
Imagine you started a business from home but didn’t tell anyone you were doing it. You didn’t put up any signs around your doors, and there’s no obvious indication of what your business is about anywhere. Do you think you’d have many walk-ins here?
Now, imagine you started an e-commerce business but didn’t invest in SEO. You didn’t post any relevant content, and there’s no easy way for your customers to find you without explicitly typing in your URL. Do you think you’d have much organic traffic here?
E-commerce SEO is the bread and butter of your business, connecting you with your target audience and even helping you turn random website visitors into loyal buyers. It increases your online visibility, builds up your brand authority, and shapes your reputation. Without it, you’d be nothing but a small online store in a sea of seemingly more adequate competitors (that are, by the way, growing in number by the day!).
So, if you want to be seen as the more adequate competitor, you’ve gotta get to work—and, fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone.
With the help of some of the best SEO e-commerce platforms, you can navigate the highs and lows of SEO with relative ease and start making a name for yourself in online circles. The key, of course, is choosing the right platform.
Let’s examine some of the most popular options and consider what you should look for when making your choice.
Whether it’s for e-commerce, in particular, or any business, blog, or online platform, SEO has the same purpose—to increase visibility on search engines and help you place higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Many newcomers believe that placing higher simply involves using the right keywords that match the search terms users are typing in when looking for products/services online. Though that’s certainly a big part of SEO, especially in e-commerce, it’s not the only one.
Search engine optimization is a somewhat complex concept that involves many different tasks. What makes it a bit easier to digest is the fact that each of those tasks has pretty much the same ultimate goal—to make your website more relevant and user-friendly.
In e-commerce, the crucial SEO tasks include:
Keep in mind that these are just the most crucial aspects of e-commerce SEO, so be prepared to have your work cut out for you. While it may seem overwhelming at first, it’s nothing that a good tool or an e-commerce platform can’t help you with. Besides, the benefits you’ll enjoy are well worth the effort.
With a good strategy, you’ll get:
You don’t really need the best e-commerce SEO strategy to enjoy these benefits, but you do need to put in the effort and use tools and platforms that can help you out.
Unlike an e-commerce SEO service or a tool, an e-commerce SEO platform is mainly designed as a place to help you create your online store. SEO is the secondary service. So, while dedicated SEO services/tools will typically have comprehensive feature sets, platforms will usually cover just the basics.
That said, even those basics need to be functional if you’re to enjoy the benefits of search engine optimization.
The only question is how you can tell whether a platform has functional SEO capabilities or not. What features and factors will you need to look for?
If you’re starting an e-commerce store, the chances are that your professional expertise lies somewhere in that sphere. You might have more generalized knowledge of e-commerce, or you might be an expert in the specific type of product you’re selling. What you’re probably not an expert on is SEO. And if that’s the case, you’ll need the most user-friendly platform you can get your hands on.
Unless you’re at least somewhat familiar with it, SEO can be pretty confusing. There are a lot of seemingly random numbers and complex metrics, detailed analytics, and chunks of data that could be challenging to decipher.
So, you’ll want a platform that makes it all much easier to understand.
Typically, you won’t really know whether something is user-friendly or not until you’ve tried it. However, you can get a decent gauge of it from real user reviews and testimonials. Check out third-party review sites, forums, and even social media groups and see what others are saying.
Although there are many “best practices” when it comes to SEO and countless “tried and true methods” that do work, SEO is still unique for each and every website. So, you’ll want to have adequate customization capabilities to ensure that your strategy meets your unique needs.
You’ll especially want access to customizable templates, as it will save you time and effort.
Common customizable templates include those for:
Not all ecommerce SEO platforms will have all of these customization options, but it’s a big plus if you go for one that does.
Small changes in your SEO tactics can make a big difference in your SERP performance. The catch is that you won’t know what kinds of differences if you don’t have access to insightful reports and analytics.
Not all platforms will be quite as insightful as you might need them to be, but there are a few common types of analytics and reporting features you might come across.
