If any small offline business store wants to come online, it is not that difficult today. There are lots of e-commerce platforms that offer services to open an online e-commerce store. Despite this, every platform has its advantages and disadvantages. You should not only open an online store but also keep in mind that its online visibility should be good enough, i.e., whichever platform you choose should be SEO-friendly. In this blog, we will discuss “Top 10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for SEO,” which provides the best options for your online store. Let us start!
1. Shopify
Shopify is a well-known eCommerce platform that is easy to use and has a lot of themes and plugins that are easy to customize.
• SEO Friendly Features: Shopify provides inbuilt SEO friendly tools along with ecommerce facilities, which makes it very popular among small business owners. It is very easy to customize the basic requirements of SEO, like URL structure, meta title, description and alt text, as per your requirements.
• Ease of Use: User-friendly interface and extensive app store help you provide advanced SEO functionalities.
• Scalability: If your business grows, Shopify can easily scale up without compromising on SEO performance.
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source Ecommerce plugin that provides you with all the facilities of ecommerce on the WordPress website; it is easy to use and is completely free, which gives it an edge compared to other platforms.
• SEO Customization: WordPress provides you with a lot of plugins; many SEO-friendly plugins make SEO customization very easy, such as Yoas SEO, ALL in One SEO, etc.
• Content Management: WordPress is known for its very easy Content Management System. Hence, it is very easy to manage or update content on the website, and any website owner can easily manage their content.
• Community Support: WooCommerce has a large community from where you can get support and tutorials.
3. Magento
Magento is an open ecommerce platform. To work on Magento, you need coding and technical knowledge, it provides you with advanced tools like payment integration, product management, etc.
• Robust SEO Options: Magento comes with customizable URL structures, sitemaps, and metadata options.
• Flexibility: A highly customizable platform that helps you implement your SEO strategy at a detailed level.
• Performance: Magento is efficient in managing high traffic and complex product catalogues, but some technical knowledge is required.
4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a cloud-based platform for businesses that want more flexibility. BigCommerce comes with built-in SEO features that provide easy customizations like microdata, automated redirects, and many more.
• Built-In SEO Tools: As we know, BigCommerce offers built-in SEO features like customizable URLs, meta tags, and many other well SEO optimized features.
• Speed and Reliability: High page speed is a very big point of user experience today, and it also affects your SEO ranking as Google prefers fast loading websites.
• Ease of Integration: Many third-party apps help you make your website SEO friendly, and in BigCommerce, you can easily optimize your website by integrating SEO enhancements from third-party apps.
5. Wix
Wix is a website builder platform where you can create anything from a personal blog to an enterprise-level website. It has inbuilt ecommerce features. Wix provides you with a solid foundation for SEO through which you can do automatic image optimization and schema markup for your products.
• SEO Wiz: An SEO tool of Wix that provides you with many combined SEO features through which you can do many things like easy crawling and indexing, content optimization, etc.
• Drag and Drop Interface: Wix provides you with a drag and drop feature through which you can easily make the design of your website elements user-friendly.
• Responsive Designs: Wix provides you with mobile-friendly templates that do not require you to optimize your website for mobile, and it is also very important for SEO.
6. Squarespace
Squarespace is ideal for creating blogging, portfolios, and simple e-commerce websites. Since it provides drag-and-drop features, no special technical knowledge is required, and hosting is also included.
• Stunning Templates: Squarespace has a large collection of beautiful templates for modern website design. You can easily customize the templates of your website according to your desired look and feel.
• Drag-and-Drop Functionality: This is a blessing for non-technical users! You can easily customize your themes by using their drag-and-drop features.
• Integrated Blogging and Marketing Tools: If you’re blogging or running marketing campaigns, all of these tools come pre-installed in Squarespace. There are also SEO-friendly templates that improve the visibility of your site.
• eCommerce Ready: Its eCommerce platform provides every aspect of eCommerce support to your business. Now, you can upload your products and manage your inventory. Your visitors can easily add items to your cart and easily check out with various payment methods.
• 24/7 Support: Squarespace provides you with 24/7 customer support, who are always ready to help you with any kind of troubleshooting.
7.OpenCart
OpenCart is an open-source e-commerce platform that you must install yourself; if you are not a technical person, then you will need a technical person. This is good for businesses that already have web experience and knowledge of technical setup. OpenCart is also very good from an SEO point of view, but you will have to install its plugins; it does not provide you with many SEO-friendly plugins or extensions by default.
