Ecommerce SEO tools are the software that checks what a brochure site doesn't have: thousands of URLs generated by filters and variants, structured data with price and availability, the product feed that Google reads. The basic kit costs nothing and almost all of it comes from Google (Search Console, Merchant Center, the Rich Results Test); once the catalogue grows, you add a paid crawler and a keyword database.
In the UK, "google merchant center" and "merchant center" get 9,000 searches a month between them, more than Screaming Frog (5,400) and half as many as Ahrefs (18,100) (12-month average, Google Ads data via DataForSEO, October 2026).
Yet if you search "ecommerce SEO tools" on Google from a phone, hardly anyone treats Merchant Center as a tool.
On 10 October 2026 we opened the top results on Google UK: six lists of SEO tools, two general guides to ecommerce SEO, a vendor's product page. We read four of the lists. None of them covers Merchant Center as a tool; they recommend Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, WordPress plugins and, in two cases, the publisher's own software.
So what's the problem? They're good tools.
They are. But they answer a question (which keywords do I show up for?) that in an online shop comes after three others:
- Can Google crawl the catalogue without getting lost in filters and sizes?
- Do the product pages tell Google the price, availability and shipping?
- Are the products in Google Shopping's free listings?
No keyword suite answers those three. Different tools do, and most of them cost nothing.
We see it on the shops we work on in Italy. Scovaventi, a food producer on Shopify, closed a year with €77,000 in sales and an average basket of €190, and its sales from Google went through a feed generated by Google's own Shopify app, not through an SEO suite.
Bosatta sells Vespa and Piaggio spare parts in four countries: €240,000 in sales in a year. There, the tool we check after every change is the combination of languages and hreflang in Shopify Markets, not the ranking of a keyword.
In this guide you'll find:
- the five jobs an SEO tool has to do on an ecommerce site, with the right tool for each;
- our test on 20 Italian product pages: what they actually declare to Google (and to AI crawlers);
- what the kit costs in three set-ups, with prices in pounds and dollars.
Let's start.
What an SEO tool needs to check on an ecommerce site (five jobs a blog doesn't have)
An ecommerce SEO tool is useful if it measures one of five problems that come from the catalogue: crawling, product data, the feed, search demand for categories, and the platform. Twenty-tool lists mix these jobs up, so Ahrefs and Merchant Center look like alternatives. They aren't: they do different things.
| Job | The question it answers | No-cost tool | Paid tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawling the catalogue | How many URLs do filters, variants and internal search generate? | Search Console (Pages report) | Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Lumar |
| Product data | Does the page declare price, availability, shipping, GTIN? | Rich Results Test, Search Console Shopping reports | Crawler with structured data extraction |
| Feed and free listings | Do the products appear in Shopping, Images, Lens? | Merchant Center | The platform's feed app |
| Demand for categories | How do people in the UK search before they buy? | Search Console, internal site search in GA4 | Ahrefs, Semrush |
| Platform | Does the theme write titles, canonicals and markup properly? | Shopify or WooCommerce settings | SEO apps and plugins (Yoast, Rank Math, Shopify apps) |
And if my budget is small?
The first three rows cost you nothing. That's why it makes sense to start there, and leave the suites until the catalogue passes a few hundred pages. The full comparison of the suites, with checked price lists, is in our guide to the best SEO tools.
The test: what 20 Italian product pages declare (only 6 have a GTIN)
On 10 October 2026 we took 20 well-known Italian online shops, from Tannico to MediaWorld, and for each one a product page picked from the XML sitemap. We downloaded the HTML as the site serves it, without running JavaScript, and read the Product structured data (JSON-LD or microdata). The sample is Italian because that's the market we work in, but the checks are the same on any shop.
Why without JavaScript? Because that's how AI models' crawlers read the page. Vercel's study of 17 December 2024 found that none of the major AI crawlers runs JavaScript, including OpenAI's GPTBot (569 million requests in a month on Vercel's network) and Anthropic's ClaudeBot (370 million). Googlebot, on the other hand, does render the page.
| Shop | Product | Price | Availability | Brand | GTIN | Shipping | Returns | Ratings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tannico | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Velasca | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | yes |
| Farmaè | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Pittarosso | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | no |
| Geox | yes | yes | yes | no | no | yes | yes | no |
| MediaWorld | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no |
| Yeppon | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | no |
| Alessi | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| Carpisa | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| Vino.com (microdata) | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | yes |
| Bialetti | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Yamamay | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Liu Jo | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Motivi | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Mondadori Store | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| OVS | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Prénatal | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
| Calzedonia | yes | no | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Subdued | yes | no | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| Unieuro | no | no | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| Total out of 20 | 19 | 17 | 18 | 16 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 2 |
Three things stand out.
On 3 pages out of 20 the price can't be read. Subdued declares a Product with no offer, Calzedonia an offer with availability but no price, and Unieuro's initial HTML only has the site data and the breadcrumb. For merchant listings Google requires an active price and currency: without them, that markup isn't enough for results that show a price.
