In the online retail market, your goal should be to drive traffic and in-turn increase your customer base. To be able to do this you’ll need an easy to find website.
This is where a search engine optimization strategy will help you see a positive effect on your businesses growth.
If you are about to invest in an online store, first you need to find the best ecommerce platform to support your business. During your search, look into built-in SEO features to determine if they support your goals. To help you get started in your search for the best ecommerce platforms for SEO, here are some important things to make sure the platforms you consider will take care of for you.
Title tags
When SEO ecommerce website optimization is a priority, you want a ecommerce platform that will allow you to create independent title tags for each page of your website. For ideal SEO strategy, the page title should be connected to your target keyword. Ideally, your search term should be placed at the beginning of the title for the page.
There are some ecommerce platforms that will generate page titles automatically. These page titles may use the same names as the products and product categories in your online stores. Keep an eye out for ecommerce software solutions that will automatically do this for you.
Meta descriptions
The meta description for your pages will be amoung the first thing that your customers will see in their search, before they click on your website. The details of these metadescriptions have a large impact on whether potential customers will actually click to your website.
Some ecommerce integration services will automatically pull content from the page as a default meta description, with no option for customization. When choosing a platform, look for something that allows you to customize your meta description and tailor it to each page.
Canonical URLs
A canonical URL is a URL that can be found in more than one place. This is especially important for ecommerce retailers due to products potentially fitting into different categories of products, which could make for multiple URLs. This could hurt your SEO due to the web pages being seen as duplicated content.
To avoid this, use an ecommerce platform that uses the Google provided “REL CANONICAL” which will allow you to specify which URL will be the preferred version of the page. If a platform does not include this feature, it may have a negative impact on your SEO.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a file which is located on the web server, which allows search engines like Google to find and index website content. A online retailer, depending on the size, can have thousands of unique product pages and sitemaps. Managing these pages manually would be time consuming and tedious.
When researching ecommerce platforms, ensure that you find an ecommerce platform that automatically generates an XML sitemap when a new pages is added to your website. Most platforms do, but some only offer this at an added cost, which may not be ideal for a small businesses.
Getting the most out of your online store, means ensuring that your ecommerce platform allows for SEO customization. The online retail market is growing, and having an excellent website is more important now than ever. If you want an overview of the best ecommerce platforms, start here or connect with Computan below to get a free quote and get your ecommerce website development started today.
