If you are thinking of starting an e-commerce business, one of the biggest aspects of it is having an online store. As you need visitors to check out your physical store for it to flourish, you also need to drive traffic to your online store to ensure sales of your products and services. For this, you have to make certain efforts to make sure that people visit your online profile, i.e., your e-commerce website.
This makes SEO services mandatory – however, the success of many SEO efforts depends on the e-commerce platform you choose for your business.
The importance of the right e-commerce platform cannot be overstated. It significantly influences the appearance as well as the functionality of your online store and plays an indispensable role in the SEO success of your business. Optimising your website with e-commerce SEO can help you rank higher in the results of the search engines, direct purely organic traffic to your website and also help convert mere visitors to paying customers.
I know what you are thinking –
How do I choose the best e-commerce platform for my business? Don’t fret. In this blog, we will discuss the same.
Choose the platform that offers comprehensive customisable features
When setting up your online store, there are certain things that are non-negotiable from an SEO perspective. The most fundamental of these features is the ability to customise URL structures, title tags, and meta descriptions of your site. These are important as they help the search engine understand the context of your website and rank them better.
Your e-commerce services must have unique URLs and titles/descriptions to communicate with the search engines effectively. Other than this, you should also ensure that the platform you choose lets you add alt-text to the images on your website. This can help the search engine identify and match the queries with your website more smoothly.
In the era of mobile phones, it is key to have a mobile-responsive website for your e-commerce strategy to work. Ensure that the platform you go for allows you to optimise your site for mobile use. Additionally, ensure that the platform of your choice offers CDN (Content Delivery Networks) for the faster loading speed of your website as in today’s world, speed of the website is critical in ensuring SEO success.
Go for the platform that has built-in tools for SEO
You can easily optimise your website for e-commerce services if you opt for a platform that offers built-in tools for SEO or can accommodate SEO tools and plugins seamlessly. These tools can be used for efficient optimisation of your website, keyword analysis, tracking the website ranking, and also for generating reports for SEO performance.
You should keep an eye out for features such as XML sitemaps, editing meta tags, canonical tags, and detailed analytics. This can aid your efforts for SEO and improve your ranking. You can go for Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Wix, and more as they offer a number of helpful SEO tools and also allow integration with third-party plugins for SEO.
Select the platform that offers scalability
As your business grows, it requires the e-commerce website to become more comprehensive to include its broadened range of services. This calls for choosing an e-commerce platform that also has options for scalability to keep up with the performance. It is essential that the platform you go for is competent to withstand high traffic and transactions without having to compromise on page speed or stability.
Final thoughts
Selecting a platform that aligns with your e-commerce strategy and has provisions for SEO efforts is critical. It needs to have a balance between all the correct tools for SEO and have room for integration of the same otherwise, being user-friendly, and have provisions for scalability. There are many platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Wix, and more that you can choose from and ensure that your SEO efforts get you the results you desire.
