Lost and worried: Comparing JSON-LD for SEO and other Shopify SEO apps

When you’re trying to figure out which Shopify apps to install, it can be confusing to compare all of the options.

Especially within the SEO app space where there are dozens of apps that all do different things. There are are dozens of things you can do to improve your SEO and maybe half that can be done with an app.

I’m asked to compare JSON-LD for SEO to other apps frequently, but after one customer mentioned the frustrations she was having, I felt like it would be worth sharing my response with you too:

I’m impressive with your reviews, but I have tons of doubts and I’m sorry if I will ask a stupid question…
What’s the difference between you and SEO Manager? Should I have both? I have installed Plug In SEO but I didn’t see any change. I’m lost and worried…

I can totally understand why you have doubts. The common view of SEO as an industry is that it’s filled with a bunch of scammers with only a handful of actual experts who know what they are doing.

There’s a severe trust deficit.

But that’s a rant for a another day…

Comparing SEO Manager, Plug In SEO, and other SEO apps to JSON-LD for SEO are a bit difficult because they do different things.

SEO suite apps like SEO Manager tend to offer a broad set of features which are useful if your theme doesn’t have those (meta descriptions, alt tags, etc but most themes have included these basic features for years, so it's rare to see these missing). Some may offer "features" to regurgitate what's free and fully available to you in Google Search Console.

Some of them like SEO Manager also provide a limited set of structured data. However, generally speaking, it's not much different from what Shopify includes in all themes. 

JSON-LD for SEO on the other hand is 100% focused on providing great structured data that is more complete and provides fields that meets the requirements of Google, LLMs (such as ChatGPT), Bing and more. Additionally, you can modify some of the default fields every app and theme pulls directly from Shopify or link custom data as you see fit.

If you’re happy with another SEO app’s structured data, you might not need my app.

But all too often I hear from customers that they have another SEO app, but don't use it. That's probably because it's not providing any features outside of what Shopify already includes. In that case, you may just want the structured data and my app would be a good fit.

Lots of customers run both which is perfectly fine too. I usually recommend turning off another apps data or remove your theme data if they too provide review markup. I've found over time that Google doesn't do as well with multiple sets of aggregateRating.

Keep in mind though that we don't yet know how LLMs handle multiple sets of data. If you are concerned with showing up in AI Search Results, it may be better to only use one set of data. But so far, I'm not seeing anything super obvious with LLMs that would cause me concern here.

In other words, more SEO apps doesn't equate to better SEO.

The focus should be on quality, not quantity.

If you don’t have JSON-LD for SEO yet, what’s holding you back from installing it?