eCommerce SEO is something we do a lot of around here. Small and medium sized businesses come to us looking to help them grow their online shopping empire and we’ve gotten pretty good at it but something we’ve seen a lot of is clients who are trying to run their shops on platforms which just aren’t very SEO friendly (or business friendly for that matter!).
Much like the importance of choosing the right web host from the outset, selecting the right eCommerce platform or shopping cart provider is even more important. We’ve worked with quite a few different platforms and here are the ones we rate highly for search engine optimisation.
3dcart
- Search engine friendly URLs – this might seem like a given to anyone using a modern CMS or halfway decent eCommerce platform but believe me, there are plenty of eCommerce software providers and shopping carts that have anything but search engine friendly URLs so this is a big win for 3dcart AND the fact that they work pretty much right out of the box scores big brownie points for newbie shop owners.
- Search friendly category pages – category level pages are a great source of search traffic because they form real hubs which can attract links. 3dcart makes it even easier to create category pages that win big in the search engines because you can easily add text and content (it doesn’t just generate product images and links) and 3dcart also automatically generates a category index as part of the sitemap to
- Easy header/footer/page title editing – this might sound like a really basic thing to mention but quite a few eCommerce solutions out there force users to just accept the auto-generated titles without a thought to the fact that you might need some control. The only thing that 3dcart lets itself down with is the fact that you can’t set a different title for the menu and the page which does get a little frustrating if you want to create short snappy navigation links but include keywords within the page title.
- Breadcrumbs – nice little bonus benefit of 3dcart is easy setup of breadcrumb navigation which is not only an SEO win but also a great conversion rate/usability benefit.
There is just one thing which I dislike from an SEO perspective about 3dcart (and in fairness this is aimed at all hosted eCommerce software providers):
- It’s a hosted solution – from a business perspective that does ultimately limit the control you have but from an SEO perspective it can also limit your ability to fully-optimise your website because 3dcart’s servers are US based which means your website is effectively originating from the US and if you often serve a UK customer base then they are going to see longer page loading times (increased frustration and page speed is also likely a ranking factor) and it is likely to have a slight impact on how Google sees your geographical location.
Pricing ranges from $19.99/month to $499.99/month and beyond so there is something for everyone and as I see it, 3dcart is a very credible option for eCommerce businesses.
Go to 3dcart.com
SEE ALSO – My guest post on the 3D Cart blog
Volusion
It has won numerous accolades to support its claim to be the best eCommerce solution out there and there is plenty to love from an SEO’s point of view.
- Full HTML & CSS access- you can create a completely custom design if you have a designer (or DIY if you know how). This is great because it gives you a lot of control to ensure that your pages are clean coding and fast loading. It also enables you to build a great looking store which will ensure your website goes some way to earning its badge as a high-quality website in Google’s eyes (post-Panda) and it will also stand the test of time as Google looks to integrate more user feedback into its algorithm because let’s face it, customers don’t buy from ugly unusable online shops.
- Search engine friendly URLs and redirects – a great feature of Volusion is the ability to create search engine friendly URLs and then redirect any examples of the page to the SEO friendly version. The search friendly URLs give you an SEO boost and the redirects will ensure all link juice flows to the correct page rather than getting split between multiple versions of what is essentially the same page.
- Link canonicalisation - sometimes it just isn’t possible to redirect every single occurrence of a page for example session IDs on URLs etc which is where link canonicalisation comes in – it tells the search engines which version of the page should get the rankings and the link juice. Volusion enables users to change canonicalised link tags for any page on their website which is a pretty nifty feature for SEO.
However…
- The only problem I have with Volusion is the fact that it is hosted which comes with the same issues as I mentioned in my review of 3dcart above.
Pricing ranges from £19-£95 per month
WordPress + Jigoshop
Jigoshop is an eCommerce plugin for the extremely popular publishing platform WordPress. It’s a relative newcomer to the market but it is getting plenty of good coverage and having worked on a couple of sites now (mainly personal projects) I’ve been very impressed with this plugin.
- The code is lightweight – Jigowatt, the developers behind the plugin, are leading eCommerce web developers so they know what makes a clean coded website and it is this kind of attention to detail that has gone into the Jigoshop plugin. You can run an eCommerce WordPress website knowing that it isn’t the plugin holding your website back from performing well in the search results.
