Which e-commerce platform is the most SEO friendly?
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The process of setting up or transferring your business to the online space can be quite tricky. There are a lot of moving parts to the process and it is important that you make the right decision every step of the way.
A critical area that requires such strategic and wise decision making is in choosing an e-commerce platform. The platform you select is going to be your central marketplace and will play a pivotal role in your business operations.
There are so many options available in the market, that it might be difficult to know which one to choose. However, it is important to note that these different e-commerce platforms vary in their design, features, and functionality.
The different e-commerce platforms also vary in their level of compatibility with high impact SEO strategies that can improve organic traffic, foster conversions, encourage purchases, and boost revenue for the online store. In this article, our main focus will be to compare two major e-commerce platforms - Magento 2 vs Shopify Plus (further as Magento and Shopify).
We will discuss their similar and distinct SEO features to determine which is truly SEO friendly. The points below are straightforward and easy to understand, enabling you to determine which of the two e-commerce platforms is most SEO friendly.
However, if you still need Magento ecommerce services, we would advise you to hire a professional Magento Developer for technical assistance and support.
The Magento and Shopify platform typically undergoes frequent updates by their respective developers. These modifications usually feature the introduction of different extensions and functionalities for higher rankings on result pages. Therefore, online stores built using either platform have a huge chance to appear friendly to search engines, increasing their potential for better performance on search engine result pages (SERPs).
However, Magento and Shopify only take care of some SEO automatically, meaning that using either of both platforms, you need to handle the other essential SEO steps yourself. For the steps you take to be effective and yield actual results, the individual platforms must have all the necessary SEO extensions and features.
Nonetheless, If you build a store using Magento or Shopify and without having to use any extensions or apps on Magento or Shopify, you can:
1. Edit the title page and meta description:
Using Magento or Shopify, you can edit the title page and meta description of your store. Editing your title page and meta description involves adding your business targeted keywords so that it can be shown in relevant user searches.
Not to forget including a strong call to action that can compel buyers to click on your stores listing on result pages. The ability to do this and get it right is critical to define how your store appears on search engine results, which in turn can attract the right customers your way.
2. Add Alt text to Product Images:
This is another SEO feature Magento and Shopify have in common.
An Alt text stands for an Alternative text which is a descriptive text you add to the HTML code of images.
Adding an alt text to all the product images on your store serves three very important functions:
- It increases the accessibility of your store to visually impaired users who might be using a screen reader. This software uses the alt text to understand what the image is about and describe it to the user.
- If an image does not load on time or cannot be loaded, the browser will display the alt text, giving the customer an idea of what the image is supposed to represent.
- An alt text enables search engine spiders to understand your images since they cannot view them. This helps the spiders to easily crawl and index all the store's images for user searches.
Now that you know some basic SEO techniques you can take on Magento and Shopify without any apps or integrations, I will discuss it from a different viewpoint. This time It will be the optimization steps you can take using apps and integrations from Magento's marketplace or Shopify's App store.
The steps include:
— Scan For SEO Issues:
— Checks on Site Speed:
A study on page load speed time revealed that 40% of consumers will leave a product page if it takes more than three seconds to load. And 79% of buyers are less likely to purchase from that same website again if they are unhappy with the site's load time.
This shows that having product pages that load faster is critical for improving user experience, encouraging sales, and facilitating buyer comebacks.
Thankfully, using Magento or Shopify you do not have to be a developer or have coding knowledge to improve the page speed of your product pages.
On Magento's marketplace or Shopify's App Store, you can find and use apps and extensions available for free or a premium to run checks on your site speed.
Some of the apps and extensions even give you recommendations on the necessary steps to optimize your product page load time and enjoy the benefits therein.
Summary:
Magento or Shopify offers you a basic set of SEO tools to enhance your optimization efforts for a high ranking on result pages. But, there are levels to it and both platforms differ in their level of flexibility and functionality.
With Shopify, it is easy to set up and launch an online store that is search engine friendly, not to mention the impressive range of SEO apps on the platforms App store. Using these apps, you can trace and correct certain SEO issues on your product pages. However, since Shopify is a hosted platform you are kind of limited in terms of functionality. For example, you cannot access .htaccess or perform server-level configurations.
Unlike Magento, a self-hosted platform that offers greater SEO flexibility and even better SEO functionality at a price tag.
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