It is a powerhouse for businesses and brands to find new customers, increase conversions, and build their eCommerce brand. According to a study, over 37% of all traffic sent to eCommerce stores starts at a search engine, and more than two-thirds of all clicks go to the top five search results on the page, so it’s rather important to optimize your online store for search engines.
Nowadays, online is the way to go, and building an online store is easier than ever. However, choosing the right tool that will help you kickstart your online journey is quite a difficult task. There are many tools out there available in the market, but for most people, the choice is between three market leaders: Shopify, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce (Magento).
How can an eCommerce platform impact SEO?
The choice of an eCommerce platform can impact SEO. Most eCommerce and web design platforms offer a variety of features that help you optimize your eCommerce website for search engines. Considering the many factors of SEO and search engine rankings, you will have to find a platform that excels in all of them.
Below mentioned are some key factors for optimal eCommerce SEO:
14 Key Factors for Optimal Ecommerce SEO
Based on our research, we found that these factors play an important role in how well eCommerce stores rank in the search engine results pages(SERPs):
- Custom Navigation Links
- Custom Page Titles
- Custom Page URLs
- Custom Meta Descriptions
- Custom Image ALT Tags
- Custom H1 Headings
- Canonical URLs
- Integrated Blogging Features
- Social Sharing buttons
- Auto XML Sitemaps
- Custom domain names
- Custom IP addresses
- 301 redirects
- Robots Noindex Capabilities
While selecting the right eCommerce platform for your online business, you may consider these ranking factors to see if each eCommerce platform offers the functionality to optimize each factor.
Which is the best eCommerce platform for eCommerce SEO?
Though there are many free eCommerce platforms that provide limited functionalities, you will have to go for a paid version for the best SEO features. Therefore, we recommend choosing the best platform for your eCommerce website right from the beginning.
Comparing the many eCommerce platforms available, we discovered a few of the best ones, which are WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento.
All three of these platforms offer optimization tools for almost all the 14 ranking factors, with Shopify showing advanced eCommerce features for independent navigation links, page titles, and URLs. You can also find other features ranging from 301 redirects to social sharing buttons, and blogging management to independent image alt tags.
WooCommerce is a great eCommerce platform but it has to be integrated with an open-source WordPress content management system, which provides you complete control over your SEO settings and WordPress site files. WooCommerce uses customizable SEO-optimized code, has search engine-friendly URLs, a wide range of SEO plugins, rich snippet support, and provides robust blogging support.
Shopify, on the other hand, is a subscription SaaS (software as a service) that provides strong performance for SEO and offers optimization for almost all the ranking factors. Shopify includes SSL certificates, built-in mobile optimization, optimized CSS & HTML5 coding. Shopify SEO allows a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform to help you optimize your content better for e-commerce portals.
Magento, now Adobe Ecommerce, like WooCommerce, is another open-source platform, so it lets you maintain control over SEO factors like independent links, URLs, and headings.
Now, which one out of these is the best is a debate that’s been going on for years. The platform that is best for you and your online business comes down to what your needs are. If you want an easy-to-use platform, go with Shopify. A Shopify store will give you a minimal amount of customization and great SEO features. Go for WooCommerce if you wish to have a higher degree of control and customization of your online store.
If you are looking to boost your search engine rankings and gain traffic and conversions, Digital Hive’s team of eCommerce SEO experts can help your business gain the desired visibility.