[5] Best Shopify Blog Apps to Increase Sales
Blogging from your Shopify store is a great way to:
Position yourself as a leader in your product field
Build a loyal following for your brand
Generate traffic, leads and sales
It’s a central part of content marketing that Shopify store owners shouldn’t be without — but where do you start?
Like many features of Shopify, it’s made easier by using an app. Shopify blog apps are available as plugins to your store to make it simple to inform, educate, and inspire your followers into purchasing your products.
A free native Shopify plugin is available with all themes but the best Shopify blog apps add extra functionality and allow shoppers to more conveniently purchase related products.
In this post, we’re going to review your best options with Shopify blog apps so that you can either improve an existing blog…or start some dynamic content marketing right from your Shopify store.
Why should Shopify store owners blog?
According to a study published on HubSpot, websites with blogs receive:
- 55% more visitors
- 97% more inbound links
Other estimates claim that visitors who read a blog convert 5-10 times more than visitors who don’t.
Blog posts don’t have to take days to create and you don’t need to get set up on another platform to post content (no WordPress is needed).
From the comfort of your Shopify store, you can consistently put out valuable content that informs your audience, inspires them to spend more time in your store, boosts trust in who you are and what you do and gets rankings in the search engines.
Many SEO experts consider that the time spent on pages is an important ranking factor for search engines. It’s reasonable that if visitors spend longer on your pages, those pages are considered more relevant and informative — and Google wants to reward this. Blogging can help you do that.
So, blogs are generally great for generating more traffic, more leads, and more sales.
Product descriptions in your store only go so far. How about showing your audience how your products can be used in real life? Or a few posts about the production process and the materials used? What about customer success stories or other interesting stories about your products or your company?
These are just a few blogging ideas that should get you thinking along the right lines.
Can’t we just use the native blog app in Shopify?
The free native blogging tool that comes with Shopify is fine to a point and Shopify provides tutorials to get you started:
It has a visual and text editor, you can insert images and videos, and it can provide automatic SEO for each blog title and description.
Furthermore, it can also schedule posts and manage comments and tags.
As it’s fully integrated into your Shopify store, once you attract readers to your blog, it’s easy to funnel them to your shop.
You can also manage and maintain content from the one admin tool that looks after content in your online store and your blog.
That’s all great — but visitors still need to click a link and move away from an article to order a related product. They must also click a link from a product page to read a blog post and discover more about a particular product. In other words, there’s no easy way to toggle between blog posts and related products.
Ultimately, truth be known, Shopify is many great things but it is NOT a blogging platform and its functionality is relatively basic. It’s also quite inflexible and some merchants don’t like the URL structure.
You’ll find that the Shopify blog apps reviewed below enhance the reader and shopper experience and make management of the blog easier for Shopify owners. This, and the other many benefits they provide, can ultimately boost leads, sales, and the profitability of your store.
We’ve reviewed five of the best Shopify blog apps around…
DropInBlog
DropInBlog is the only app in this review that is a total blog solution in its own right and not just a layout builder on top of the in-built Shopify blog.
This makes it light and flexible. It is also SEO-friendly and has more features than Shopify’s native blog. It’s also easier and cheaper to implement than a WordPress blog because it requires no hosting.
With this blog app for Shopify, it’s easy to insert products into your blog posts, making content shoppable while also keeping it visible in the search engines.
Interestingly, the app also integrates well with other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Big Cartel so if you ever migrate from Shopify in the future, it’s easy to bring your blog with you.
Pricing: $24/month for the Lite Plan and $49/month for the Standard Plan with more features and premium support (14-day free trial)
Shopify reviews: 4.8 (139 reviews)
Main features and benefits:
- Includes as-you-type SEO analysis to improve content rankings
- Embed products into blog posts directly from the editor
- Customers can “Add to Cart” the products you embed in posts
- Easy writing experience to create posts that look great on mobile and desktop
- Includes related blog posts feature
- Highlight to share feature
- Includes a read progress indicator
- Easy to search and share posts
- Filter posts from the admin panel by title/category and display blog categories how you like
- Add background images/description text to blog home and category page headers
- Fast-loading pages
- Matches your site theme out-of-the-box (automatically uses your store’s colors and fonts)
- Greater flexibility than the Shopify built-in blog
- Cleaner URL structure than the built-in Shopify blog
- Responsive “real human” support
- New features and updates are added regularly
Blog Articles in Collections
This is a Shopify blog app by Growthfamily15 that allows you to highlight your best blog articles inside your shop’s collections.