The most common one is keyword performance tracking, which will give you insights into the overall SERP performance of a given keyword, as well as its search volumes and competitiveness (aka how difficult it is to rank for it).
You should also expect to get traffic analysis with your chosen platform. Some will keep things simple and only give you insights into the general amount of organic traffic you’re getting. The best SEO e-commerce platform, however, will also identify your top pages and tell you what your most valuable sources of traffic are.
Helpful analytics and reporting features you should look for also include conversion tracking, backlink analytics, site health reports, and content performance insights.
Good website loading speed is important for all online businesses, but especially those in the e-commerce industry. If your site handles any type of financial transaction or requires users to leave their sensitive personal information, speed can be a determining factor in whether the users will complete the transaction or abandon their cart.
Slow-loading pages immediately raise red flags. Is the site slow because there are some security issues? Or because it isn’t a legitimate platform? Or maybe it is slow because someone is intercepting the connection with it? If a user has even a sliver of doubt, they’re going to abandon your site, which will increase your bounce rates and decrease your rankings.
So, you’ll want to look for an SEO platform that lets you optimize site speed and ensure excellent load times.
As I mentioned earlier, most e-commerce platforms focus on the e-commerce aspect and are primarily designed to give you a place where you can develop your online store—SEO is only their secondary service. You’ll likely want to upgrade to dedicated tools sooner or later.
That said, there are still quite a few platforms that can serve as the foundation for getting started with SEO. So, here’s an overview of some of your best options.
With about 4.61 million websites using it, Shopify is among the most popular e-commerce platforms, and for a good reason. It has a robust set of features and capabilities that let you create your online store with the utmost ease. Whether you’re brand new to the world of e-commerce or a seasoned professional, it should take you no time at all to get used to it.
What makes it especially suitable for e-commerce SEO is the fact that it’s highly blog-oriented. With excellent templates and theme options, you can publish new blog posts that are engaging and relevant. However, it does require you to do your keyword research independently. Considering that it flawlessly integrates with the free Google Search Console (among other tools and plugins), this shouldn’t be an issue.
What it can take care of for you are the title tags, URLs, canonical tags, and sitemap.xml and robot.txt files. It generates them all automatically and keeps them clean and optimized for SEO. It allows you to set up quick redirects if you happen to change URLs or delete some of your pages, makes it easy to create image alt texts, and automatically makes your pages mobile-optimized.
It’s a bit on the slow side, so you might have occasional issues with your loading speed, but it covers its bases and helps you get started with SEO. Still, you won’t be able to rely solely on Shopify if you want to make a difference in your SERP performance. You’ll definitely need an additional e-commerce SEO tool once you’ve settled and gotten serious with your online store.
If you’ve decided to make WordPress your store’s new home, you’ll want to give WooCommerce a try. One of the most commonly downloaded plugins, it offers excellent customization capabilities, great flexibility, and complete freedom to design your store however you see fit. With easy inventory management and seamless payment processing, it’s every merchant’s dream come true.
Its SEO capabilities aren’t quite as robust as its e-commerce ones, but they could still be well worth your time.
Primarily, as a plugin designed for WordPress, it gives you all the SEO benefits of WordPress itself. It integrates well with popular tools like Yoast SEO, allows you to customize your permalinks and make them more search-engine-friendly, lets you create custom meta tags, and makes it easy to structure your content with headings and subheadings.
It does, however, bring other things to the table in addition to its WordPress-enabled capabilities. Its image optimization features allow for lazy loading, which can significantly increase your page speed by preventing the images from loading and clogging up bandwidth before the users scroll down to them. It also allows for breadcrumb creation, which makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site and find the pages they need.
You can use WooCommerce to create detailed and keyword-rich product descriptions, keep your pages mobile-optimized for faster loading across devices, and organize your product and content pages by tags and categories.
While it’s somewhat lightweight (in regards to SEO), it’s a capable tool that can serve you well if you’re using WordPress for your online store.
