Continuous SEO audits tuned for Shopify

The idea

Merchants already believe SEO auditing is worth paying for — Screaming Frog charges $23/mo and Yoast $9.90/mo for the generic version. But a desktop crawler treats a Shopify store like any website, which it isn’t. Shopify has its own repeatable pathologies: every product exists at both a /collections/ path and a /products/ path, tag filters spawn thin duplicate collection pages, variants leak into the index, and product schema is whatever the theme author bothered to write. Screaming Frog will list 4,000 URLs and leave the merchant to figure out which of it matters.

The wedge is specificity plus remediation. Because the tool knows it’s Shopify, it can name the exact pathology, explain it in plain English, and draft the actual fix — rewritten meta, corrected JSON-LD, the precise liquid snippet — instead of exporting a CSV of symptoms. Continuous weekly monitoring beats a one-off desktop crawl because stores change every time someone adds a product or swaps a theme section.

Who pays

Small and mid-size Shopify merchants who know SEO matters but have zero SEO literacy and no agency. $19/mo for weekly monitoring with one-click fixes undercuts Screaming Frog while doing more of the work. Distribution is the Shopify App Store, which is a built-in channel with purchase intent, plus content targeting searches like duplicate collection URLs.

MVP scope

• Shopify OAuth install and API-based catalog pull
• Weekly Playwright crawl of a rendered-page sample
• Rule engine covering the top 8 Shopify-specific SEO pathologies
• Claude-drafted fixes with one-click apply for meta and alt text
• Weekly diff-based email digest and dashboard health score
• Skip for v1: rank tracking, backlink analysis, non-Shopify platforms, multi-language stores

Build ShopAudit, a continuous SEO auditor purpose-built for Shopify stores. Stack: Next.js (App Router) with Postgres, Shopify Admin API via OAuth app install, Playwright for rendered-page crawling, Claude API for fix generation.

Core flow: 1) Merchant installs the app and connects their store. 2) A weekly job pulls products, collections, and pages via the Shopify API, then Playwright crawls a sample of rendered URLs to verify what Google actually sees. 3) Rule engine checks Shopify-specific pathologies: the same product reachable under /collections/x/products/y and /products/y with mismatched canonicals, tag-filtered collection URLs generating thin duplicate pages, variant URLs indexed separately, missing or broken Product/Offer/AggregateRating JSON-LD, missing alt text, and title/meta duplication across collections. 4) Each finding gets a plain-English explanation and a Claude-drafted concrete fix: rewritten meta description, corrected JSON-LD block, or a robots/canonical change with exact theme.liquid snippet. 5) One click pushes approved meta and alt-text fixes back through the Admin API.

Pages: onboarding/connect, dashboard with health score and trend, issues list grouped by type with severity, issue detail with draft fix and apply button, weekly email digest settings. Non-obvious details: respect Shopify API rate limits with a leaky-bucket queue; diff each week's crawl against the last so the digest only shows new and resolved issues. Pricing: free single audit, $19/mo for weekly monitoring and one-click fixes, $49/mo for 3 stores.