SEO tools for an online store, and the two that matter most

The short answer

A store's SEO problems are almost all crawling and indexing problems, and the two tools that address those best are free. Google Search Console will tell you which of your product pages are indexed and why the rest are not. A crawler will tell you what is actually on the site, including the thousands of filter and variant addresses no one meant to create.

Only after those two have been read does a paid subscription make sense, and then usually for one specific job rather than a suite.

Why stores are a different SEO problem

An ordinary site has a few dozen to a few hundred deliberate pages. A store has:

• one page per product, often thousands
• one page per category, and one per combination of category filters
• one address per variant, colour, size and sort order, unless something prevents it
• pagination stretching across large catalogues
• internal search result pages, which are pages
• product pages for things that are out of stock, seasonal or discontinued

The consequence is that a store generates addresses faster than a search engine is willing to crawl them, and the pages you care about compete with the ones nobody meant to publish. Almost every real ecommerce SEO problem traces back to that sentence.

Which is why the tools that help are the ones that see addresses rather than the ones that suggest keywords.

Tool one: Google Search Console, and the report that matters

Google describes Search Console as "a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results", and for a store its indexing reports are the single most valuable free resource available.

What to read, in order:

1. Which pages are indexed, and which are not. For a store the not-indexed list is the interesting one, and its reasons are the diagnosis — duplicates, pages excluded by a canonical, pages crawled but not indexed, pages discovered and never crawled.
2. "Discovered – currently not indexed" at volume. On a large catalogue this usually means Google has found more addresses than it considers worth crawling, which is a structural problem no keyword tool will fix.
3. The performance report, filtered to product pages. Queries where you get impressions and almost no clicks are usually title and price-snippet problems rather than ranking problems.

Bing Webmaster Tools is worth the same ten minutes — free, per Microsoft's own description, and its IndexNow integration is genuinely useful for a catalogue that changes daily, since it lets you notify the engine when items appear, change or sell out.

Neither pays this site anything.

Tool two: a crawler, because the store is bigger than you think

Run a crawler over the store and the first thing it usually reveals is the address count. Stores routinely discover they have five or ten times more crawlable addresses than products, generated by filters, sorts and variants.

The free Screaming Frog SEO Spider covers up to 500 URLs per crawl — its own page frames the upgrade as "buy a licence for €245 Per Year to remove the limit" — which for most stores is enough to diagnose the pattern but not to enumerate it. That is usually fine: once you can see that sorting by price generates a distinct address, you do not need all four thousand examples.

If you do need the whole catalogue crawled, and crawled on a schedule, that is where a licence or a hosted audit tool earns its money. SE Ranking's site-audit module does the hosted version, and the number to compare across vendors is the pages-per-audit allowance rather than the headline price. More on the free crawler and its exact limits.

What to actually fix, in order

1. Stop generating addresses you do not want indexed. Filter and sort combinations are the usual culprit. This is a store-platform configuration job, not a tool purchase.
2. Make canonicals honest. Variants pointing at the main product page, pagination behaving predictably, no page claiming to be a different page by accident.
3. Give category pages a reason to exist. On most stores these are the pages with real ranking potential and the least attention.
4. Decide what happens to out-of-stock and discontinued products, deliberately, once, as a rule rather than case by case.
5. Only then think about keywords.

That order is uncomfortable because the interesting work is at the bottom. It is still the order that works, because a beautifully optimised page that Google has decided not to crawl is worth exactly nothing.

Where a paid tool earns its place

Three genuine cases for a store:

Competitive research. Seeing which products and categories competitors rank for, which no free tool will ever show you. The cheapest published entries on this site's wall are Ahrefs Starter at $29.00 a month and Mangools Basic at $30.50 a month, read on 24 September 2026. Ahrefs has no affiliate programme, so that one earns this site nothing; Mangools is a partner link.

Scheduled crawling with history. So you find out that last Tuesday's deployment made two thousand pages return errors, rather than finding out from the traffic.

Category and product keyword research at scale. Genuinely useful once the structural work is done, and genuinely a waste before it.

A full suite makes sense for a store when three of those are true at once. Read on the same day, SE Ranking Core listed at $129.00 a month billed monthly, or $103.20 on an annual plan.

What this post deliberately does not cover

Which store platform to build on, what any platform's plans cost, or what its apps charge. Those are real questions and they are not this site's subject — Searchbench is about standalone SEO software, and a store platform's own SEO settings are a different conversation with different trade-offs.

Nor does this post rank ecommerce SEO apps by results. Nothing here has been tested, no store's traffic has been measured before and after anything, and any page claiming a percentage uplift from an app should be read with that in mind.

The framework that does transfer is the six jobs any SEO tool is bought for — a store just meets jobs one and four, indexing and crawling, far earlier and far harder than anyone else.