Why Shopify's Product Reviews app may be good enough for your Shopify store

With the release of JSON-LD for SEO’s new Magical Review Integrations I’ve been having a lot of conversations about reviews apps.

Recently David emailed me one that I’ve never directly explained before, one that could be useful especially if you don’t use reviews.

We use Shopify Reviews on our other stores. Do you feel that Shopify Reviews is not SEO friendly?

Shopify’s Product Reviews app is pretty good for SEO.

The review content appears on the page so that helps your own content. By that I mean that what your customers write, will end up adding to the page content and fill out the page content-wise. I’m constantly giving the advice of adding more content to product pages and this is a way to help that.

Other review apps don’t do this well or they add the review content in ways that Google can’t read or is actually hostile to your SEO. I remember seeing one that will only host the content on their domain, letting them take advantage of the content, links, and photos from your customers.

Shopify’s Product Reviews app doesn’t do well with the structured data but if you pair it with JSON-LD for SEO then they become as good as every other app.

The downsides of Shopify’s app all center around its features, or lack of them. It’s just a basic form to collect reviews and then some styled HTML to list the reviews. Functional yes, but not ideal.

Other apps do additional things like proactively ask customers for reviews, allow embedding the reviews in other places, or allow other types of review (e.g. photo, Facebook, etc).

But for a free app and for the SEO-side, Shopify’s Product Reviews app is a great option. It’s also a great option for starting out until you can decide which premium one you’d want.

Good-enough now is almost always better than inaction.

Just make sure to pair it with JSON-LD for SEO if you want the best Rich Results.