Is Shopify the best platform for e-commerce SEO?

Choosing the right e-commerce platform is an important decision as it greatly impacts how you work from day one. If you’re new to the industry, you’ll see a wide variety of names and websites that allow you to build the online store of your dreams.

But what are the options, and what’s best for your online business in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO)?

Here’s everything you need to know.

What are the different e-commerce platforms and how do they compare?

There are certainly plenty of options when it comes to choosing the right platform for your online store. They differ in complexity, pricing, customisation and features so you’ve got to compare them to find out what’s best for you. The biggest five e-commerce platforms are:

• Shopify
• Wix
• WordPress
• BigCommerce
• Squarespace

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an easy-to-use subscription-based software sales platform. It allows businesses of all sizes to build their online presence and sell their products, making it the most popular e-commerce platform.

Shopify has a market share of 26%, with over 4.2 million online stores, as of July 2023.

Many businesses – small and large – use the services of a Shopify SEO agency, (like us at Paramount Digital) to build their website and ensure a high rank on Google, which leads to high organic traffic and an increase in sales.

A Shopify store offers great flexibility to all kinds of businesses and is easy to use from the start.

What is Wix?

Wix is similar to Shopify in that it offers users the freedom to build their own website and online store. Wix is a cloud-based website builder that offers web hosting and design services.

This particular platform is useful for smaller businesses just getting started because it is a cheaper alternative to others in the market.

However, its features are thin compared to Shopify and WordPress.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a popular choice for many businesses looking for an SEO-friendly platform. It initially started as a blogging platform for writers but has developed into something much larger since its creation in 2003.

Thanks to the many plug-ins WordPress offers, people find it easier to rank on search engines. However, too many plug-ins and attachments can affect site speed so mastering WordPress as a platform can take time.

When thinking of platforms for SEO, WordPress is a good place to start as it can scale with your business and offers fantastic customisation, making it one of the best e-commerce platforms for SEO.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is another hugely popular e-commerce website hosting platform. It’s not as large as Shopify but it does offer more features for free.

For example, BigCommerce does not charge a transaction fee, whereas Shopify does.

BigCommerce offers store creation, web hosting, marketing, security and search engine optimisation.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is another easy-to-use platform that’s great for e-commerce businesses.

The big selling point of Squarespace is its sleek designs that help to showcase your products. If your main priority is beautiful design and a wonderful user experience, Squarespace is a top choice.

Benefits of using Shopify for SEO efforts

When searching for the best e-commerce platforms, Shopify is an easy choice. There are many benefits to using the most popular e-commerce platform, and they include:

Hosting on a shared platform

Shopify offers web hosting on its own, making it easier for many businesses to get started. There is no programming or development skill required and businesses can choose a domain name with Shopify, rather than an external service.

In terms of bandwidth limits, Shopify does not have any. External web hosting services will charge a business if the bandwidth is exceeded, which essentially punishes a company for having lots of traffic.

Shopify’s servers can handle a lot of traffic, too. A business can take up to 4,000 transactional purchases at once with Shopify before any throttling occurs, covering 99.9% of websites on their platform.

Shopify is also quick and reliable all over the world as it uses a large network of servers called Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) making it fit for high volume and offers excellent site speed for desktop and mobile devices. But, Shopify also offers free, automatic updates to keep your service as good as possible for customers.

Shopify is friendly with search engines

The biggest benefit of using Shopify for search engine optimisation is how well it works with search engines.

You don’t need a huge Shopify SEO strategy to see excellent search engine results. Having a solid URL structure, including structured data on product listings, and using relevant keywords in your product and category content can produce great rankings.

You can use a free SEO tool like Google Analytics to track your website’s performance.

With Shopify, you’re able to edit all of the important aspects of a website’s SEO, including meta titles and descriptions.

Easy to use

As well as plenty of customisation options, Shopify is extremely easy to use. With a wide range of plug-ins available, you can easily build the website of your dreams.

With the easy-to-use SEO tools, it doesn’t take an enormous effort to start bringing in some organic traffic from search engines, compared to other platforms.

Shopify displays everything clearly, making it easy to add meta tags, titles and descriptions as well as offering a preview of what it would look like on search engine result pages (SERPs).

If your business has multiple team members, the ease at which Shopify can be used makes it simple for multiple people to get to grips quickly with the e-commerce platform.

Scalable from a free trial to Shopify Plus

Shopify’s scalability makes it easy for online stores to grow.

With free plug-ins that help with all aspects of Shopify SEO efforts, your team can quickly build something to be proud of.

If you’re a small business, you can scale up from the Shopify free trial to subscriptions that offer even more features for growing online stores.

Auto-generated robots.txt file

The robots.txt file tells search engine bots – also known as crawlers – which pages to request to view from your store.

Fortunately, your Shopify site comes with a built-in robots.txt file that’s perfect for SEO.

For people who aren’t skilled in the technical side of building an e-commerce website, Shopify makes it easy.

Pulls through schema to help Google understand the site

Another aspect of Shopify SEO that makes it the best e-commerce platform is how easy it is to ensure your website has the correct schema.

With plug-ins, Shopify can apply tags to all of your products without the hassle of having to go through every page manually.

Get help from Shopify SEO experts

If you’re interested in starting an e-commerce website on Shopify but you’re unsure of how to optimise it to perform well on search engine result pages, speak to us at Paramount Digital.

By choosing Paramount Digital as your Shopify SEO agency, you will gain access to a team of dedicated professionals who are both technical experts and strategic partners invested in the success of your business.

Don’t hesitate to send us an email at marketing@paramountdigital.co.uk or call us at 01744 747474.