12 Best Ecommerce Platforms For SEO (to Actually Rank Fast)

You need the right ecommerce platform to build your online store’s website and support your SEO strategy. Manually optimizing your site for search engines can be a hassle, which is why finding an ecommerce platform to do this automatically is so crucial to business owners. 

The best ecommerce platforms for SEO have built-in tools to optimize your site for search engines, fast loading speeds, and easy design tools that don’t require a large learning curve.  

Best Ecommerce Platforms For SEO

1. Shopify

The best ecommerce platform for SEO is Shopify, which continues to be one of the most-used platforms among ecommerce stores. Businesses of any size can use Shopify, which users like because of the built-in SEO features and intuitive interface that is easy to navigate. 

Shopify offers all essential features for ecommerce SEO, including their abandoned cart recovery system, alt text with images, multi-language support, and other capabilities. 

Some of the internal linking structures will require a web developer’s help, as their SEO capabilities can be quite advanced, though this is a great benefit to users. 

What We Liked

  • It’s easy to get started on the platform with its simple-to-use interface 
  • You can add an unlimited number of products with any plan
  • Many built-in SEO features for users to optimize their sites
  • The blogging ecommerce SEO feature is easy-to-use 
  • There are fast loading speeds for sites, which is good for SEO ranking

What Can Be Improved

  • Shopify functionalities could get complex and require users to get professional help
  • The transaction fees that users pay add up quickly
  • Cannot edit robots.txt files

Pricing: Starting at $29/month
Free Tier: Yes, 3-day trial
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

2. WooCommerce

This is one of the best ecommerce SEO platform options that is open-source for online sellers. 

Millions of stores utilize this platform and enjoy its SEO tools for an online shop, including its simple interface, built-in sitemap that translates well with Google’s index, and customizable title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs to optimize your site for certain keywords. 

Users like that WooCommerce is always updating its site for new features and improvements that help you boost your SEO ranking. Plus, it can be seamlessly integrated with your existing WordPress site for even more SEO help. 

What We Liked

  • There are flexible and secure payment gateways using 140 region-specific platforms
  • WooCommerce is an open-source platform and developer-friendly 
  • Users can easily integrate WooCommerce with their existing WordPress account
  • There are no fees on transactions aside from what the payment provider charges
  • There is a good amount of documentation for developers to learn

What Can Be Improved 

  • It does require some level of technical expertise to use their SEO tools for ecommerce
  • Specific only to WordPress sites
  • The cost to add multiple plug-ins can add up quickly

Pricing: Free open-source platform, though you’ll pay for domains, WordPress hosting, SSL certificate, plug-ins, etc.
Free Tier: Yes, free as an open-source platform
Difficulty Level: For intermediate skill level

3. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a great SEO platform for an ecommerce site, helping businesses manage their online stores with features that are good for SEO. 

Some of the main features of BigCommerce that help a store’s SEO ranking include abandoned cart recovery, product recommendations, and a blogging platform. The URLs provided on the platform are customizable and SEO-friendly, in addition to the automatic 301 redirects that prevent the page from having broken pages, which could detract from SEO scoring. 

BigCommerce even offers an app store where you can purchase additional solutions like email marketing and social media tools. 

This program continues to be one of the best SEO ecommerce platform, especially for sellers with a larger budget. 

What We Liked

  • There is good flexibility on the platform and it’s easy for a business to scale up
  • Great back-office integrations 
  • Good levels of security to protect sensitive customer data
  • Uptime is 99.9% so sites are rarely down
  • Easy integration with WordPress, even better for SEO

What Can Be Improved

  • Plans are a little more expensive than the competitors 
  • There is a limit on the annual sales that ecommerce stores can bring in 
  • Limited number of themes and typefaces in the free version

Pricing: Starting at $29.95/month
Free Tier: Yes, 15-day trial
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

4. Wix

Wix offers users many different ways to boost online shop SEO optimization, aside from the easy set-up and templates to create the site in the first place. 

Within Wix, you can edit the title of your website and the meta tags, with an additional built-in keyword research tool to identify the best keywords for your online store to implement. Most of the time, this must be done manually on other sites, not within the web creation site itself. 

You can also create custom URLs for your website and blog posts on Wix, which is another way to boost your SEO. 