As its name implies, BigCommerce is designed for larger online stores with big dreams. Its biggest selling point is its overall ease of use—it requires no coding skills or previous experience, allowing you to build up your online store without batting an eye. It’s got all the things you need to make it big in the industry: fully customizable storefronts, no less than 65 payment gateway integrations, and detailed reporting and analytics that will help you stay on top of your sales, customer behaviors, performance, and more.
It also has a nice variety of helpful SEO features.
BigCommerce automatically generates optimized URLs for you, adding your primary keywords and ensuring everything stays nice, clean, and relevant.
It allows for customizable title tags and meta descriptions, which you can adjust directly from your product page.
Lastly, BigCommerce supports schema markups, which can help increase your chances of appearing in rich snippets, has responsive, mobile-optimized templates for improved performance, offers speed optimization for decreasing your load times, and creates automatic XML sitemaps to increase your crawlability and indexability.
While it might not be the best SEO e-commerce platform, it’s certainly up there and can help you make a name for yourself without much effort.
Unfortunately, its biggest issue is its price—which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering it’s mainly designed for larger stores. It’s scalable and has custom pricing plans for everyone (read expensive pricing plans for everyone), so you’ll need to reach out to get a personalized quote.
If you’re looking for something nice and breezy, you might want to give Wix a try. Known as one of the simplest platforms for building a website (whether for e-commerce purposes or anything in between), it comes with a wide variety of business management and marketing features.
It has a great selection of payment solutions, allowing for easy online transactions, offers an integrated CRM system for managing customer relationships, and even gives you great website analytics. It offers excellent email marketing tools and a comprehensive set of SEO features to get your rankings in check.
First and foremost, it has a Wix SEO setup checklist ideal for newcomers to the world of search engine optimization. It’s an intuitive, easy-to-follow guide that explains the basics of SEO and helps you get started with website optimization.
In addition to the checklist, it also comes with a robust set of features designed to make SEO easier.
It automatically generates editable robot.txt files to improve your page’s crawlability and indexability. It also comes with an automatic schema markup generator and editable built-in presets that allow you to adjust your structured data using your go-to tools.
Through Wix, you can customize your URLs and URL slugs and edit your URL structure however you see fit—don’t worry, Wix will automatically update your sitemaps, create necessary redirects, and handle your canonical tags.
What’s especially useful are the detailed Wix analytics and its Site inspection tool. Analytics will tell you all you need to know about user behavior on your site, your clicks, your impressions, and your traffic changes. The inspection tool integrates directly with the Google Search Console, checking your page indexability and notifying you of any potential issues that might be affecting your performance on SERPs.
All of these features are just a taste of what Wix offers in regards to SEO. While the platform isn’t exclusively designed for e-commerce websites, it has convenient e-commerce features and can certainly help you stand out on the results pages.
While Squarespace was originally designed for creatives, it’s now a popular website builder among all kinds of professionals and businesses, from blog owners to SMBs and those in the e-commerce industry. It comes with convenient e-commerce templates, insightful analytics, and, perhaps most importantly, excellent SEO capabilities.
Similarly to Wix, it gives you an SEO best-practices checklist that can help guide you through SEO essentials and make it easier for you to get started with site optimization. It also integrates with the Google Search Console, simplifying processes such as keyword research and giving you access to insightful data that can help you improve your rankings.
With Squarespace, you’ll get default SEO page titles and meta descriptions that you can change as needed. You’ll be able to control the appearance of your content when shared on social media, and you’ll be able to hide specific pages from search engines and prevent them from being crawled and indexed.
You’ll get automatically generated sitemaps and schema markups, clean SEO-friendly URLs, built-in mobile optimization, SSL certificates, and more.
Perhaps the most useful aspect of Squarespace is its AI tool. With it, you can generate SEO content that’s ready for publishing in mere minutes. However, you’ll want to keep in mind that using AI-generated copy isn’t always ideal, and you’ll only want to use it if you’re in a pinch. It can lack depth and make for somewhat of a dull read.
