Best Shopify SEO app for broken links & alt text: how to choose

Broken links, 404s, and missing image alt text quietly cost you SEO and accessibility, and they pile up every time your catalog changes. The job of an SEO app here isn’t to lecture you — it’s to find these at scale and fix them in bulk. That’s the line that separates the apps worth paying for from the ones that just hand you a long to-do list. Pick on whether it actually fixes (not just flags), whether those fixes are reversible, and whether it covers the real issues rather than a vanity “SEO score.”

Does Shopify have an SEO checker built in?

No audit, no. Shopify gives you the basic plumbing — editable title tags and meta descriptions, an automatic sitemap, and a URL-redirect tool — but nothing that scans your store for broken internal and external links, 404s, redirect chains, or images missing alt text. Those are exactly the issues that accumulate silently as you add, remove, and rename products, and finding them by hand across a real catalog isn’t realistic. That gap is what these apps fill.

What actually separates a good Shopify SEO app

Does it fix, or only report? This is the whole decision. A lot of SEO apps are scanners: they crawl your store, give you an impressive-looking report and a score, and leave you to fix everything manually. The ones that earn their price fix in bulk — fill in alt text where it’s missing (prefilled with the product title as a starting point), add redirects for your 404s — so a thousand missing alt attributes is a job you finish, not a report you feel bad about. A scanner that can’t fix is a glorified checklist.

Are the fixes reversible? Bulk editing a live store is powerful and a little scary, which is exactly why reversibility matters. You want every change recorded and undoable in one click, restoring the exact prior values — so if a bulk batch of alt text isn’t to your taste, you roll it back cleanly instead of hand-unpicking it. An app that bulk-writes with no undo is a risk you don’t need to take.

Coverage of the issues that matter. Look for broken internal and external links, 404s, redirect chains (redirects pointing at redirects), and missing image alt text — the concrete, fixable technical issues. Be a little wary of apps that lead with a single “SEO score” number; a score is a vibe, a list of broken links is work you can actually do.

Technical hygiene vs keyword/content SEO. Keep these straight. This category is on-page technical hygiene. Keyword research, rank tracking, and content planning are a separate class of tool. Both are worth doing, but don’t expect one app to be great at both, and don’t buy a content-SEO suite expecting it to fix your broken links.

The apps to look at

The Shopify SEO category is crowded and uneven, because “SEO” is used for everything from technical-hygiene scanners to keyword tools to image compressors. Most of the big names are all-in-one suites that lead with image optimization and meta tags and fold in broken-link and alt-text coverage (Booster, Avada, Smart SEO, TinyIMG); Plug in SEO and Webrex sit closer to the pure audit-and-fix end. Narrow it fast: you’re after broken-link, 404/redirect, and alt-text coverage, and you want bulk fixing with an undo — not just another store score. That filter removes most of the field.

Our pick: Healthly

We build Healthly, so this is the honest in-house option. It does one scan that finds broken internal and external links, 404s, redirect chains, and missing image alt text across your storefront, and then fixes in bulk — adding alt text where it’s missing and creating redirects — rather than leaving you a list. Every fix is a reversible, audited change set, so you can undo a bulk change in one click and get the exact previous values back. There’s a free tier (a full store scan, a handful of redirects and bulk fixes), and Pro (€24/mo) makes redirects and bulk fixes unlimited and adds scheduled automatic re-scans.

Honest limits: Healthly is a technical-hygiene tool — links, 404s, redirects, alt text, meta. It is not a keyword-research or rank-tracking suite, and it won’t write your content strategy. If that’s what you need, pair it with a dedicated keyword tool; Healthly’s job is keeping the store technically clean.

Next steps

To see the specifics, how to find broken links on Shopify and Shopify image alt text for SEO cover the two most common issues and how to fix them properly.