many different platforms to choose from as well as many factors that you need to consider before making a decision.
Too frequently, business owners rush to choose an eCommerce platform without considering how it will influence their long-standing SEO strategy and end up selecting one that directly contradicts their objectives.
In this article, we will point out which SEO factors you should consider while choosing an eCommerce platform.
Why is SEO important for your eCommerce store?
When it comes to attracting more clients to your eCommerce business, SEO is critical. Where do people go when they want to find something online? The internet search engines. That is why you want maximum search engine visibility.
More traffic comes to your eCommerce site if your product pages rank better in SERP. Because more traffic equals more revenue, having an SEO-optimized eCommerce site should be one of your top goals.
Ecommerce SEO analyzes a number of aspects that impact how Google and other search engines rank content, including keywords, title tags, meta descriptions on your product pages, overall user experience, page speed, and much more from the technical side.
While many eCommerce solutions on the market today acknowledge the importance of SEO, not all excel at making it simple for their customers. As a result, while determining which platform to use for your eCommerce website, look at particular SEO benefits.
Read More:- 10 Effective Ecommerce Link Building Tactics for Boosting Your Online Business
Which SEO Features should you consider while choosing an eCommerce platform?
Speed
Whether it’s your eCommerce site or another blog, site speed is a major ranking element for SEO. The faster your site loads, the better the experience your customers will have. Speed can also indirectly affect rankings by raising the bounce rate and decreasing dwell duration.
Websites that load quickly are more appealing to users and can increase conversion rates.
Read More:- Ways to Improve core web vitals for Your eCommerce Site
Content Marketing and Blogging
Blogging is an excellent method to contribute fresh material to your website regularly. It lets you enlighten and educate your clients while targeting new keywords. Many hosted systems have a blogging component, allowing you to maintain everything on one platform. If you use an eCommerce platform that does not contain blogging and content marketing options, you will need to create a separate blog on your domain.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on developing and distributing content in order to attract and keep consumers. This material can take the shape of blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, or anything else that your target audience will find interesting and helpful.
WooCommerce paired with WordPress offers a built-in, free blogging platform that interacts seamlessly with any store.
Read more:- From Good to Great : Elevating E-commerce with SEO Audits
Navigation Links
It’s simple to see why visitors value navigation so highly: it enables them to swiftly and easily locate the content they want, such as a blog post or product page. It can also assist consumers in locating vital information that they were unaware they needed, such as a price plan, an email registration page, or contact information.
Links in menu navigation are a crucial part of SEO. This is because they are used for internal linking, which helps search engines understand what content is on your site. They also help visitors find their way around your site without using the back button. However, it is important to remember that links in menu navigation may not always be necessary and should only be used if necessary.
A solid navigation system helps consumers quickly and effectively locate what they’re searching for, improving your store’s user experience. In reality, you just have a few seconds to capture a site visitor’s attention, so you should direct them to the information they want straight away!
So, while choosing an eCommerce platform, look for the platforms that allow you to customize navigation and footer menus.
Read More:- Understanding Link Insertions and Their Importance in SEO
Mobile Optimization
Websites that are not optimized for mobile devices will lose out on a huge chunk of traffic.
A website with sluggish loading pages and missing functions is something that mobile buyers face all too frequently. To improve user experience and increase client satisfaction, your eCommerce platform should include mobile-friendly themes and storefront.
An important consideration while choosing an eCommerce platform that gives a solid SEO practice is about whether or not your store is mobile-optimized. You should choose a platform that offers mobile-optimized themes for your store to ensure that it is easy for customers to browse and purchase products on their mobile devices.
Mobile optimization is the key to success in the ecommerce industry. It is a must for any business to have a mobile-optimized website today. Because of the increased usage of mobile devices to purchase online, a mobile-friendly website is high on the priority list.
Your eCommerce shop must meet customer expectations.
Because of the ease of accessibility that surrounds this website design, mobile-friendly websites increase your sales and conversions. Knowing that a mobile-friendly website lets visitors interact and connect with your business across devices without irritation or inconvenience. This improved accessibility is critical for client retention.
Custom Page Titles
Before clicking on a link in the SERPs, a user wants to see an accurate and short summary of the page’s content. On the other hand, search engines must identify the relevance of a webpage to surface the content as a result of the proper search query.
The page title is what you see in the browser tab and the seo title is what you see in search engine results. The page title is shorter and more descriptive of the content on that page while the seo title will be longer and contain keywords.
Page titles should be between 60-70 characters, while SEO titles should be 50-60 characters long.
If you include keywords in the title tag, search engines will highlight them in the results if a user enters a query including those keywords. This increases the page’s visibility, and you may see a greater click-through rate as a result.
So the platform you consider must allow you to add custom page titles.
Customization of Page URLs & permalinks
Many people believe that keywords are the only part of great SEO. URL optimization is a critical yet often neglected component of gaining a competitive advantage.
