SEO Friendly eCommerce Platform- 4 Best features you must have

Posted by Nitin Jain / May 26th, 2015 / No responses

The majority of most popular eCommerce platforms like Magento, OpenCart and Prestashop claim to be SEO friendly, but actually they lack SEO friendly features. While choosing a shopping cart, hosted eCommerce or customized solution, you need to compare its SEO features with the ones given below if you want your business to have an identity and recognition amongst your followers-

Below listed are 4 best SEO features that every Ecommerce site needs apart from having a functionally well performing eCommerce platform. Do, you have these?

Canonicalization-

Canonicalization is all about correctly indexing or ranking your content so that it is easily viewable using multiple URL’s. In simple words, a web page that can be accessed through more than one URL is said to have a canonicalization issue. This is a form of duplicate content problem that confuses search bots and must be rectified. If there are a lot of URL’s that lead pretty much to the same page, you are going to make search engines work much harder and spend a lot of time crawling all different URL’s. Listed below are some instances when canonicalization becomes an issue and you need to look after it-

When you have not rectified www and non www versions of the website-

These versions are same but ideally you need a 301 or permanent redirect from one to other in order to deliver best results. Without this server re-direct, you will have two websites that will be indexed by search engines- which gives you poor SEO results.

You have changed your URL structure so that your web content and information still exists on both new and old versions-

Obviously, you don’t want to lose traffic that is linking to or visiting the new content. In this situation, a 301 redirect is important to redirect your traffic since both search engines and web browsers can follow it. (302 redirect can be followed by a web browser and not spider)

Website Speed-

A fast loading website is one that ranks better and attains higher visibility on search engines. Websites with faster speed ultimately leads to increased conversions too. While choosing a self-hosted shopping cart solution, look for a platform that is embedded with fast and efficient coding. Page load speed depends on the platform you choose as well as the hosting solution you have.

• Having a dedicated server can help speed up your website.
• Create a cache of your web pages to hasten page loads
• Monitor web server performance regularly
• Use CSS to maximize the performance of your website. The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows search engines to spider or read the content of your website easily.

Implement Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking-

Simply having an eCommerce software is not enough these days, you need to understand how visitors are driven to your site, how they behave and what type of visitors drive revenue. By setting up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking, you will be able to make informed decisions about your website and marketing efforts as SEO, PPC and Social Media.

Once setup correctly, Google Analytics provide a range of different metrics to judge the success of marketing and web design changes. These include- Revenue, Ecommerce conversion rate, average value, unique purchase and so on. In addition to it, you can also track product performance and the time to purchase (the time from a user’s first visit to when they complete a sale).

Once you have Google Ecommerce tracking setup, it is worth leaving it for a period of time to collect enough data so that results gathered are meaningful and significant. With these results, you will be able to work out to make better informed decisions about your business.

Enable Social Sharing-

Social media plays a stronger role in SEO, therefore it is important that your eCommerce website must be optimized for social sharing. This can be done via-

• Providing social sharing buttons to allow visitors share your business pages amongst their circle. This will help in brand promotion, driving new customers and increase in conversions.
• Gain access to social followers by viewing their demographic details (age, location, interests, and preferences)
• Get instant traffic from social media sharing by allowing people to like and follow your brand.
• Out of all these, the best thing you will get is increased user engagement on your site.

Conclusion

After having a look at these features, we hope that you will look forward to have a platform with most of these features that can offer you a great start. However, if you do not find such platforms, you can go ahead with additional add-ons that can be downloaded to achieve the above given functionalities on your eCommerce website.

In all, the aim is to have a SEO friendly eCommerce solution that invites users for a pleasing experience. So, let’s give a start today for a better tomorrow!!!