How to Choose the Best Ecommerce Platform for SEO (Sep 2021)

Why is SEO important for e-commerce?

Well, 93% of all internet activity starts with a search. That means you're going to have a tough time running an online store if users can't discover your website through Google.

But most ecommerce platforms today offer a variety of features that'll help you optimize your ecommerce store for Google. But considering that SEO involves a lot of factors -UX, speed, meta tags, etc, you'll need to find a platform that does well with all of them.

In fact, it'll need to ace in all of them.

And we're here to help you find the best ecommerce platform for SEO in 2021.

We know that some ecommerce softwares have only the most basic SEO features. Let me give you a real-life example.

Let’s imagine that you are a retailer of men’s vintage-style clothing. One of your products is a 70’s-style, blue velvet jacket that you have named “Bradley”. You list the product in your ecommerce website as a “Bradley Jacket”.

Because of the limitations of your store-builder software, this name might automatically become the title of the product page, the page URL and the name of the product in your site’s navigation.

Your prospective customers, however, are not searching for a “Bradley Jacket”. They are far more likely to be searching for “70’s style velvet jackets”.  Realising this, you now want to modify the page title to read “70s Style Velvet Jacket – Bradley | VeryVintage.com”.

With some free ecommerce platforms, you have no way to override this or are forced to pay extra to have this feature.

Unfortunately, many business owners don’t become aware of this limitation until long after they have invested significant time uploading product images, product descriptions, and stock information.

We wanted to know which ecommerce platform was best for SEO and wanted to rank ecommerce platforms by how good they were at SEO so that we'd have a rank chart that we could use to select eCommerce platforms for our own clients.

So, here's what we did:

Our Research Methodology: Best Ecommerce Platform for SEO

We found the most used ecommerce platforms in the US and Europe (Data Source: BuiltWith)

Wix
Magento
Shopify
WooCommerce
BigCommerce
osCommerce
Weebly
SquareSpace
Volusion
PrestaShop
3DCart
ZenCart
GoDaddy
MoonFruit
1&1
BigCartel

We then compared all of them for 14 factors that we believe are very important for ecommerce SEO.

Best Ecommerce Platform for SEO: List of Factors

Over the past decade, across the hundreds of ecommerce clients we've worked with, we believe that these factors play a crucial role in how well your ecommerce store ranks in the SERPs:

• Independent Navigation Links
• Independent Page Titles
• Independent Page URLs
• Independent Meta Descriptions
• Independent Image ALT Tags
• Independent H1 Headings
• Canonical URLs
• Integrated Blogging Platform
• Social Sharing buttons
• Auto XML Sitemap
• Use of own Domain Name
• Your Own IP address
• 301 redirects
• Robots Noindex Capabilities

Each factor was then assigned a weighting based on its correlation to an increased Google ranking in the Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors study.

Here's why these factors are important to your ecommerce business:

Independent Navigation Links

Weighting: 10/10

Definition:

The navigation link is the text that appears for your products and product categories in the navigation menu of your site.

Some ecommerce platforms will automatically generate the navigation links in your menus using the same names as the products and product categories in your online store. For SEO purposes it would be preferable to have independent control of the navigation links.