Your first online store needs a way to check whether Google can find your products, whether your product information is correct, and whether the storefront works well on a phone. You can start most of that work for free.
The expensive mistake is buying a large SEO subscription before you know which of those jobs needs help.
These five affordable SEO tools cover different parts of running a small store. You do not need five subscriptions, and some of the tools work best together.
I’m a co-founder of Screpy, which is included below. This comparison uses official documentation and pricing, checked on October 20, 2026. It is not a hands-on performance benchmark.
Compare the tools by the job your store needs
A product missing from Google, a rejected product listing, and a slow product page require different checks. Pick the row that matches your problem.
| Tool | Most useful for | Starting cost | Important boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Search performance and product-page indexing | Free | Needs access to your website’s property |
| Google Merchant Center | Product data and eligible free listings | Free; advertising is separate | Listing eligibility does not guarantee exposure |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Crawling your catalog and finding technical patterns | Free up to 500 URLs per crawl | JavaScript rendering requires the paid license |
| Screpy | Keeping audits and rank tracking in one workspace | Pro: regular $192/year, billed upfront | Plan limits apply; AI Visibility is not in Pro |
| PageSpeed Insights | Investigating mobile product-page performance | Free | A new store may have no real-user data |
The prices below are for the stated billing terms. An annual price divided by twelve is a budgeting equivalent, not a monthly subscription.
1. Google Search Console: check whether Google finds your products
Google Search Console is the first tool I would set up. It shows queries, impressions and clicks for your site, alongside information about crawling and indexing. You need to verify ownership or receive access to the relevant property.
For a new store, start with one product you actually want customers to find. Inspect its URL rather than searching your brand name and assuming the whole catalog is fine.
Check the reported indexing status and, when available, the Google-selected canonical. That is the URL Google treats as the main version. If the selected URL is unexpected, investigate the product page, its links and its canonical settings before changing anything across the store.
One important distinction: the indexed report describes Google’s recorded version. A live test checks the current page’s potential indexability. It does not prove that the page has been indexed or predict which canonical Google will select. Google explains this in its URL Inspection documentation.
Use Search Console for evidence about your own search visibility. If you need a whole-catalog inventory of broken links or repeated metadata, a crawler is the more direct tool.
2. Google Merchant Center: manage free product listings
Google Merchant Center deserves a place in a store’s SEO toolkit because it addresses product discovery directly. The service is free, and eligible products can appear in free listings across Google. Paid advertising is a separate choice.
Search Console helps you investigate a page in Google’s index. Merchant Center helps you manage the product information supplied for listings. For a store selling physical products, that is a useful distinction.
Suppose you reduce a lamp from $40 to $32. The product page displays $32, but your submitted product data still says $40. Opening a keyword report will not resolve that mismatch. Compare the submitted data with the live page, then correct the source that is out of date.
Google’s free listings requirements cover product attributes, policies and shipping requirements that vary by market. Check Products → Needs attention for reported issues. Keep price and availability consistent with your store.
Eligibility is the limit to remember: enabling free listings does not guarantee your products will appear. You still need suitable products, compliant information and accurate landing pages.
3. Screaming Frog: audit the catalog before it grows
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler. Use it to investigate broken links, redirects, duplicate metadata and canonical patterns across your store.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl. That can be enough for a small catalog, but count URLs rather than products.
Here is an illustrative example. Imagine a store with 80 products. If each exposes a base URL plus four separately linked variant URLs, that is already 400 product-related URLs. Another 30 category and content pages bring it to 430. If the crawler discovers 100 additional filter URLs, the total becomes 530.
Those numbers describe one possible configuration, not a typical-store benchmark. Your platform might expose far fewer variant URLs. The useful check is what the crawler actually discovers and whether the crawl reaches its cap.
Do not remove useful variants just to fit a free plan. Investigate why alternate URLs exist and which pages should serve customers and search engines.
The paid license is £199 per year. JavaScript rendering requires the paid version, which matters if important product content depends on client-side rendering. Paid crawl capacity also remains subject to your computer’s resources.
Choose this when you want detailed, deliberate catalog investigations and are comfortable working with a desktop application.
4. Screpy: keep store SEO checks in one workspace
Screpy is worth considering when you want audits and rank tracking together instead of managing each check separately.
Its website audit organizes pages, links and images so you can investigate repeated problems. For a store, a useful question might be whether several broken product links come from one category template. Fixing the shared cause is more manageable than treating every affected URL as an unrelated task. Run a comparable crawl afterward to check the change.
The regular Pro annual price is $192, paid upfront, equivalent to $16 per month when budgeting. That annual plan includes five projects, up to 5,000 crawl pages per project and 100 tracked keywords per project. AI Visibility and keyword research are not included in Pro; check higher-plan eligibility if you need them.
The pricing page also offers a conditional 72-hour welcome discount. Confirm your displayed discount and final total at checkout. The offer says the discount continues on renewals while the subscription remains active. The seven-day trial converts to a paid subscription unless you cancel before it ends; paid subscriptions also renew unless cancelled.
Compared with a desktop crawler, the reason to choose Screpy is the combined workspace and ongoing tracking. It does not replace Merchant Center’s product-data requirements or apply website fixes for you.
5. PageSpeed Insights: check the mobile product page
PageSpeed Insights is a free place to investigate how a public product or category page loads on mobile and desktop.
Test a representative product page, not just the homepage. Then check a category page with several product images. They have different layouts and can expose different problems.
For example, if a product image takes a long time to appear, inspect the relevant diagnostic and the image being loaded before installing another optimization app. If a page shifts while it loads, investigate which elements move. Treat the report as a lead to investigate, not an instruction to change every flagged item blindly.
Google separates lab and real-user data. Lighthouse provides a controlled diagnostic run. Available field data describes real experiences over the preceding 28 days.
A new store may not have enough traffic for page-level field data. The report can show origin-level data covering the wider site, or no real-user data at all. Read that scope before describing a result as “this product page passed.”
Use it after a theme, image or app change to investigate a specific public-page regression. One score is not evidence that every shopper, device or page now has a good experience.
Which tools should you start with?
For a first store on a tight budget, I would start with Search Console, check Merchant Center eligibility, and run PageSpeed Insights on representative public pages. Add a free Screaming Frog crawl if its limits fit your storefront.
That gives you several useful checks without adding a paid SEO subscription. Store hosting, platform fees and any advertising are separate costs.
Pay for a crawler when you need its paid capabilities or more crawl capacity. Consider Screpy when keeping audits and tracking together would make recurring work easier. Those purchases solve different needs, even though their auditing features overlap.
Before spending money, write down one question: “Which product URLs need attention, and what will I do with the answer?”
If the answer is fixing stale product data, work on the data source. If it is a broken template affecting many products, fix the template and verify the affected URLs. Choose affordable SEO tools around that next action, rather than the longest feature list.
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