It’s overwhelming to choose what eCommerce platform will be the right one for you. Outside of making sure that the platform can accommodate the size of your store, you need to make sure it’s well equipped for search engine optimization (SEO).
Any platform will have its own SEO features, but they all have their own pros and cons. Having the right features for eCommerce SEO can mean the difference between your target audience finding or not finding your shop.
We’re here to help you in your search for the best eCommerce platform for SEO! With a rundown of some of the biggest platforms on the current market, you’ll be set to increase high converting traffic to your online store.
1. Shopify
For beginners that want an online store up and running ASAP, Shopify is a great option. Its user-friendly interface makes building your store as simple as choosing a pre-built theme and customizing it to suit your brand. This means you don’t have to worry about knowing the ins and outs of coding to make a great website (thankfully, there are options to edit HTML and CSS if you need to).
There are a couple of great tools that help to boost your Shopify eCommerce store. With easy integration with Google Analytics, you can track your leads, traffic, and conversions with ease and accuracy. Plus, the built-in Shopify App Store gives you access to a wide range of plugins that add additional features to the Shopify builder.
Plugins like Plug In SEO and SEO Booster help monitor your SEO performance and create SEO-optimised titles and meta descriptions for you. However, there are a couple of drawbacks to Shopify.
The number of free themes is limited to about ten, and if none of those suit you, you’re going to have to pay extra. Considering Shopify is a monthly subscription service, the costs will build up. That being said, Shopify has been making strides to improve its SEO functionality.
Once, you couldn’t edit your robots.txt file, which is essential for any SEO-optimised website. This has been rectified and makes Shopify a great eCommerce platform for anyone to begin on.
2. WooCommerce
If you’re looking for full control over your eCommerce SEO without needing too much coding knowledge, then WooCommerce is your best option. The platform is actually a plugin for WordPress, so if you’ve been using WordPress for other sites, you should feel right at home with WooCommerce.
This creates a barrier of entry if you’re not familiar with WordPress, but once you get a handle on it, there’s a lot you can customize SEO-wise. Its integration with WordPress means you have access to popular SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, which optimizes your meta descriptions, URLs, and editing robots.txt files. However, this integration has its setbacks. WooCommerce starts to struggle when your store goes above a certain threshold of queries (requests of the database), it starts to break down.
For example, if you have tons and tons of users making conversions and adding items to your shopping cart, then WooCommerce can’t handle that number of requests and shuts down. This would be a disaster, especially if your store is seeing high conversions.
If this ever becomes an issue, a strong technical support team is ready to help with any issues. With WooCommerce being an open-source platform, there are people working on it continually to improve the experience. Overall, WooCommerce is a great way to really take control of your online store’s SEO. The barrier to entry with how technical it is may turn some off but learning the terminology and tools will only improve your SEO skills for the future.
If you decide to use WooCommerce, you can also take advantage of two other amazing add-on plugins that will make your selling experience easier. WooCommerce Order Export is a very useful plugin that allows you to Export your orders anytime you want to, or you can even set it to export and/or email them to you automatically at set intervals. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping helps you to create advanced shipping rules based on weight, item count, the logged-in status of the buyer, and more.
3. BigCommerce
It’s overwhelming to choose what eCommerce platform will be the right one for you. Outside of making sure that the platform can accommodate the size of your store, you need to make sure it’s well equipped for search engine optimization (SEO).
Any platform will have its own SEO features, but they all have their own pros and cons. Having the right features for eCommerce SEO can mean the difference between your target audience finding or not finding your shop.
We’re here to help you in your search for the best eCommerce platform for SEO! With a rundown of some of the biggest platforms on the current market, you’ll be set to increase high converting traffic to your online store.
4. Magento
When it comes to no restrictions in eCommerce SEO, Magento is the go-to platform. It’s completely open-source, which means you can edit the code to fit the exact requirements of your business. You’re provided with a basic outline of your store, so you don’t have to build it from the ground up, and from there, you can add what you need. Need an overhaul of your navigation bar? Want to change the colors on a single page completely? It’s all possible in Magento.
Of course, this customization extends to the SEO features. You can fully edit your store’s metadata, rich snippets, robots.txt, and XML sitemaps. There are no restrictions to optimize your entire site exactly the way you want. Of course, this all sounds great, but only if you have a working knowledge of coding. You need to have coding experience or an expert you can call on to get the most out of Magento.
The community version of Magento is free, but the Enterprise version can get very expensive if you’re really looking to take your eCommerce site to the next level. If you’re confident in your coding skills, then Magento is the platform that lets you optimize your online store with zero restrictions.
Summary
These are a couple of the best platforms for eCommerce SEO but there are other platforms that can help increase your online visibility. Squarespace is a good option for creating professional-looking stores with a user-friendly builder.
A platform like Volusion is great with tutorials to show you through the process of optimizing for SEO. Whichever platform you choose, you can start creating an SEO-friendly eCommerce store in no time at all.
