What is the best e-commerce platform for SEO?

One question that I get asked a lot is about the best e-commerce platform for SEO. If you’re running an online business, which platform will help you the most in terms of raising your Google rankings?

Like a lot of questions, the answer to this one is “it depends”. Depending on what you want out of your SEO, different sites are the best for different features. Here are some of the basic criteria we look at when deciding on a platform:

Easy editing

If you want to tweak your SEO to improve rankings, you’ll need the ability to edit page titles, headings, URLs and even filenames. WordPress with WooCommerce and Magento do this well, but with some other platforms you might have to resort to doing it programmatically.

Creating redirects

Any of the open-source platforms are good candidates for this. On the other hand, avoid anything with a drag and drop interface! Don’t even use drag and drop for a regular informational website unless you don’t want it to rank at all.

Changing linkage

It’s crucial to be able to add noindex tags, nofollow tags and canonicals to your pages, and it’s surprising how many platforms make this more difficult than they have to.

Speed

This might be the most important criteria; it can certainly be a deal breaker. Run speed checks on existing sites on a variety of systems to see which ones work the best for you. The Google Page Speed Tool or webpagetest.org are simple tools for doing this. When sites are faster, Googlebots will crawl them more often, and this translates into higher rankings for your site.

For more information, visit the StewArt website.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.