In any case, Squarespace can be a great e-commerce SEO platform when you’re just getting started. It’s got a rich SEO feature set, convenient e-commerce tools, and pretty affordable pricing, making it suitable for newcomers and small to medium online stores.
Using e-commerce platforms with built-in SEO capabilities can be practical and affordable. Platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and others have plenty to offer, letting you easily build up your online store and simultaneously take care of some of your SEO tasks.
The problem is that none of these platforms are designed specifically for SEO, so their effect on your performance and rankings could be minimal.
If you want to see a real difference in your performance, you’ll need an e-commerce SEO company. Professional SEO services bring a lot to the table:
Of course, it’s not all just fun and games when you’re using an e-commerce SEO company. It all comes at a cost, quite literally. Agencies can charge anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand a month, which could pose problems if you’re on a strict budget.
There’s an alternative, however. Instead of agencies, you can rely on dedicated SEO tools.
With solutions like Rankioz, you can master SEO and become a pro in no time. Uncover the best keywords to use for your e-commerce platform, gain competitive insights, and drive traffic like it’s no big deal. Sign up for Rankioz and seize control of your SEO strategy today!
Rankioz is designed with accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility in mind. It’s a comprehensive SEO tool suitable for growing businesses across niches, with excellent capabilities that make it especially beneficial for newcomers to the e-commerce sphere.
It’s lightweight, intuitive, and incredibly easy to use. Whether you’ve already dabbled in SEO before or this is your first time even hearing about it, you’ll feel like an SEO professional in no time.
It offers detailed keyword research and presents you with all the most important metrics on each keyword’s competitiveness and search volumes. It helps you determine precisely what search terms to use throughout your content to stand out to both search engines and real users.
Relying on Google’s extensive database, Rankioz offers unmatched accuracy and helps you narrow down your focus and create content that stands out.
However, its capabilities don’t stop at keyword research. You’ll also get insightful competitor analytics that will help you assess your competitors’ overall performance, as well as gauge their effective and not-so-effective SEO strategies (both of which can help you improve your own strategy).
You’ll get a helpful link-checker tool, on-page SEO capabilities, and so much more.
The best part is that you don’t have to rob a bank to benefit from it. Rankioz is, first and foremost, designed to be accessible. It has just one unified pricing plan that unlocks all of its SEO features, and it will set you back just $10 a month (less if you subscribe to the annual version)!
If you’re not too sure about it, you can always first sign up for the no-obligations 7-day free trial, where you can experience everything that Rankioz has to offer. Once you’ve seen first-hand what it can do, you won’t be going back.
To start attracting customers, it’s not enough to simply build your online store—you also need to make your online store visible. You can’t do that without SEO.
When done right, e-commerce SEO helps you increase website traffic and boost conversions, improve your brand recognition, establish website authority, and decrease your marketing expenditures. With SEO, you’ll be playing the long game. You won’t get the immediate results that are common with paid marketing efforts, but you’ll get sustainable, long-term results that keep improving over time.
Of course, to get started with SEO, you’ll need the right solutions. Many e-commerce platforms that let you build and host your online store come with some useful, built-in SEO features that will get your foot through the door. Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, and Squarespace all come with useful SEO capabilities that let you optimize your product pages and improve the user experience.
However, to truly impress users and search engines, you’ll need a dedicated SEO solution. You’ll need Rankioz.
With powerful features, insightful competitor analytics, and accurate keyword research, Rankioz helps you climb through the ranks like it’s no big deal. Improve your SERP performance and start driving higher traffic with Rankioz today.
As one of the best e-commerce SEO services, Rankioz can help you improve visibility on search engines, boost your rankings, and drive organic traffic to your site. With insightful competitor analysis that keeps you informed about the SEO strategies your competition is using and accurate keyword research that tells you what your target audience is searching for, it helps you build an optimized store that stands out on the results pages.
Sign up for Rankioz and see just what a difference a reliable SEO tool can make for your e-commerce business.
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