Twelve years ago, Yoast was founded by my brother, Joost de Valk after a career as an independent SEO expert working with large brands like eBay, Facebook, Disney, and The Guardian. Everything he learned while fixing the sites of those companies flowed into a plugin for WordPress called WordPress SEO, which would later become Yoast SEO. In 2022, the company consists of over 140 people worldwide, and its software is used on over 12 million websites. Yoast SEO is still the flagship product and has become the most popular SEO tool globally, garnering over 25,000 five star reviews on wordpress.org. SEO experts build Yoast SEO, but we design it to be accessible and useful for anyone looking to get a fair chance in the search results. In this post I’ll share our approach to building an app for Shopify, how we successfully launched the app, how we’ll continue to invest, and what we’ve learned. But why build an app for Shopify? Our mission is SEO for everyone. We want everyone to have a fair chance to show up prominently in search. Shopify is one of the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms, and it’s growing insanely fast. Extending our services to Shopify will help us get closer to our mission. By publishing our app on the Shopify App Store, we’re diversifying our offering. As you know, we’ve been attached to the WordPress CMS forever, and that makes us vulnerable. By growing our consumer base on another platform that’s seeing very healthy growth, we can become less reliant on the sole income of our WordPress plugin. Combine that with the never-ending ecommerce boom, and we have the opportunity to share our product with millions of new merchants. If we succeed, the possible financial gains can be huge, which will also flow back into improving Yoast SEO across all platforms. This helps us continue our mission – to help businesses get their best outcome in search. Besides the financial benefits, Shopify itself speaks to our open-source loving hearts. While it’s proprietary software, the Shopify philosophy is something we can very much get behind. We all want to make the web a better place for independent merchants and give them the chance to stand up to big money! How the Yoast team built the app This being a new platform for us — and the first time developing for a SaaS — we researched extensively how to best build an SEO app for Shopify. One of the most essential sources was the Shopify developer documentation. Here, we found answers to almost all our questions. Shopify.dev contains all documentation regarding the different APIs and integration points Shopify offers. We’ve been using this as a primary lookup source for information about: The Liquid syntax and the available objects Shopify offers, for us to output the right meta tags and Schema.org information. The Admin API, which we use to retrieve and enhance existing content. The Partner API, which we use to manage customers’ access to our SEO academy. The App Bridge library, which allows us to integrate our app inside the Shopify admin and rely on their authentication mechanisms. In addition, the Shopify developer documentation also provided a lot of information about how to work with Shopify’s existing SEO implementations, like its title and meta description implementation, as well as canonical URLs, sitemaps, and the robots.txt file. Also, the developer documentation provides information about tools that we use, like the Theme Inspector, to analyze the performance impact of our app. We use this when we’re editing our SEO modifications to the Storefront to determine how much impact our modifications have. We worked with the Shopify partner community for help. For technical questions, we reached out to ZAGO — a very experienced Shopify agency from Sweden. We used their expertise to confirm our findings on building the best possible app. We set out to build Yoast SEO for Shopify using all of our combined insights. For us, this is an entirely new app, built on a mostly new te...