Only 6 pages have a GTIN. Google lists it among the recommended properties and asks you to include all applicable global identifiers. In our sample it's mostly the shops reselling other people's brands that have it (Tannico, Farmaè, MediaWorld, Yeppon), less so the ones selling their own products.
Shipping and returns appear in the markup in only 5 cases. Here, though, we need to be straight with you, because the figure doesn't mean the other 15 have a problem. Since July 2024 Google has let you set up shipping and returns directly in Search Console, and Google's return policy documentation says that when both exist, it only uses the Search Console settings. A shop can have everything in order without a single line of code.
So what does the test tell us?
That the check has to be done with Google's tools, not by eye on the source code. And that the test needs repeating for each type of page: we read one page per site, and the same platform can write different data on different products. The eight Shopify shops in the sample all had a complete Product with a price, but only 3 declared shipping in the markup: the theme decides the rest.
If you want to understand what structured data does beyond products, there's our guide to schema markup.
Do your product pages tell Google what they cost?
You've just seen that 3 of 20 large Italian shops don't declare the price in their product page markup, and that only 6 of 20 have a GTIN. If the same happens on your catalogue, Google may not show your products in results with prices and Merchant Center may not approve them. We check your shop's product pages, feed and Search Console and tell you what to fix first.
Book a strategy consultationSearch Console for ecommerce: the Shopping reports (and where the real problems are)
Search Console is Google's no-cost tool that shows how a site appears in search, and for an online shop it has an extra section: Shopping, which only appears if Google recognises you as an online merchant. According to the Search Console help, merchants are sites that sell goods directly to consumers; affiliate sites and sites where you can't complete a purchase are left out.
Inside you'll find three things:
- the Product snippets report, which flags errors in the Product markup on your pages;
- the Merchant listings report, which is stricter, because those listings always show a price;
- Merchant opportunities and the Shipping and returns setting, if you've linked a Merchant Center account.
Google split the two product reports in September 2022, when it opened merchant listings to sites without Merchant Center too.
The report we look at first on the shops we work on isn't in the Shopping section, though. It's Pages, filtered on URLs "Crawled - currently not indexed": if there are thousands of addresses with filter parameters in there, the problem is crawling, and no markup will fix it. How crawling works, and what blocks it, is explained in our guide to crawling.
Merchant Center: the SEO tool the lists leave out (and it puts products in eight places)
Merchant Center is Google's no-cost platform where you upload your catalogue, and it's useful even if you don't advertise. Free listings show products at no cost in Search, Google Images, Lens, YouTube, Gemini, the Shopping tab, Maps and the products module of a Business Profile, and according to Google in most cases they're switched on by default.
Isn't that a Google Ads thing?
No. It's the same feed used in two ways: Shopping campaigns use it for paid placements, free listings use it organically. On Scovaventi the feed is generated by Google's app for Shopify; how we set it up on the advertising side is in our guide to Google Ads for ecommerce.
The check that matters in Merchant Center is product diagnostics, and the first field to look at is the price. According to the Merchant Center help, Googlebot compares the price in the feed with the price on the page or in the markup, and if they don't match, the product may be disapproved.
The same page adds a detail that ties everything back to our test: Googlebot checks the data in the HTML returned by the server, and if the price is added with JavaScript after the page loads, it can trigger a mismatch error. That's why we read the product pages without running JavaScript.
Crawlers: Screaming Frog and the rest, for filters and variants (500 URLs at no cost isn't enough for a catalogue)
A crawler is a program that visits the site the way Googlebot would and gives you a list of every URL it finds, with status, canonical, title and structured data. On an ecommerce site it's mainly for one thing: counting how many addresses the filters generate.
Google's documentation on faceted navigation, updated on 18 December 2025, says filters can generate infinite URL spaces: the crawler wastes time on useless pages and has less left for new products. The first solution it gives is to block those URLs in robots.txt.
How big can the problem get?
Take Liu Jo, one of the shops in our test. On 10 October 2026 the first file of its product sitemap contained 15,000 URLs, and the same top appeared with a different address for each size (S, XL). The size L of another model, which we opened, had a canonical pointing to itself. That may be deliberate, but it's exactly the kind of thing you only see with a crawler, and we cover it in our guide to duplicate content.
The tools:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: no cost up to 500 URLs, then £199 a year per licence. It runs on your computer, also extracts structured data and can crawl pages with JavaScript rendered. We go into detail on our page about Screaming Frog.
- Sitebulb: the same job, with more guided reports.
- Lumar: a cloud platform for large catalogues, with continuous monitoring.
On a 300-product shop with no indexable filters, the no-cost crawler is enough. On one with 5,000 products in sizes and colours, the paid version pays for itself at the first migration.
