Eight SEO Attributes for eCommerce Platforms SEO features to look for in an eCommerce platform It’s no secret that search engines can have a major impact on your online business. Many customers start their buying process by performing a search for the item(s) that they are looking to purchase. Using SEO services to help ensure that your site or product listing ranks high in the search results helps your company become a contender for their business. While some may think SEO optimization starts with your marketing experts creating a strategy, optimizing your site for search engines starts the moment that you choose your software and platforms. Choosing an eCommerce platform that was built with SEO in mind helps get your site started on the right foot. Below are eight SEO essentials to look for when selecting your eCommerce platform. Custom Categories, Subcategories, and Meta Data Your eCommerce platform should allow you to easily create and edit your own custom categories, subcategories, and metadata. Instead of just having URLs, categories, descriptions, and alt tags automatically filled in for you or not having them at all; you should have the option of editing, adding, or renaming each to best fit what you're selling. Custom Landing Pages The eCommerce platform that you select needs to allow you to create custom landing pages for internet searchers. One of the best ways to put this feature to use for SEO is to use combinations of the tags you created for products to create customized landing pages that display a particular set of products. For example, if you run a clothing eCommerce store, you could apply the tag "spring" to various relevant products. Then, you can create a custom landing page to display those products that is more likely to have your store rank when someone does a web search for "spring clothes". The page will keyword rich and customized to fit exactly what the searchers are looking for. 301 Redirects Do 301 redirects hurt SEO? It's a vital question you can't ignore. Your platform also needs to allow you to set up 301 redirects for pages that are deleted, which could be a result of discontinued products among other things. The 301 redirect makes it possible for you to redirect the page visitor as well as its ranking power to a new or different page. If a certain product is discontinued, redirecting to the new version of the product instead of displaying a broken page can make a huge difference in keeping visitors on your site and making conversions. Make sure to address all 301 SEO problems in order to appeal to search engines. Block Robots from Crawling Certain Pages Some pages on your eCommerce site may not be search engine friendly and weren’t designed to be that way because of their intended use. In these cases, you need an eCommerce platform that enables you to block the search engines from indexing those certain pages. Keep in mind that just because a page is not linked to your site does not mean that Google won't index it. These pages might hurt your rankings. Responsive Web Design Search engines are continually giving more credit to web pages that are mobile-friendly. Google specifically made recent changes that give high priority to mobile searches to mobile-friendly sites. Choosing an eCommerce platform that is mobile-friendly or has a responsive web design feature can help your eCommerce site improve its ranking. Integrated blog Many eCommerce sites are composed mainly of product listing pages and don’t contain detailed, in-depth content, something which is valued by search engines. Having a blog that is integrated with your eCommerce site helps bring your site more views and increase its search engine ranking. Finding an eCommerce platform that enables you to have an integrated blog under the same site can improve how search engines rank your site. This is a great place to put customized workflows to use, creating permissions on your site for authors and editors. When an author submits an article, an editor is automatically notified. This makes it so blog posts or articles must be approved before they go to the live site. XML Sitemap The eCommerce platform that you select should automatically generate an XML sitemap for your eCommerce site. An XML sitemap makes it easier for search engines to understand and crawl your site. Automatic generation of an XML sitemap saves your businesses the time and hassle of having to create and update one on your own. Optimized for Social Media Sharing Sharing content from your site on social media can also help improve your search engine ranking. Selecting an eCommerce platform that makes it easy for you to share site pages and content on your business’s social media accounts can help your rankings while greatly expanding your reach. Clarity Can Help With almost a decade of experience helping our clients improve their eCommerce sites and offerings, Clarity is no stranger to SEO. Our team of experts has helped numerous clients choose eCommerce platforms with excellent SEO features that would work well for their businesses. We also help further develop their SEO strategies and improve search rankings. To find out more about how Clarity's SEO experts can help your eCommerce business improve its SEO strategy, call or click to contact us today.