You won’t get very far as an eCommerce business without a solid eCommerce SEO and eCommerce marketing strategy.
And you can't implement any SEO strategy, like internal linking, without the right tech. We’re talking about the online marketplace or platform you sell with and the SEO tools you use.
What you choose when it comes to these makes a huge impact on your ability to execute an SEO plan. Because they vary in quality and have different features.
The right platform or eCommerce tools for one business may not be the best for another.
That’s why we rounded up the ones we think are the best, along with some helpful information about them and SEO terms in general.
Let’s get to it!
Best eCommerce Platform for SEO
BlueCart’s digital storefront is one of the best eCommerce websites and top eCommerce platforms for small and medium businesses. And one of the great things about it is that it serves both D2C sales and B2B sales (see what is B2B sales and D2C meaning.) Familiarize yourself with DTC marketing, direct to consumer business model, and the best DTC brands to better understand.
Here’s how BlueCart Digital Storefront helps with eCommerce SEO right out of the gate:
- Designed and fully-optimized for all mobile devices so your customers can easily shop like an online line sheet
- Optimized and editable meta information on product and category pages (read more about SEO for eCommerce product pages)
- Product-specific Schema markup and structural data
- Unique, optimized URL structure
- Editable alt text for images
You can read more about Schema and structural data in our technical SEO for eCommerce post.
Even though we’re a bit biased, BlueCart Digital Storefront is, in fact, one of the best values out there for SMBs looking for a reliable, SEO-optimized, affordable eCommerce platform. It's even great for those interested in coffee eCommerce and other eCommerce business ideas.
And because we’re biased, we won’t get into what other platforms can—or more importantly, can’t—do.
Best SEO Tools for eCommerce
Once you get up and running with an eCommerce platform for SEO, your work continues. Consistent monitoring and maintenance using SEO tools is a part of every successful eCommerce SEO strategy.
The number of people searching for a given keyword changes. New keywords and new competitors show up. User behavior and expectations change. New opportunities to attract people on Google are always appearing—whether it means publishing new SEO content for eCommerce or changing existing content.
The following tools will help. We believe that because we use each of these tools, every day.
SEMrush
SEMrush is our go-to SEO tool at BlueCart. Starting at around $100 per month, it allows you to do infinite keyword research, along with the ability to:
- Track up to 5,000 keywords
- Crawl up to 1,000,000 web pages per month
- Generate ideas for content optimization, creation, and marketing
- Do thorough competitive research
- Run site audits to identify basic technical SEO opportunities
- Manage and execute link building campaigns, which are a big part of off-page SEO for eCommerce
A free trial for SEMrush exists, so try it out. And if you’re not keen on a paid SEO tool or a free trial, check out UberSuggest. It’s a keyword research tool that provides a limited number of free searches per day, per account.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is the be-all, end-all of technical SEO tools. It crawls your website, audits for common SEO issues, and extracts all the data you need to take action.
Here’s what it’ll do:
- Find broken links
- Audit all site redirects
- Analyze page titles and meta information
- Scan for duplicate content
- Review your robots.txt file along with canonicals and other URL directives
- Creates XML sitemaps
- Helps visualize overall site architecture
Among other things. There is a free version which has limited features and has a maximum 500 URLs that can be crawled. Note that a web page is an individual URL. This doesn’t mean you can crawl 500 sites.
Yoast
Yoast SEO is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin, available in both free and premium versions.
It helps eCommerce companies:
- Learn about SEO. You get access to Yoast’s industry-leading SEO education.
- Do keyword research and optimize existing keywords
- Auto-generate Schema markup
- Monitor pages for outdated and duplicate content
- Check all content for readability
- Set up internal linking profiles
- Discover new content to write about
- Handle all URL redirects
Yoast’s selling point is that it keeps the “technical stuff in the background,” which means everything regarding sitemaps, robots.txt, and URL structure is on autopilot.
If you have a WordPress site, even if you use WooCommerce, installing Yoast is a no-brainer. It’s one of the best ways for WordPress users to unlock all the benefits of eCommerce SEO.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a free “search listening” tool. There are around 3 billion Google searches every day. And about 20% of those are brand new. No one has ever typed them into Google before.
That’s 60 million queries that keyword research tools can’t find … because they don’t exist yet. But that doesn't mean you can’t target them with your on page SEO for eCommerce. Because you can target the intent behind them. And that’s what Answer the Public helps you with.
Answer the Public scrapes all the autocomplete data from search engines and provides you with intuitive visualizations around all the related phrases and questions related to a keyword you input. The more you study the keywords related to your keyword, the more you’ll understand the intent behind entire sets of keywords.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool every commercial website should use. Once you register a domain with GSC, you’ll be able to leverage the power of Google in an interface designed specifically to improve search performance.
GSC measures your site’s traffic from Google and its performance. Crucially, it also shows you which queries bring users to your site, and you can analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and ranking positions. If it finds any issues, you’ll be alerted immediately and made aware of what URLs are affected.
It’s also useful to expedite sitemap crawling and new URL indexing, both of which can be submitted to GSC. That ensures Google has the most up-to-date view of your site.
And finally, it shines a light on how Google sees your pages with it’s URL Inspection tool. It provides deep crawl, index, and serving information about your pages directly from Google.
Google itself may be the most underlooked SEO tool for eCommerce sites out there. It’s obviously free and it offers you three invaluable tools.
Google Autocomplete
Google autocomplete does what it says right on the tin. It shows you a list of suggested searches based on what’s been typed in the search box so far.
While how many times these searches are types per month isn’t available, it’s nevertheless a free and easy way to dig up related keywords.
Google Searches Related to
SEO Platforms & Tools for eCommerce Sites
If you have literally no budget, you can actually get away with some decent solutions for eCommerce SEO platforms and SEO tools.
That said, if you’re serious about growing your business, you have to invest in SEO.
65% of eCommerce traffic comes from search engines. If you’re not competing for that traffic, you’re at a massive and obvious disadvantage. This is particularly true if you're competing with some of the best direct to consumer brands.
Taking your presence in Google and other search engines seriously is the first step. Learn about eCommerce SEO platforms and eCommerce SEO tools is the second one.
And a smart third step is using BlueCart Digital Storefront. It’s a simple, all-in-one SEO-ready, eCommerce platform that takes care of the eCommerce website design and structure, types of menus, payment processing software, and more. All so you can focus on what you do best: running a business. This includes running a wholesale business. Look into how to run a wholesale distribution business for more clarification.
BlueCart is a member of the SEMrush affiliate program and makes commission through advertising and linking to SEMrush.com.