• Customizability: OpenCart provides you with both free and paid extensions, but by default, OpenCart is SEO-friendly. However, you may face canonical link issues or other SEO issues in the free version. If you are looking for advanced SEO optimization features you need to go for paid extensions.
• Cost-Effective: OpenCart can provide SEO extensions at a very reasonable rate. Most of the SEO extensions you can get are between $50 and $150, which will help you optimize your website for advanced SEO.
• User Community: OpenCart has great community support, which provides regular updates to you and helps with troubleshooting.
8. PrestaShop
PrestaShop is an open-source and customizable ecommerce platform whose user interface is very friendly. It provides product management and multi-store management and provides SEO friendly environment.
• SEO Modules: Pretashop provides various SEO modules that allow you to customize your website, from URL optimization to meta tags and rich snippets.
• Multilingual Support: Pretashop provides you with multilingual support, which takes the burden out of it. If you are building a multilingual site, then this is best for you. You will get one language by default, while you can download other languages.
• Flexibility: Prestashop provides customizable themes and modules which can be managed from custom pricing to bulk orders. You can also create your custom modules and themes, which will make your site even more SEO friendly.
9. Weebly
Weebly is not very advanced compared to Wix, but it provides you with a basic SEO-friendly environment. The main strength of Weebly is its ecommerce features and ease of use, which makes it the best option for small businesses.
• SEO Tools: Though Weebly provides inbuilt SEO features, it still provides advanced SEO tools.
• Ease of Use: Weebly provides a user-friendly interface, and with the help of its drag-and-drop features, we can easily make its design SEO friendly.
• Fast Loading Time: Weebly sites load quickly due to being lightweight, which is very good from an SEO point of view since Google gives priority to fast loading sites.
10. Volusion
Volusion is a fully hosted, robust eCommerce platform that provides you with various tools and resources to build your eCommerce website and use it to grow successfully online.
• Product Management: Volusion gives you the facility to manage a detailed inventory of your products. Advanced tools are available for product categories and SKU tracking.
• In-Built Payment Processing: Volusion offers an in-house payment gateway, which is secure and reliable. Integration for multiple payment options is also easy.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM features are built-in to track customer data and orders. These enhance the experience of your customers.
• SEO and Analytics Tools: Volusion has in-depth analytics and SEO tools that optimize your site’s performance and visibility.
• Mobile-Friendly: Mobile eCommerce is very popular today, and Volusion’s themes are mobile-friendly.
Factors to Consider Before Choosing an Ecommerce Platform
• Customization: Make sure that whatever e-commerce platform you choose, its customization and navigation field should be easy to use, providing drag-and-drop features and customization capabilities according to your specific requirements.
• Speed and Performance: Website speed is an imperative feature, so keep in mind that the platform you choose should guarantee fast-loading speed and high performance.
• Mobile Optimization: The mobile version of the platform is optimized because Google gives priority to mobile-first indexing.
• Security: The platform should provide all the features for your e-commerce security, such as SSL certificates, secure payment gateways, etc.
• Cost: Budget is a very important factor, so you should study the pricing of the platform carefully as some platforms are free, some follow the subscription model, and some charge you for advanced features, so make sure you are clear on all the pricing details beforehand.
SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Websites
Once you have finalized your e-commerce platform, some of the best SEO practices are very important to follow for the site’s good visibility.
1. Keyword Research:
You must identify niche keywords related to your business product and use those keywords in the Meta title, description, H1 tags, alt tags, and, most importantly, in the content while following Natural Language Processing (NLP) guidelines.
2. Optimized Product Descriptions:
Your audience searches many products for specific keywords; after identifying them, you should write content about your product that gives value to both your audience and search engine.
3. High-Quality Images:
Today is the era of HD images, and people like to see high-quality images, so make sure that the products in your products are in HD quality along with alt tags and are compressed.
4. Internal Linking:
Interlink relevant category and product pages of your website with each other, which will improve site navigation and crawlability.
5. Customer Reviews:
You should add customer reviews on each of your products, which builds up a trust factor and helps customers in making purchasing decisions.
6. Sitemaps and Robots.txt:
Update the sitemap regularly at a common interval and configure robots.txt properly so that the search engine has complete clarity about which of your pages you want to crawl and which you do not. This will also improve the crawlability of your website.
Conclusion:
Every eCommerce platform provides some or the other unique features or services of its own. You must decide which platform will be suitable for you based on your requirements. In the above blog, top eCommerce platforms have been discussed, and all have their specialities. Understand your requirements and decide which platform will provide which features to you, what its cost is, and how its customer support is. All these things have been explained in this blog, which will help you choose the best eCommerce platform for yourself.
