r/ShopifySEO

Small win, but it genuinely made my week.

I've been building a Shopify SEO app (MetaGenius: AI SEO & Alt Text — helps merchants auto-generate meta titles, descriptions, alt text, etc.) and growth has been painfully slow. No ads, no influencer deals, just the app sitting on the App Store.

This past week: 5 new installs, all organic. And one of them converted to a paid Pro plan.

I know that sounds tiny. But I've been grinding on this thing solo, and seeing strangers find it, install it, and actually pay for it without me doing anything to push them there... that feeling hits different.

No Shopify ads. No paid promotions. Pure organic.

If you're building a Shopify app and feeling like nothing is happening — keep going. The App Store does eventually work. SEO on your own listing matters. Reviews matter. The compounding is just slow at first.

To anyone who's further along: what was the moment growth started feeling real for you?

I have a live Shopify app approved on the Shopify App Store. It currently has 16 installs.

I’m thinking of selling it because I don’t have enough time to grow it properly.

Has anyone here sold a Shopify app before? How do you value an early-stage app, and where can I find serious buyers?

Any advice would be helpful.

last autumn we changed our website URL/domain structure, and since then we’ve still been struggling a lot with our Google rankings.

To speed things up, we are now considering buying backlinks for the first time.

The problem is: every AI tool basically says, “Never buy backlinks.”
But recently I read a post here from someone who said that buying backlinks helped them a lot.

So now we’re unsure what to do.

Would you recommend buying backlinks in this situation, or should we avoid it completely?

And if buying backlinks can make sense, what would be the better approach?

• A few “high-quality” backlinks?
• Many backlinks, even if the quality is not perfect?
• Or only backlinks from websites in our own country/language?

We are a German company, so I’m also wondering whether the backlinks should ideally come from German websites.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and advice. :)

Hoping someone who has shipped this on a real store can sanity-check my thinking.

My products live in multiple collections, so there's no single "true" hierarchy stored anywhere. My dev suggested two options:

1. Add a metafield per product holding the primary collection, then build the breadcrumb + JSON-LD from that. Downside: someone has to maintain that field across the whole catalog.
2. Slightly modify the product URLs so they always include the current collection, like /collections/karambolage-queues/products/product-name. Then Shopify exposes the collection object on the product page and we build the breadcrumb from that.

My concern with option 2: Shopify sets the canonical to the clean /products/... URL no matter which collection you enter from. So on the canonical page the collection object is nil, which means the breadcrumb + BreadcrumbList schema that Google actually indexes would be empty or inconsistent. Feels like it only helps visual nav, not the rich snippet. Am I wrong about that?

The third option I'm considering: skip the metafield maintenance entirely and just iterate over product.collections in Liquid, pick the first one that isn't "All", "Frontpage" or "Sale", and build the breadcrumb + JSON-LD from that on the canonical URL. Only override with a metafield for the handful of products where the auto-pick is wrong.

Questions:

• For anyone running multi-collection catalogs, did the auto-pick-from-product.collections approach hold up, or did it produce inconsistent paths that caused Search Console enhancement warnings?
• Is the collection-in-URL approach a dead end for SEO breadcrumbs specifically because of the canonical, or am I misunderstanding how Shopify handles it?
• Anyone regretting going the app route (Breadcrumbs Uncomplicated, JSON-LD for SEO) vs. native snippet?

Store is a niche sports equipment shop, a few thousand products. Thanks.