What We Liked

  • Hundreds of free online store templates to choose from
  • Bulk 301 redirects in order to prevent broken links from tanking SEO scores
  • Users can get instant Google indexing of their site for better SEO ranking
  • Multi-language support with SEO optimization
  • Unlimited customization of the site with APIs

What Can Be Improved

  • Mobile sites may not be fully-responsive which could detract from SEO
  • Checkout does not support multi-currency, though this can be displayed for prices
  • Once you’ve built a site on Wix, you can’t change the template

Pricing: Starting at $16/month
Free Tier: Yes, 14-day trial
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

5. Squarespace

This is another option for the best SEO ecommerce platform, with plenty of built-in features that help stores optimize their search engine optimization. 

There are helpful SEO features to bring in more traffic to your site including the easy addition of product pages, control over how your site appears in SERPs, auto-generating sitemaps, meta tags, and other features. Plus, it’s easy to make a mobile-friendly version of your site with Squarespace, which helps your SEO ranking further. 

Squarespace has easy-to-use templates that can help you get started and manage your online store, so anyone can utilize this platform to improve the SEO for ecommerce store websites–not just advanced users. 

What We Liked

  • As a Squarespace user, you get free Google Ads credit
  • Users can enjoy 24/7 support from Squarespace’s team
  • There are great SEO features built-in to the site to help with ranking
  • Fully-managed cloud website hosting
  • All users receive a free custom domain with a plan purchase

What Can Be Improved

  • There is no phone support for users 
  • No autosave feature when customizing how your site looks
  • Page loading speed isn’t as high as some of the other best ecommerce for SEO options

Pricing: Starting at $23/month
Free Tier: Yes, 14-day trial
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

6. Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)

Adobe Commerce is the best online store platform for SEO for sellers who utilize other Adobe products. 

This platform has been around for a long time, formerly known as Magneto, and gives users access to other Adobe tools like Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, all of which are great for SEO optimization for an ecommerce store. 

Many features are out-of-the-box and simple to implement, like product categorization and management, shopping cart functionality, order management, and others. 

It’s a good fit for larger enterprises given the developer features and scalability, though any business can optimize its SEO with URL customization, meta tags, and 301 redirects for broken links.

What We Liked 

  • There are great integrated SEO tools for ecommerce stores
  • Customer support response times are very quick
  • Users can access increased customization with extensions and third-party integrations
  • Gives users access to other Adobe products like Creative Cloud, Analytics, and others
  • Easy to optimize the mobile site for customers

What Can Be Improved

  • The platform is pretty technical so there can be a learning curve
  • On the more expensive side compared to other ecommerce SEO platform options
  • The interface isn’t very user-friendly

Pricing: Must contact the team for pricing details
Free Tier: N/A
Difficulty Level: For advanced technical users

7. Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart)

Many view Shift4Shop as the best online shop platform for SEO because of its large range of features that can help you score higher in search engine results pages. 

When using this platform, it will automatically create sitemaps for you that help search engines index your site easily, with other built-in support options for SEO like Yoast SEO. 

The platform also has detailed analytics on your SEO rankings so you can track progress and adjust the SEO on your site to improve your strategy over time. 

Shift4Shop offers the best SEO options for ecommerce, which online store owners can use to their advantage. 

What We Liked

  • There is unlimited bandwidth, users, and products included with all plans
  • AI-powered fraud protection tools for sites
  • Users of Shift4Shop will receive a free SSL certificate 
  • All users get a dedicated support team for direct help
  • Users don’t pay any additional transaction fees like on other platforms

What Can Be Improved 

  • Some users find the features too complex for beginner use
  • Only some will qualify for the free plan, and the paid options aren’t the most affordable
  • The interface isn’t very user friendly and can be overwhelming

Pricing: Contact the team for details on the paid plan
Free Tier: Yes, many will qualify for the free plan
Difficulty Level: For intermediate/advanced users

8. Weebly

Weebly is a platform for ecommerce stores to build their websites and boost their SEO ranking to bring in more traffic. 

There are many features of Weebly that can help you improve your SEO strategy, including meta descriptions and titles, header and footer codes, a custom HTML element, an automatic sitemap, and more. All of these features allow business owners to optimize their sites to show up higher in search engine results. 

Additionally, the site loading speed and bandwidth that you’ll get from having a Weebly site are very competitive with other sites and will improve your SEO ranking even further. 