Replacing a simple product description with a blog post makes your collection pages more informative and engaging — great for improving the overall shopping experience.
Pricing: $5/month (15-day free trial)
Shopify reviews: 5.0 (9 reviews)
Main features and benefits:
- Provides deeper insight into products for customers considering a purchase
- Displays relevant articles for customers depending on their stage in the buying journey
- Saves customers from having to search for more information: fewer clicks
- Buying guides help shoppers choose the right product(s) for their needs
- Can highlight buying guides to speed up the buying decision
- Can display blog title, custom text or main image
- Add as many blog articles in one collection as you want
- More conversions and fewer returns
- Easy to install and use
- Customizable text (color, size, background color)
- Non-intrusive to the overall customer buying experience
Pro Blogger
Pro Blogger is a Shopify blog app by Low Fruit Solutions. It’s a useful add-on app that helps you get the most out of the article content in your store by keeping visitors engaged — with the aim of converting them to shoppers.
Pricing: $5.99/month (10-day free trial)
Shopify reviews: 4.8 (56 reviews)
Main features and benefits:
- Includes related blog posts feature (for collections pages)
- Uses a responsive slider with a weighted rule set to ensure relevant matches
- Includes slider to add related products for blog posts
- Display relevant articles such as reviews on product pages to increase conversions
- Includes image captions to engage readers
- Customizable support for pinning images from blogs to a Pinterest board
- Helps build internal site links (essential for SEO)
- Custom CSS options
- Simple intuitive management interface
- Modular features – only use what you need, when you need it
- Premium support provided
SEO Blog Optimizer
This is a Shopify blog app by Axel Hardy. It focuses on one important aspect of your blog content — optimizing it so that it ranks in the search engine results pages, gets seen, and drives more traffic to your Shopify store.
This app may be more limited in features than others reviewed here but if you simply want to improve the SEO of your blog content, it’s worth a look.
Pricing: Free plan available. $14.99 for Premium Plan with real-time optimized SEO article recommendations and a Shopify SEO expert contactable by email.
Shopify reviews: 5.0 (9 reviews)
Main features and benefits:
- Automatically improves SEO of blog articles using AI
- Provides an SEO score to measure the performance of each article
- If you’re not happy with the score, simply update content
- Includes real-time optimized SEO article recommendations (Premium plan)
- The premium plan includes access to a Shopify SEO expert by email
- Includes a Google preview
- Simple-to-use interface
- Free plan available
Blog Product Spotlight
This is a Shopify blog app by Tom I.T. It helps turn your blog posts into powerful selling tools by showing products related to each post and allowing you to find out more information there and then — and, vice versa, it shows related blog posts on product and collection pages.
Pricing: $9.99/month for all Shopify plans (14-day free trial)
Shopify reviews: 5.0 (4 reviews)
Main features and benefits:
- Shows products related to each blog post
- Highlights related blog posts below products on product/collection pages
- Readers can hover on a product link in articles to view more info
- Lightbox feature for users to quick-view and add to cart products
- Mobile users can tap to view more info
- Displays related products below the article
- Helps build internal site links (essential for SEO)
- Can view analytics on which products are viewed/added to cart the most
Best Shopify blog apps
Ecommerce stores that don’t blog are missing out on potentially tons of traffic and leads. Your competitors are likely blogging because they’ve seen how it drives traffic to their stores.
Whether you’re just starting a blog or you have an existing blog that you want to optimize, the Shopify blog apps reviewed above not only help you create blog content for your store to educate and inform your customers. They also boost search rankings, improve the reader experience and make your blog section easier to manage.
By blogging directly from Shopify rather than moving to a dedicated blogging platform like WordPress, you get all the benefits without the extra hassle.
