Whether you’re using Shopify, WordPress, BigCommerce, or Magento, each platform has unique features and challenges that impact your site’s visibility in search results. From improving site speed and optimizing URLs to leveraging SEO-friendly themes and plugins, this guide breaks down key SEO tips for each platform to help you boost rankings, drive organic traffic, and enhance user experience.
WordPress SEO Tips
- Yoast is a helpful plugin for WordPress sites, allowing you to optimize your content, metadata, and XML sitemaps with ease.
- Optimize URLs (permalinks) with the post name.
- Improve your site’s load times by using a caching plugin and/or a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Remember to optimize your images as much as you can before uploading. We like convertio.co to change images to .webp and compressnow.com to make file sizes smaller.
- WordPress is one of the most content-friendly platforms. Make sure you’re taking advantage of the WYSIWYG and all it has to offer, from easily adding internal links to choosing heading tags to match the structure of your page.
Shopify SEO Tips
- Shopify provides themes and apps to help your website. Some of these are more SEO friendly than others, especially in terms of load times, so be sure to research them prior to adding them to your site.
- XML sitemaps on Shopify are auto generated and cannot be manually edited. Keep this in mind as you’re adding and removing pages.
- Shopify has built-in redirect functionality for both single URLs and bulk URLs, which is a great feature.
- Shopify adds /collections/ and /products/ to respective pages on your site that you cannot change, so we recommend making your collection and product URLs concise and with relevant keywords, so they don’t get too wordy or jumbled.
- Manually optimize any auto-generated metadata (like product and collections pages) to improve keyword rankings.
- Once you compress your images, some Shopify themes make it easy to enable lazy loading to further increase site speed. Read more about lazy loading on Shopify here: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/lazy-loading
BigCommerce SEO Tips
- BigCommerce has lots of themes and APIs that work well with it. Be sure to test them for responsiveness and load time, though.
- URLs are dynamic by default, but editable manually. We recommend adjusting URLs to be keyword-friendly, as needed.
- If you change a URL, be sure to set up a 301 redirect because this doesn’t happen automatically.
- Your robots.txt file is configurable on BigCommerce, so use it when you need to.
- Make sure you have a robust development team who can help make changes.
Magento SEO Tips
- Site speed is often one of the biggest drawbacks of Magento sites. If your website is on Magento, enable caching, use a fast hosting provider, and compress your images as much as possible prior to uploading.
- Your XML sitemap and robots.txt files are configurable on Magento, so use them to help Googlebot understand what’s most important on your site and what should be left out of crawling and indexing.
- Magento makes Schema markup additions easy, so make sure you’re enabling structured data on products, reviews, and pricing to give your site a leg up in SERPs.
- Enable canonical tags to help Googlebot better understand how your pages are connected, and which ones are most important for SEO.
Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to improve visibility and drive organic traffic. Some of the most important optimizations you can make include compressing images, speeding up load times, using your XML sitemap and robots.txt files appropriately, and making sure URLs are clean and easy to read. No matter which platform you use, there are many resources, like official platform documentation and community forums, to help you implement best practices and start your journey to SEO success.
Looking for additional ways to improve your SEO? Book a meeting with our team to see how we can help.
