Before making a final move on settling down with the platform, you gotta check-mark whether the provider can offer you these crucial SEO website features:
Table of Contents
1. Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, URLs, and Header Tags customization
This is one of the basic ecommerce SEO tips, but we will repeat it. The chosen platform must allow you to edit the title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and header tags (such as H1, H2, etc.) for all of the customizable pages. Google decides how your website will be displayed by the descriptions on the home page, product, collection pages and other customizable pages. Title tags also happen to be important not only because you’ll use them to place your targeted keywords, but it will also serve as a call-to-action button as it will be displayed in the correct search results.
2. Optimized URL structure and 301 redirects
URL happens to be the essential component for SEO purposes for two reasons: 1) it tells the search engine what the page is about; 2) it builds a path for the search engine to find that page.
So the best ecommerce platform will allow you to customize URL strings and organize their structure.
Though sometimes your e-commerce business customers might save the old version of the product link so you need to be careful with adjusting the URLs. But there is a solution. Such situations are the reason why SEO best practices recommend making sure the platform offers a 301 redirecting in case someone tries to access the original link you edited.
3. Mobile customization
In 2018, Google revealed that more than half of website traffic in the US was coming from mobile devices and you want to be sure you are targeting those users.
Nowadays, the best ecommerce platform will offer you responsive design and it will make sure your website is perfect both on desktop and mobile.
4. Website search feature & Pages indexation
While starting an e-commerce website, you have to make sure the visitors can search for items on your website. Also, it’s in your best interest to display correct search results so the users find what they are looking for.
While it looks like we are giving you general ecommerce advice, we are about to surprise you that it’s actually one of our ecommerce SEO tips. It’s also important to use the platform that allows you to control how the internal search results pages are displayed in external search engine results. Meaning, that you will have control over this content.
This is a powerfulecommerce SEO practice. Though, be moderate in these pages indexation as you can accidentally create a duplicated content. And then it becomes messy.
5. Professional and tech-savvy customer support
As you probably already noticed, many of the features basically depend on the platform. And as e-commerce companies are partially responsible for the success of the operation of your online store, you want to make sure the support they are providing you is top-notch.
Even the best developers taking care of your website might need the assistance from the platform customer support, so think of it as a business partnership.
So as we’ve reviewed the essentials, let’s list the best ecommerce solutions in terms of SEO.
What Are The Ultimate Ecommerce Platforms For aSEO Friendly Website?
What is an ecommerce platform? It’s a software application that allows you to move your store online and offers you all the necessary tools to build your website, launch your marketing, increase your sales, and manage the operations. And as we’ve already mentioned, Search Engine Optimization capabilities are extremely important if you want customers to easily find your store.
Now, let’s discuss the main ecommerce players out there and see their SEO capacity.
1. WooCommerce
You probably heard a lot of WordPress. And Woocommerce is the plugin that allows WordPress users to create an online store.
WordPress has an amazing community and if you run into a problem, there is a very high chance somebody else has already solved it.
The benefits of SEO on Woocommerce are endless. The platform offers all of the features mentioned above. Besides that, it has pretty much every important SEO feature out there.
2. Shopify
Shopify is a simple and popular ecommerce platform. It’s very intuitive and offers pretty much anything you need to run a successful online shop.
Besides that, the pages loading speed of Shopify-created websites is very fast and this is one of the basics included in every SEO best practices handbook out there.
Though, the system doesn’t allow you to fully customize the URLs which obviously lead to search engines ignoring some of the important keywords you might want to include.
3. Magento
Magento is considered to be the best in terms of SEO for ecommerce websites. Though before picking this platform, note that Magento is open-source software and you will have to customize pretty much everything. It requires a lot of coding, and if your coding skills are minimal make sure you find a professional developer on Onbenche.de that can be with you during the entire project. And make sure your developer is aware of how important the SEO is and can create a fast and SEO friendly website.
4. Prestashop
Prestashop is a very easy to use ecommerce platform. It’s targeting small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for a quick ecommerce solution.
It lacks some built-in SEO features, but it allows you to add external SEO plugins. While it can be a solution, you can lose the whole point of using Prestashop, and the point is to easily build an online store. Also, plugins for Prestashop significantly increase the development cost.
5. Wix
Wix is yet another easy to use website builder. It’s very user-friendly and intuitive, though it lacks bigger players on the market functionality.
It offers very limited customization and it’s simply not the best ecommerce SEO solution out there. It doesn’t offer URLs, title tags or meta descriptions optimization, the indexing of the pages is slow, and it’s a closed source platform meaning that third-party plugins are not even an option.
