Everybody claims to be the best at it. But who does have the SEO features that gets you to the top of search engine results?
Web traffic is the lifeblood of any eCommerce business. The key to generate leads and make sales. Today’s eCommerce is almost like the survival of the fittest in our digital world. It’s a human endeavor to be on top of search engine results. It is a constant battle, especially for industries that have high competition. The technique that is behind SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) has evolved into one of the most challenging internet marketing disciplines around.
Why you need SEO
Almost all internet activity starts with a research. A good SEO campaign is crucial for every business owner. You will have a tough time running your business if consumers can’t discover your website through a search engine. Your SEO needs to be building into a web platform, covering every aspect of the site design. From page load time, and speed, to HTML structure, avoiding duplication of content, and so on.
Search Engine Watch reports, that websites ranked number one, receive and average click through rate of 36.4%. Number two had a CTR of 12.5%, and number three a CTR of 9.5%. For just the regular consumer, the impression coming from the first position is almost double that for the second position. This illustrates the value of first spot holds.
eCommerce platforms promising the best SEO solutions
But which platform has the best SEO techniques to help you climb up to the top of your industry ladder?
Platforms under the SEO microscope
A quick and effective way to analyze and compare different platforms, is to look at some out of the box SEO features. The cons of one platform, can be the pros of the other. Different non keyword related SEO elements, will help in finding out which platform is best in optimizing your eCommerce store for search engines. We eased up the work for you, and looked at some features like, site speed, image optimization, natural setup of the page, and more. The eCommerce platforms BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Volusion were taken under the big SEO microscope.
How good is BigCommerce for SEO
Pros
Natural Setup
BigCommerce offers a wide range of native SEO features. But some built in SEO features come with a couple key differences described in the following.
Customized H1 tags
H1 tags are incorporated on the page level, allowing merchants to obtain an SEO benefit from including products, or related keywords into this area. The H1 tag is included with just about every eCommerce platform. Most of the time, the H1 tag is being generated when you type in the name of your product. But BigCommerce gives you the option to customize your H1 tag, by making it different from the actual product name.
Built in nofollow support
BigCommerce offers something that, especially Volusion, does not. The built in support for nofollow tags, which allows merchants to control how PageRank flow between internal and external links on their pages. This is incredibly useful when it comes to SEO, which gives BigCommerce a big advantage.
Sitespeed
BigCommerce website loading speed takes 2.41 sec. BigCommerce has one of the fastest loading speeds, compared to the average speed of 3.39 sec.
Cons
BigCommerce can be quite expensive. Its pricing is a little bit more expensive than the direct competitors Shopify and Volusion.
How good is Volusion for SEO
Pros
Natural Setup
Volusion has several SEO features. It offers a user friendly site, friendly URLs, and SEO features are easy to implement. With Volusion you also have different price ranges, that are a little bit cheaper than other platforms.
Robots Meta Tag
Volusion allows your to set individual pages, to display the noindex meta tag. Robots noindex meta tag is one of the most desired solution, to keep specific pages from appearing in Google search results.
Cons
Sitespeed
Volusion’s website loading speed takes 3.50 sec, which is more than the average time of 3.39 sec.
Blogging
While the other platforms contain an integrated blogging platform, Volusion offers this feature as an add on. Blogging is one of the key features for SEO, and helps businesses to get more traffic onto their websites. This add on feature can be costly. Missing the feature of communicating with your customers can be a problem.
How good is Shopify for SEO
Pros
Natural Setup
Even though the SEO settings are automated, you can go into each product page and customize your own target keywords, URLs and more.
Canonical URLs
This is the original address of a page that may be found in more than one location. Google will view these URLs as two separate pages, both with identical content. The majority of eCommerce platforms have some sort of canonical URL adjustment procedure. Sometimes you have to make changes in the site files. Shopify makes it a little bit more convenient than the other platforms by having instructions for accessing the layout theme file and adding some code to the canonical URL area.
301 redirects
The 301 redirection is a command used to redirect a browser or search engine from one URL to another. Shopify makes it really easy to redirect. The platform has a tool for it right in the dashboard, while others include this as a premium feature at an additional cost.
Cons
Custom fields
Some merchants will require the functionality to allow a user to provide some text at the point of purchase. Shopify allows you to capture this data, but is is a difficult process. Your need to create a ‘line item property’ by manually adding some HTML code to your template. With BigCommerce for example, you can easily just select or enable text field options when creating products.
How good is Magento for SEO
Pros
Natural Setup
Magento’s natural setup of the site is very SEO friendly. It features a range of default strong options to create a SEO friendly website. Magento enables you to edit individual page titles for every type of page. You can generate SEO friendly URLs and sitemaps. You can also define the metadata and so on. Lastly, the search option within your e-store is crucial, which is a strength of Magento.
Own IP address
Magento is the only eCommerce platform out of the 4, that offers the own IP address option. Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion do not provide you with your own IP address. Although they will hopefully take steps to prevent another client’s activities negatively impacting your website, such as spam E-mails etc.
Cons
Sitespeed
Magento’s site speed takes around 5.05 sec, which is much slower than the average. Page loading time is an important factor when it comes to search engine rankings. It contributes to the rise and fall of your conversion rates.
Independent Page URLs
Page URLs with key search terms have an SEO advantage, and look better in the search engine results. For SEO purposes, it would be preferable to have independent control of the page URLs. You don’t want them to be too long or irrelevant. All four platforms let you change the page URL. However, Magento isn’t user friendly from coding perspective, and makes it complicated to perform this task. If you plan advanced SEO modifications beyond what can be accomplished with the platforms build in feature you’ll need a budget to hire a professional coder.
Which eCommerce platform is right for your SEO
When choosing a platform for your eCommerce store, pricing can be a factor for your decision sometimes. But don’t fall for cheap platforms right away. The better your organic traffic is, the more customer engagement you will have. Investing time into researching eCommerce platforms, with the SEO solutions you need will pay off in a long term perspective. BigCommerce and Shopify are great for speed. Magento can be difficult with the way it’s been built. No platform is immune to problems, so it really depends on your requirements and preferences.
Contact and Expert
Especially in a competitive niche it is important to stand out from your competitors and let your customers see you before the competition. For a business owner, who does not know much about development, it can be hard to know what kind of SEO strategy the store might need. Content writing is no different. And not everybody has time to gain knowledge about coding. Developer can ease the complete task for you. Integrated SEO functions might be great, but for optimized content it might help you to hire a quality SEO provider. Here at 1Digital, SEO is what we do all day, every day.