What We Liked

  • You can easily target each page for keywords to boost your SEO score
  • Users can attach a custom domain name to any Weebly site
  • Set up automatic 301 redirects to prevent broken pages 
  • Great design flexibility with the provided templates
  • Easy to manage your site from the Weebly mobile app

What Can Be Improved

  • Can’t group products or services on the page, they’re all the same level
  • There are limited link attributes available on Weebly
  • No support for multi-language websites

Pricing: Starting at $0/month
Free Tier: Yes, available for basic use
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

9. Volusion

This is a top ecommerce SEO tool that has been around for many years. It was founded in 1999 and has helped stores build up their SEO strategy with a user-friendly platform that is simple and easy to use. 

Many view it as one of the easiest SEO platforms to utilize, supported by the fact that they offer many built-in SEO features and flexible coding. 

Aside from Volusion’s dedication to customer satisfaction for over two decades now, users like their helpful features for SEO optimization like abandoned cart reports, SEO-managed category pages and sub-categories, HTML and CSS editor, and advanced site search tools. 

What We Liked

  • Users enjoy a great customer support team eager to help
  • Customers enjoy a seamless checkout experience with Volusion
  • 99.9% uptime, which helps out SEO optimization even further
  • Users can set custom firewall settings to meet their security goals
  • Receive access to in-house ecommerce SEO and marketing experts

What Can Be Improved

  • Propriety APIs can limit the agencies who can work with the platform
  • There is no blog feature that can be integrated, only newsletters
  • Some users note that the features appear a little outdated compared to others

Pricing: Starting at $35/month
Free Tier: Yes, 14-day trial
Difficulty Level: Good for beginners

Essential Ecommerce SEO Features

Custom Navigation Links

Navigation links on a website are one of the main ways that search engines find and detect the content of your site. You want to be able to customize your navigation links to target keywords and show what your site contains. 

Custom Headings

The headings on your site are a crucial ecommerce SEO factor because they tell search engines what the content of your site is so they can rank and show it to searchers. 

Custom URLs

If you customize a URL and make it shorter and easier to read, it’s better for your search engine optimization and it’s more user friendly. 

Custom Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions tell search engines what your webpage or content is about. The clearer it is, the better chance search engines have to rank your page as an answer to search queries. 

Custom Image ALT Tags

These elements help with ecommerce SEO optimization because they give context to what the image displays, allowing search engine crawlers to index the image properly. 

Custom Canonical Tags

Canonical tags will prevent site issues when there is duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs. This will show search engines which version you want to appear in the results. 

Custom 301 Redirects

These connect an old page to a new page so there are no breaks in navigation and still help search engines and site visitors seamlessly navigate your site. 

Structured Data

This SEO element helps search engines understand what your web pages, products, and overall website are about. This helps them rank and assess your content. 

Automatic Sitemaps

An automatically generated sitemap will list your site’s most important pages, which will help search engine crawlers prioritize how they view and index your website. 

Builtin Blog

Having a built-in blog on your website allows you to create content to target keywords and answer common search queries from potential customers. 

Robots.txt Access

A robots.txt file informs search engines where they can and can’t go on your site so you can lock out certain pages or content you don’t want search engines to see or index. 

Log Files Access

Log files are unique in that they show search engines’ interactions and behavior with your website. This can give you great data to further optimize your website content. 

How to Pick an Ecommerce Platform? 

The main thing to consider when choosing an ecommerce platform is how easy it is to use and set up, though there are other things you should also keep in mind. 

Ease of Use

If an ecommerce platform has a simple and user-friendly interface, it will likely have a little learning curve that won’t get in the way of setting up your site and taking customer orders. 

Look for platforms that are good for beginners, and won’t require you to hire or consult with a developer in order to get started. 

Payment Options 

The ecommerce platform should also support multiple payment methods. This will help you capture more sales, as you won’t have to turn away customers as much when you have more than one way for them to pay. 

You don’t have to accept every payment method out there, but stick to the main ones for best results like debit and credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. 

Customer Support

A good ecommerce platform will have convenient customer support options to help you with any questions or issues you’re having with your site. Any time you’re having a problem with your site, you want to know that you’ll be able to quickly get solutions. 

Many platforms have gone away with phone support, though this can be very helpful to site owners. 

Features

There are many important features that an ecommerce platform should have, including built-in SEO tools, inventory management tools, simple-to-use design templates, data analytics, payment support, and more. 

These are all crucial to setting up a successful ecommerce store and tracking your progress and performance going forward. 

Scalability

You want to use an ecommerce platform that will be able to grow and scale with your business. Look out for any platforms that will cost a lot more if you have to move up to the next-tier plan. 

Overall, you want to use a site that won’t hinder your growth and will be able to support your back-end operations as your site brings in more traffic and does more sales volume.

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