Like Magento and BigCommerce, Shopify is a popular marketplace that comes with a lot of attractive features and functionalities. The cutthroat competition among retailers, wholesalers, and distributors has made it necessary to leverage the digital landscape and enhance its scalability. Certainly, Shopify is one of the best eCommerce marketplaces to develop the best content management system (CMS). Along with this, it is also known as the best CMS for SEO.
SEMrush reported that well-optimized Shopify e-stores experienced a 45% increase in organic traffic within six months. Why it is so—let’s find out below.
Shopify Is the Best CMS for SEO—Here is Why?
This eCommerce development platform enables merchants to build robust online stores. Its ready-to-use attributes combine with features to design the best CMS for SEO. Let’s understand why and how it is best.
SEO-Friendly Structure
Many eCommerce development companies embrace it for its SEO integrity. This platform provides neat and clean HTML coding in the background to make it responsive. This feature makes it easily able to get crawled and indexed in search engines. And one of the leading engines (Google) bots effortlessly gets into this online store to index, and hence, the page starts ranking quickly. However, it is possible if the website fulfills other SEO requirements too, like user-friendly content, glitch-free navigation, quality backlinks, etc.
Overall, its web design automatically lives up to the expectation of Google, which is to cater to mobile-first indexing design. With it, this platform allows developers to create the mobile version of the website for laser-fast indexing and online visibility. In this regard, Statista came up with a discovery. It found that mobile devices accounted for 58.33% of global web traffic in 2023. And Shopify designs leverage responsive features, which enable them to perform well on both desktop and mobile devices.
Customizable Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions play pivotal roles in SEO. These two key aspects help in understanding the context of the content to Google. And this is not it. They also encourage intended users to click, which thereby increases click-through rates from SERPs. It means that it enables sellers or merchants to effortlessly customize these tags and metadata for each page, product, or post. With this customization ability, businesses can easily manipulate their content as to how it should appear in search results according to SEO guidelines.
In a nutshell, eStorefront owners can easily integrate target keywords in the title and description to make it more compelling and clickable. This marketplace has inbuilt features that ensure effortless optimization of various web elements so that non-technical users can also adeptly implement basic SEO best practices.
Fast Loading Speed
Website speed is a crucial factor in terms of SEO and user experience. The update called Core Web Vitals clearly emphasized page speed as a crucial ranking factor. For sure, a faster-loading website can easily increase SEO rankings and conversion rates. Considering the Google finding, 53% of mobile users skin web journey if it takes 3 or more seconds to load.
Interestingly, Shopify is favored for being able to serve fast loading times. It has distributed servers that are optimized and available across the globe. This facility eliminates lags in loading Shopify websites. This positive side helps in retaining more visitors, out of which many convert into consumers. Overall, the way this platform ensures optimal web performance, many eCommerce development companies and even e-sellers prefer it to deliver a satisfied user experience and leverage SEO benefits.
Automatic Sitemap Generation
A sitemap presents an overview of all web pages, which search engines appreciate. Their bots find it easy to crawl and index websites more effectively. Unlike Etsy, which does not provide any sitemap, this marketplace automatically designs an XML sitemap so that the web developer or designer does not have to struggle to design it.
Also, search engines reward websites with sitemaps with easy indexing and visibility. It is particularly incredible for larger eCommerce shopfronts that have thousands of product pages. Whenever they create new product pages, the website automatically includes them in the map. This feature improves the likelihood of those pages being indexed quickly in search engines.
SSL Certificates and Secure Hosting
SSL certificate is basically associated with the security of the website. Also, it is an essential guideline of Google that secure websites (prefixing with HTTPS) are prioritized for a high ranking over non-secure websites. And Shopify provides this security without paying an extra cost. This SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, certificate actually guarantees no cases of data loss or stealing through encryption. This feature ensures that the website content remains secure and genuine for users who trust and revisit it over and over. These revisits attract more customers and top SERP rankings.
A study by GlobalSign revealed that 84% of users skip their web journeys in the middle if they find that the website is insecure. Undoubtedly, Shopify’s built-in SSL and secure hosting attract eCommerce development companies to prefer it over others. It is simply because its security shows positive signs to users to rely and retain for more trusted results.
Optimized URL Structures
URLs are vital, and their vitality can be experienced when any of the top-ranking pages’ URL is broken. It completely pauses the influx of web traffic. Planning and creating SEO-friendly URLs require a deep understanding of the guidelines. Also, it must reflect what the content is all about. Integrating the main target keyword into it is a part of SEO strategies. It guides search engines and users to quickly get an idea about the topic or its context.
Shopify enables users to create clean and descriptive URLs, whose significance and utility can be enhanced by including relevant keywords. It informs search engines that the webpage is relevant. Its structure appears like this: www.example.com/products/product-name, which consists of the product category and name. And if users are intended, they won’t think twice to click after seeing its URL structure.
Built-In Blogging Functionality
In SEO, content needs the most attention. It can be the most effective traffic-pulling strategy. For sure, integrating long-tail keywords and valuable information (which resonate with the pain point or intent of potential customers) can be easily implemented in its built-in blogging functionality. So, merchants can create and publish fully optimized blog content directly from this platform.
HubSpot revealed that companies posting blogs attract 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links as compared to those who don’t post. This marketplace has an integrated blog section that is easy to use and leverages customized and sale-specific content marketing strategy. Besides, it has features to optimize blogs, and their internal links, and attract backlinks. These are all crucial SEO factors that jointly contribute to search rankings.
SEO Apps and Integrations
Shopify comes with many SEO-friendly apps and integrations that can further help in driving online traffic and sales. Some popular SEO apps on this marketplace include the following:
- Plug in SEO: This integration helps in getting SEO insights and also provides recommendations.
- SEO Image Optimiser: It minimizes the optimization efforts by automatically integrating alt tags and filenames with images.
- Yoast SEO: This SEO guideline provides app guides on how to optimize on-page SEO elements like alt tags, H1, H2 tags, meta tags, etc.
These are some of the most impressive apps that can build an incredible experience for eCommerce companies and stakeholders. With these apps and integrations, optimizing content, images, and local SEO adjustments won’t seem like an uphill battle. That’s why, Shopify is the best CMS for SEO.
Conclusion
Businesses yearning for online visibility and more organic traffic can prefer Shopify as the best CMS for SEO. It comes with SEO-friendly customization abilities like tailoring meta tags, fast loading speeds, automatic sitemap generation, secure hosting, and more for an ideal eCommerce website. With these many features in place, sellers can anticipate a boost in their web pages’ ranking consistently.