Why is SEO Important for Ecommerce? Well, 44% of every online purchase begins with an online search (IPSOS 2012). Making sure that your products can be found easily on search engines such as Google can be the difference between an ecommerce business that fails or succeeds. A large part of effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to ensure that the pages of your site appear as relevant as possible to a search engine for the search terms (keywords) that your prospective customers are using.
Many business owners may be unaware that their Ecommerce platform (some of them discussed here) might not be equipped with the features needed to make their online shop search-engine-friendly. Some ecommerce software offers only the most basic SEO features, some only at a premium cost while others do not offer them at all.
Example:
Let’s imagine that you are a retailer of men’s vintage-style clothing. One of your products is a 70’s-style, blue velvet jacket that you have named “Bradley”. You list the product in your ecommerce website as a “Bradley Jacket”.
Because of the limitations of your store-builder software, this name might automatically become the title of the product page, the page URL and the name of the product in your site’s navigation.
Your prospective customers however are not searching for a “Bradley Jacket”. They are far more likely to be searching for “70’s style velvet jackets”. Realising this, you now want to modify the page title to read “70s Style Velvet Jacket – Bradley | VeryVintage.com”.
With some ecommerce platforms you have no way to over-ride this or are forced to pay extra to have this feature.
Unfortunately, many business owners don’t become aware of this limitation until long after they have invested significant time uploading product images, product descriptions and stock information.
With that in mind, I conducted an evaluation of the most popular shopping cart platforms assessed purely on the basis of their SEO capabilities.
