Your ecommerce store should be ranked in the results so internet users can easily find it on Google and Yahoo when they search. Luckily, the optimization process is not very difficult. Some of the ideal shopping cart software solutions such as Builderfly support many SEO functions to decrease your burden.
The information on Google and Yahoo search engines can help you in building an effective SEO website marketing strategy.
SEO is just a part of your marketing. Nobody can guarantee you that you’ll always be found at the top of the search engine outcome. Today, so many website owners want to achieve this, and only the most proficient will get this.
SEO is way too important for the success of your ecommerce business, and so customers were also looking outside of search engines.
What is SEO?
SEO refers to the set of practices used by online business owners to achieve good traffic and high ranking in Google via organic search engine results. Old practices such as hiding text on webpages are of no use today and can even lead to penalties.
Google is the main decision-maker when it comes to “good” or “bad” SEO strategies. Optimizing your ecommerce website for search engines improves human readability. There are two main categories of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The techniques you apply on your website refers to the on-page SEO, while off-page refers to the promotional efforts you do to increase your website traffic. To perform better on-page activities, you need solid tools to build in ecommerce software or shopping cart software.
Why is SEO Important for your Ecommerce?
Today, the majority of user’s shopping starts on a search engine. There are thousands of online shopping websites available, and users are looking for the best option, and thus, they visit search engines to find out which are the top-ranked websites and compare products they need.
Some Long-tail keywords attract high-quality traffic which is most likely to convert into long-term customers. Sometimes shoppers start using short-tail keywords and perform detail searches with long-tail keywords for the desired product. These keywords have a drastic effect on the ranking of your website. Using the proper keywords for your website is important nowadays. Unluckily, some of the shopping cart software makes it difficult to optimize your website. Apart from keywords, people also need good page speed, mobile-friendliness, quality content and many more.
If you want to win over today’s ecommerce world and want to boost your sales and traffic, you need to have a complete SEO strategy that covers everything and to achieve this you need to build your online store on a platform that supports all SEO features.
List of SEO Factors Which Matters
The following factors play an important role in how good your online store ranks in search engine:
- Page speed
- Fast loading software is good for users and additionally good for SEO as it can lead to higher conversion rates. Page load speed depends on the ecommerce platform and hosting solution you choose.
- Optimize Meta titles and meta descriptions
- Google and other several search engines fetch Metadata such as descriptions, tags, and titles based on the algorithm. Many shopping cart software provides by default fields for meta description and title. Optimize it properly, and you’ll get the best result.
- Editable robot.txt files
- It allows you to mention URLs that robots should not crawl. It is beneficial for blocking search engines from crawling non-HTML files.
- Built-in Blog
- Blogs can offer additional benefits to your users and increase your business ranking as it can attract more visitors than a static page.
- Proper and complete business information
- Adding your complete business detail on google allows users to easily find your business and also increase your site completeness rank.
- Rich category page
- Many ecommerce platforms neglect the category pages. The ideal ecommerce platform will allow you to add rich text for your category pages along with the proper images and videos.
- Canonical URL
- Duplicate content placed on multiple URLs of your ecommerce website can be indexed and ranked using canonical URLs. This enables you to neglect duplicate content issues by pointing only one original page for indexing.
- Automated XML Sitemaps
- It allows you to index individual pages with Google, although it does not have any effect on your ranking. Ecommerce platforms or shopping cart software that generate XML sitemaps will make it easy for you to update and add sitemaps.
- 301 Redirects
- Many shopping cart software tends to remove product pages when it is no longer available or of no use. That’s why 301 redirects are important to redirect deadlinks whenever needed.
- Friendly Navigation Structure
- Both your users and search engines need easy navigation around your site. You should navigate both through texts and not via images. Remember always to avoid duplicate links.
The list is not finished yet; there are more than 200 SEO factors which affect your selection of ecommerce platform. If you can find out the platform which covers most of the features, you need to kick start your work.
Weighted Score of the SEO-friendly features
Among many ecommerce platforms available, how do you identify which platform is best for your website?
Let’s find out the weighted Score of the list of SEO-friendly features available. Higher-scoring features are the most important for your ecommerce website, and you should not ignore it:
| Features | Ranking |
| Search-Friendly Navigation | 10/100 |
| Built-in Blog feature | 10/100 |
| SEO-friendly URLs | 9/100 |
| Customized Meta titles and Meta Description | 9/100 |
| Canonical URLs | 8/100 |
| Google Analytics Integration | 4/100 |
| ALT Tags Control | 3/100 |
| 301 Redirects | 2/100 |
| Robot.txt | 1/100 |
The Content Matters
The procedure of a search engine indexing your site is called spidering.
Little software programs called robots visit your site and pursue every one of the links they can discover, to situate whatever number pages as could be expected under the circumstances.
They couldn’t care less if you made your site with shopping software or manually coded it. They just search for data.
The more SEO well disposed of your shopping cart software is, the more data the robots will discover for the search engine to investigate. The more data the robots can separate from your site, the better for you.
All things considered, the examination of this data will choose the ranking of your page in a specific item.
The better your site coordinates a search term entered by a search engine client, the higher your site will rank in the result pages made.
Getting your site as near the highest point of the results for a specific pursuit term as conceivable is called SEO.
Pick an SEO friendly Shopping Cart Software
You can choose the best SEO friendly shopping cart software such as Builderfly to get the most useful SEO features. It also ensures that your website should be optimized for easy indexing.
It also makes it easy for search engines to find important information about your web pages and allow your page to rank high in the search result.
Builderfly also prepares site maps of your website for search engines and updates robot.txt files used by search engine spiders to navigate your online store.
At last, you want to index as many pages when search engines go through your website as this is a very important basis for a better ranking in search result pages.
Below is the list of features that you’ll find in Builderfly
- Customizable page titles
- Customizable Meta Description
- Dynamic canonical URLs
- Mobile-friendly Design
- Pagespeed optimized
- Google XML sitemaps
Other than that, there are various other ecommerce platforms which are ranking high on the list of SEO features offer:
- Squarespace
- Wix
- PrestaShop
- Zencart
- Bigcommerce
Non-SEO related features
When picking an ecommerce platform or shopping cart software, at that time you should also consider some non-SEO related features such as:
- Choice of Payment Gateways (e.g. WorldPay, PayPal, etc.)
- Integration with your actual EPOS and accounting software
- Customer Support
- Scalability (will the platform be able to flourish your business?)
- Security (Will your customers’ amount and contact details be secure?)
Summary
Picking a shopping cart platform for your ecommerce business should not be taken lightly. Although it is necessary to use the most popular and cheapest solution, you should also consider some other factors such as custom landing page, design and customization options,
If in case you, later on, find that the solution is not capable of your business and not allowing you to interact and engage with them, then you might wish you had spent some more amount looking for the best solution before you spent money on a less capable platform.