- You can create custom URLs - WordPress obviously has the ability to rewrite URLs and create search engine friendly ones but what I really like about Jigoshop is that it allows you to create the exact URLs you want with the ‘products base url’ option in the general settings section of the backend of the plugin. It might seem like a small feature but little things like that are really useful when it comes to fine-tuning a website for maximum search engine performance.
- It is self-hosted – maximum control, so not only can you implement 301 redirects which perhaps you couldn’t do with a fully hosted eCommerce solution but you can also host your website where you want and add things like a content delivery network for maximum site speed.
- You can use an SEO plugin alongside Jigoshop – one of the great things about running a website on WordPress is that you can create an install exactly the way you want it so unlike a lot of the other eCommerce solutions covered in this post, you have complete flexibility and control with Jigoshop so you can use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO to ensure every product page is well-optimised.
The plugin is free and comes with a couple of premium add-on options which are well worth a purchase, like the Jigoshop theme with is both highly SEO friendly and mobile-optimised also!
Magento Go
Magento has to be one of the world’s most well-known eCommerce solutions but it is also essentially enterprise grade and therefore quite expensive and complex to implement. Since this post was written to help out our small and medium sized business owner friends, we decided to include Magento’s slightly more ‘small business friendly’ offspring… Magento Go.
This solution comes with lots of the SEO awesomeness that you get with the full Magento solution:
- Search engine friendly URLs – having the ability to fully customise URLs is so important, Magento Go lets you do what you want with every URL, just so it suits your needs. Sometimes we want to help clients shorten URLs and some other eCommerce solutions force you to adopt their structure, but Magento Go lets you do what you want.
- Support for 301 redirects – the ability to be able to redirect visitors and googlebot around your website is vital, particularly in an eCommerce business because products might go out of stock or cease to be sold so you want to be able to redirect all that link juice and the actual visitor to another closely related page on your website.
- 503 header support – one of my favourite features of Magento Go is the fact that even though it is a hosted solution, it still has support for 503 headers so you can tell the search engines that you are working on a page (or the whole site) and that they should check back when you are done. Forgetting to implement a 503 response could be detrimental if you are tinkering with a page and for whatever reason when Googlebot attempts to crawl it gets a 404 error – that could be kissing goodbye to your ranking.
- Complete control of meta data – standard feature and what you’d expect from an eCommerce solution worth its salt but it is still good to see that Magento Go offers full meta data control.
Prices range from $15-$125 per month for the software
Shopify
Shopify is probably one of the most well-known eCommerce software solutions out there and over 15,000 stores run on their software so they must be doing something right! And they certainly get quite a bit right when it comes to SEO…
- Clean, search engine friendly URLs – Shopify allows shop owners to create some of the neatest looking URLs around, plenty of other eCommerce platform providers out there will force you into having different bits and bobs attached to the end of URLs but not Shopify.
- Beautiful themes – a great looking shop is so important because people have to trust you enough to hand over their payment info. How a website looks will affect the trust people feel and there are plenty of themes you can use from Shopify that will make your eCommerce business look very slick. This is great SEO wise because not only will you be building a higher quality website which people are more likely to want to link to but it will also help reduce bounce rate and increase user satisfaction which in the longer term is going to help you no end once Google starts working more user feedback into its algorithm.
- Complete HTML and CSS control – Shopify is well coded to begin with but it also allows you to tweak under the hood of your website and make code changes as and when you need to thereby making SEO all the more easy.
- Shopify Apps – from an online marketing perspective, Shopify Apps makes the whole shopify proposition extremely appealing. I’m blown away with all the add ons that you can purchase for Shopify that just plug straight into your shop. Email, maps, A/B testing and loads more besides.
Software fees range from $29-$699 per month
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I really enjoyed your post since we have been trying to determine if we should go with MagentoGo on our next project over what we typically do on Shopify. I am glad to hear it sounds pretty SEO friendly. We also recently finished a post on Shopify and SEO that some of your readers might find helpful. It is an advanced step by step breakdown of how to do SEO on Shopify. Thanks again!
http://www.newepicmedia.com/ecommerce-marketing/shopify-seo-guidebook/