Effective URL optimization enables you to get the following benefits:
- Search engine-friendly URLs are a ranking feature that affects where your site appears in search results.
- It Makes it easy for users to browse your site and see where they are currently on a site.
- Search engine crawlers use URLs to connect sites, resulting in even more SEO juice for your website.
So, when you’re looking for an eCommerce platform, check its permalink structure and see if it’s SEO-friendly and customizable.
Custom Meta Descriptions
An intriguing meta description has the potential to increase the number of people who click on your organic search results. This implies that more visitors who view your page in the search results will click through and visit your website. Even if your rating remains unchanged, this equals extra traffic for you!
A meta description is an important aspect of SEO. It does not only help people grasp your website’s content but also helps search engines read and understand what you’re trying to portray through your website.
Custom headings
A heading is an essential component of every web content you produce, especially for search engine optimization. Heading tags include the H1, H2, and H3 tags, which respectively indicate the importance of your content on your website.
The headings identifies the various sections of the content, making it easier to read. Using headings in your articles is essential if you want to create engaging content.
A good eCommerce platform should allow you to add the appropriate header tags to your product pages.
Adding Custom Image ALT Tags
Alt tags give context for what an image displays, notifying search engine crawlers and helping them to index an image appropriately. Including keywords in an image’s alt property is vital since search engines cannot see your pictures but can read your text to determine what the image is about.
Using pictures in alt tags, such as product shots, can improve an eCommerce store’s search engine results.
Source: WooCommerce dashboard
Robots.txt file management
The robots.txt file is a text file that directs search engine crawlers on which pages to index and which to ignore on your website. This is important since you don’t want Google to index duplicate or low-quality sites. If you can’t keep track of your robots.txt file, Google may index pages you don’t want them to. This can hurt your search engine optimization since it lowers the quality of your website in Google’s eyes.
If you add pages, files, or directories to your site that you don’t want search engines or web users to index, you must update your Robots. txt file. This will assure the security of your website and the greatest possible search engine optimization results.
Recommended eCommerce platforms for SEO
With evergrowing solutions on the market, deciding on the finest eCommerce platform for SEO is difficult. Furthermore, when it comes to SEO, certain systems outperform others.
Here, I’ve listed several eCommerce platforms that will give SEO results.
Uvodo
Uvodo is a conversion-focused eCommerce platform for small businesses. It’s an eCommerce platform that includes marketing and conversion tools for free. Uvodo provides a comprehensive set of eCommerce-specific product SEO features like managing product inventory – SKU, SEO title, meta description, collection and tag management, etc.
What makes Uvodo great for SEO is that Uvodo’s themes are designed for lightning-fast speeds. By using a fast-loading theme from Uvodo, website owners can ensure that their site is well optimized for search engine crawlers. This can lead to increased engagement, more pageviews, and ultimately higher rankings in search results.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for SEO because it offers a number of features that make it easier for you to optimize your site for search engines.
It gives you almost all of the tools you need to rank at the top of search results pages.
Shopify offers many features for SEO purposes, including customizable meta tags, image alt tags, Google Analytics and Search Console integration, and much more.
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is extremely SEO friendly right out of the box. It is built on WordPress, which is standard compliance and SEO friendly. You can add plugins like Yoast SEO to optimize your product pages with its suggestions .
You need to use seo-friendly themes, optimize product descriptions, product pages, photos, and other material to your WooCommerce-powered online store -you are in charge of optimizing any extra material you upload.
WooCommerce SEO is a continuous activity that must be maintained in order to achieve consistent development in search engine traffic and revenue.
Magento (Adobe Commerce)
Magento (now, Adobe Commerce) is a famous eCommerce site-building platform that includes several SEO-friendly features. While some of these SEO-related capabilities are enabled by default, users must adjust some settings to achieve the greatest results in terms of site ranking and conversion.
The good news is that implementing these modifications is straightforward. However, you may get the finest expertise in this area by selecting a Magento development service that also specializes in SEO since it’s an open-source platform.
Choosing the Best eCommerce Platform for SEO
Anyone creating an online business will benefit greatly from solid SEO practices. Because SEO is critical, these capabilities should always be addressed while assessing an eCommerce solution. You want to have all of the tools you need to succeed available from the start, with no roadblocks. However, you must first understand what those SEO tools are, why they are vital, and why it is critical to have the greatest SEO platform management.
You can check the platform’s demo store and admin to see what the platform offers before you make a purchase or complete a subscription. If there is no choice, you need to check the stores that are using that particular platform.
Choosing the right eCommerce platform makes it easy to keep ahead of the SEO competition. It will save you the time and effort of improving the technical aspects of SEO while also boosting your SEO strategy. Remember that SEO plays a significant part in generating recurring visitors. If you can properly acquire and convert it, your sales will increase month after month.
