When running an online business, the most important decision is to choose an SEO-friendly eCommerce platform to make your online stores easily visible in top search queries. However, creating an online store from an SEO viewpoint is not enough, the platform should be user-friendly and comprehensible enough to be used by both the site owners and visitors.
Have you ever thought, about why eCommerce platforms should be SEO-friendly or why this is Search Engine Optimization an important factor for eCommerce stores?
With the growing popularity of the eCommerce industry in the past few years, it becomes an important concern for all online store owners to make their stores SEO-friendly to ensure that their products can be found conveniently in search results.
This is a mandatory factor in deciding the success and failure of an online store because if your store is not ranking in search queries, it will lose the opportunity of getting leads and sales from potential online shoppers.
Due to this fact, most eCommerce platforms are packed with SEO-friendly features to make store management and optimization easier for store owners. Here is the list of popular eCommerce platforms piled up against each other from an SEO viewpoint:
#1 Magento
If you are looking for the most compatible and user-friendly eCommerce platform with strong features for SEO, then Magento is definitely a good choice over other platforms that offer an open-source environment for developing and managing your online store with the latest SEO-friendly features.
With a remarkable achievement of over 200,000 installations since its launch, Magento is the surely indisputable choice for E-commerce store owners and the credit goes to its flexibility and scalability with an extensive library of current extensions.
Why Magento should be a good choice from an SEO perspective:
- It comes preloaded with impressive SEO features and it has the ability to generate SEO-friendly URLs and keywords to make your online store easily available in the top pages of search engines.
- Secondly, the tag of open source makes it comfortable for the owners and developers to make the changes according to new SEO guidelines conveniently and frequently.
# 2 Opencart
Being an open-source platform, Opencart is also free to download and use. Hence, if you are a potential beginner of an online business, then Opencart is an ideal cost-saving option for you that comes bequeathed with a horde of excellent SEO features to make the optimization of your online shop easier.
Which SEO-friendly features make Opencart an ultimate alternative for store owners?
- The most significant SEO feature of Opencart includes the ability to create a custom category and product pages with Meta tags.
- Besides, Opencart has a number of plugins, extensions, and tools created by its huge community of developers for enhancing the search engine optimization of online stores.
Therefore, Opencart could be the perfect choice for owners of startup online businesses as it offers the essential code for optimizing their stores for better search engine performance.
#3 Volusion
Volusion is yet another eCommerce platform that offers SEO-friendly eCommerce websites with enhanced compatibility over all browsers. Being a paid platform unlike Magento and Opencart, Volusion includes a variety of SEO features to help businesses govern their growth with consistency in their cutthroat marketplace.
The set of SEO features that comes preloaded with Volusion includes:
- SEO-friendly websites and their URLs
- Store-specific SEO settings
- Article-specific SEO settings
- Product-specific SEO settings
- Dynamically created SEO-friendly URLs
- Search Engine Sitemap generator
- Meta tag keyword definition
- Meta tag description definition
- Editable robots.txt
- Custom Meta tags override
- 301 redirect management
- Custom 505 error page configuration
- Custom 404 error page configuration
Besides, you can also take 24X7 professional customer care support from the team of Volusion developers for adequate implementation of these SEO features in your online store, which is very helpful for the new store owners when they don’t learn the intricate open source solutions.
#4 Big Commerce
Big Commerce is another popular paid eCommerce solution that has grown in popularity in the past few years due to the company’s claim, “The Easiest Way to Sell Online”. The popularity of Big Commerce is also contributed by its set of template options, a huge range of native SEO features, and an interactive dashboard.
If you talk from an SEO perspective, you will find Big Commerce as a reliable solution for developing an optimized online store.
From an SEO perspective, the features that make Big Commerce an SEO-friendly platform are listed as follows:
- H1 tags: You can easily incorporate the H1 tags on the page level, which allows the online store owners to gain an SEO advantage from integrating product-based keywords into this significant area.
- In-built nofollow support: Big Commerce is integrated with in-built nofollow support. It allows online store owners to control the flow of page ranks between the external and internal links on their pages. This tag is very helpful when it comes to SEO which provides Big Commerce an added advantage over other platforms.
Besides, Big Commerce has many advanced SEO tools that leave other platforms with their enhanced SERPs and fine-grain control and they are:
- 301 redirects and URL rewrites
- Prioritized XML sitemaps for auto-feeding to Google
- Tableless themes
- CSS and Javascript files, which are hosted on CDNs
#5 Shopify
Shopify is a relatively new eCommerce platform that although being a paid platform is an excellent choice for developing SEO-friendly online shopping stores. Blessed with an extensive theme store and a horde of easy-to-use design features, Shopify offers in-built support for changing the robots.txt file for creating public sitemaps.
If you talk about its SEO-rich features, the most alluring SEO-friendly feature of Shopify is running a business blog that helps in enhancing the ranking of the online stores in search queries.
Other important SEO features of Shopify are:
- It supports customizable H1, Meta tags, titles, and SEO-friendly URLs.
- It can automatically create sitemaps to show up in search queries.
- It allows social networking integration that helps in the social media optimization of your online store.
- The SEO-friendly CMS and Shopping cart of Shopify helps in the easy optimization of online stores built over this platform.
- Shopify has in-built analytics to help in evaluating the website’s progress.
Are you planning to use any of these eCommerce platforms to create and manage your online store? If so, you can take pocket-friendly E-commerce solutions from several reputed IT companies that manage a pool of talented eCommerce store developers for offering the best services to their clients.
However, if you have any other eCommerce platform in your mind that you would like to share with us, leave your views in the comment section given below.
Article by