Keywords and competitors: Ahrefs or Semrush (for categories, not product pages)
A keyword database estimates how often a term is searched and who ranks for it: on an ecommerce site it's for deciding which categories to create and what to call them, far more than for optimising a single product page. In our guide to ecommerce SEO we saw it on Majestic: of its 100 highest-traffic keywords on Google UK, 61 land on category pages and only 6 on product pages.
For a UK shop the choice is usually between two:
- Ahrefs, Lite plan at $129 a month, or $1,290 a year billed annually (about £975), with 1,000 credits a month;
- Semrush, SEO plan at $117.33 a month billed annually (about £89), better suited if you also sell abroad or run Google Ads.
Prices checked on 10 October 2026 on the official pages, before VAT, converted at the Bank of England rate for 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 to the pound); for the plan-by-plan detail there's our page on Semrush pricing.
And if I don't want to pay?
You have two no-cost sources that the suites don't have. The first is Search Console, with the real queries. The second is your shop's internal search: in Google Analytics 4, enhanced measurement logs the view_search_results event when the URL contains one of the parameters q, s, search, query or keyword, and fills in the Search term dimension. These are the words your customers actually use, already filtered for buying intent. How to turn them into categories is in our guide to ecommerce keyword research.
Platform apps and plugins (what Shopify already does, what WooCommerce doesn't)
SEO apps and plugins are the tools that write the data into the site, which is why they come after the diagnosis, not before. On Shopify, titles, sitemaps and canonicals are handled by the platform; the structured data is written by the theme, and that's where our test found the differences: 8 out of 8 Shopify shops with a complete Product including price, 3 with shipping, 4 with returns.
A dedicated schema app makes sense when the theme doesn't write the fields you're missing. The risk to check is the opposite one: two sources of Product on the same page, one from the theme and one from the app. Choosing apps by use case is covered in our guide to Shopify SEO apps.
On WooCommerce the work goes through a plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math, which get 880 and 1,300 searches a month respectively on Google UK (Google Ads data via DataForSEO, October 2026). What changes compared with Shopify, and why we chose Shopify for our two ecommerce clients, is in our guide to SEO for WooCommerce.
What the kit costs (three set-ups, never more than two subscriptions)
The cost depends on one thing only: how many URLs the catalogue has, filters included.
| Catalogue | Tools | Approximate cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| Up to a few hundred URLs | Search Console, Merchant Center, Rich Results Test, GA4, Screaming Frog without a licence | £0 |
| A few thousand URLs, UK only | The no-cost kit + Screaming Frog licence + Ahrefs Lite (annual) | £199 + $1,290 (about £975), about £1,174 + VAT |
| Thousands of URLs, several countries | The no-cost kit + Screaming Frog licence + Semrush SEO (annual) | £199 + about $1,408 (about £1,065), about £1,264 + VAT |
No set-up needs more than two subscriptions. If you find yourself paying for four, two of them are usually doing the same job.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the size of the catalogue. Up to a few hundred URLs, Search Console, Merchant Center, the Rich Results Test and GA4 are enough, and none of them costs anything. Beyond that you need a crawler such as Screaming Frog (£199 a year) and, to research categories and competitors, a keyword database such as Ahrefs or Semrush.
Yes. Free listings show products at no cost in Search, Google Images, Lens, YouTube, Gemini, the Shopping tab and Maps, and according to Google in most cases they're switched on by default. The feed is the same one paid campaigns use.
It depends on what the theme writes. Shopify handles titles, sitemaps and canonicals. In our test of 10 October 2026, the 8 Shopify shops in the sample all had Product data with a price, but only 3 declared shipping in the markup. An app is useful when fields are missing that the theme doesn't write.
It depends on where the markup sits. Vercel's study of December 2024 found that the main AI crawlers, including GPTBot and ClaudeBot, don't run JavaScript: if the structured data is in the initial HTML they read it, if the browser adds it after the page loads they don't.
Almost never. It stops at 500 URLs, and a catalogue with filters, sizes and colours goes past that quickly: on 10 October 2026 the first file of Liu Jo's product sitemap alone contained 15,000 URLs. It's enough for a shop with a few hundred products and no indexable filters.
Where to start (crawling first, then price)
In short:
crawling first, then product data, then keywords;
Search Console and Merchant Center cover three jobs out of five, at no cost;
3 product pages out of 20 among large Italian shops don't declare the price in their markup;
AI crawlers only read what's in the initial HTML.
There's one thing the industry still rarely mentions. When we opened a Scovaventi product page on 10 October 2026, the HTTP header served by Shopify already declared a link to /.well-known/ucp, the Universal Commerce Protocol, the same item that now appears in the menu of the Merchant Center help. Product data is no longer only for Google to show a price: AI agents use it to buy. Anyone fixing GTINs, prices and availability today is getting the shop ready for that too, and we cover it in our guide to agentic commerce.
If you'd like us to run these checks on your catalogue with these tools, it's part of our SEO service.
See you next time!
