Are Your eCommerce Web Design Solutions Search Engine Friendly?

Who doesn’t want their website or eCommerce store to appear on the top page of Google search results? Every single person does. And everyone is up against the stiff competition. Fortunately, several methods may be employed to enable any eCommerce firm to compete for the desired first-page client attention. Without SEO, there is no sustainable method to reach the first page of Google in 2021. Search Engine Optimization is a young field that, when done appropriately, may catapult a small firm into the limelight sooner rather than later. However, if neglected, it might lead to the extinction of an already successful notion. As a result, it becomes critical for you to prioritize SEO and pick SEO-friendly CMS development services.

What is an Ecommerce Content Management System?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a platform that enables online merchants to create, update, and distribute digital website content without the need for coding. Additionally, it allows users to customize the online store’s appearance and feel by altering the layout of product pages, adding advertising banners, or simply building new page sections to better market items.

E-commerce solutions help to manage items and sell them straight through the website. Some eCommerce platforms also function as Content Management Systems. It is a user-friendly framework that administers all the accountabilities of an online business.

When it comes to sifting through the available alternatives, eCommerce web design solutions fall into two broad categories:

• SaaS Content Management System

A hosted SaaS CMS is a cloud-based platform for eCommerce businesses that do not require a dedicated server. You pay a membership fee, and in exchange, the software vendor manages all downloads, updates, and data storage for you. Typically, the company also provides customer assistance. Shopify, Squarespace, and others are all examples of hosted content management systems. These examples function as both eCommerce systems and CMSs.

• Open Source Content Management System

Users have complete control over the operation of their websites when using open source eCommerce web solutions. Open-source software may be downloaded for free and is frequently self-hosted. It means that eCommerce store owners are responsible for hosting and maintaining the server and updating any new software on their eCommerce platform.

While some open source E-commerce Development Services provide cloud hosting, they differ from SaaS in that management remains the responsibility of the website owner’s duty. WooCommerce and Magento are two well-known examples of open source eCommerce platforms.

Is a Separate eCommerce Web Design Solution Necessary?

You may have never considered the possibility of having a separate CMS before now. However, it’s critical to note that not all eCommerce stores will require a Content Management System. Evaluating your content strategies is the best way to determine whether your online business requires a different CMS.

Ecommerce sites that generate fresh material regularly — whether for the weblog or as part of the site and products pages — will benefit the most from the versatility of a CMS. Several of the benefits that a well-chosen Content Management System may bring.

• Easily Create and Update Content

Are you uncomfortable with the idea of changing content on your website? One of the best aspects of the current CMS is its ease of use, which does not need significant technical knowledge. It allows you or your team to handle all content and product changes autonomously, accelerating advertising campaigns and promotion strategies.

• Eliminate Dependency On Developers

Thriving e-commerce companies understand that exceeding consumer expectations drives revenue development. However, the speed and strength required to keep your website information relevant are not possible through an intermediary.

With a CMS that is convenient to use, you may minimize development work and update the eCommerce store yourself. Finally, not only will you save time, but you will also be able to invest your development money on other marketing efforts that will help drive your organization ahead. Win-win!

• Increase Your Reach Via Social Media

Social Media is the most successful marketing channel for organic lead generation, So content creation should be a top priority. By creating creative, informative content, you may increase your store’s exposure on Google (and other social media channels), attracting more visitors and increasing sales. That is how people now purchase!

A decent CMS enables you to maintain well-organized, shared, and easily accessible information. And all of this without a lot of backend tinkering.

• Facilitating Collaborative Work

Working in groups produces the best results. From editing to formatting to locating the appropriate graphic assets, creating high-quality content requires considerable effort. Facilitating team collaboration is critical for effective content development.

A well-chosen CMS may bring everyone together by allowing creators to interact directly inside the business and build store offers. It leads to more focused content, more efficient review procedures, and a better-optimized customer experience via SEO.

Features Required in an Ecommerce Web Design Solution

1. Search Engine Optimized

On-page SEO for eCommerce websites is all about determining the optimal location for your keywords. It’s a means of communicating with web spiders and ensuring that your website ranks well in search results. However, if you are not an SEO expert, have no fear – a decent eCommerce CMS will assist you in implementing optimal SEO techniques and optimizing your product pages.

2. Ease of User Experience (UX) Optimization

Shoppers in the modern day have high expectations from eCommerce websites. If you fail to establish a unified user experience, you will find that your visitors will quit your site before making a transaction. And, to make matters worse, they will not return.

Are you aware of the User Experience aspects to look for in an eCommerce CMS? Here is a couple of them listed below:

Numerous Design Possibilities

Each transaction is critical as clients move through their purchasing journey on your website. You should design, update, and manage the layout of information on every page of your business to provide a customized, pleasurable experience for your customers.

A simple-to-use CMS is critical for business owners who have little or no technical abilities. It enables you to easily alter the look and layout of your business in response to new market trends, celebratory events, and promotional events. Additionally, some CMS platforms will include a variety of connectors and plugins to assist store administrators in running store-wide campaigns and other marketing activities.

Mobile-Friendly Content

Mobile purchasing has become more obvious as the future of eCommerce. By 2021, it is anticipated to account for 69% of all online sales, creating a new opportunity for eCommerce merchants. Optimizing your store and content for smartphones must be at the forefront of your UX priority list if you don’t want to fall behind the mobile commerce curve.

In practice, this involves paying special attention to loading times, mobile navigation, the digital check-out process, as well as visual and other User Experience components that affect the consumer’s buying experience on smartphones. Furthermore, the CMS development services you pick should expedite the optimization process, allowing you to obtain greater conversion rates without writing customized code.

3. Simple to Operate

Depending on your development resources, you should search for a platform that is simple to set up and does not need a lengthy, laborious onboarding process. From regular updates and module integrations to page layout changes and search engine optimization, a CMS should allow eCommerce merchants to move quickly, experiment with new ideas, and improve the site’s user experience, irrespective of their technical proficiency.

4. Numerous Integrations

No CMS is flawless, it is an unavoidable fact. However, if you want a feature that is not included in the main CMS platform or just wish to leave your choices open in the future, consider how readily the web design solution communicates with third-party tools and plugins. In an ideal world, you’d want seamless interaction with your current tech stack, as well as the ability to add and activate plugins as needed. 

The integrations offered will also reflect the CMS’s popularity and API-friendliness, thus this is an important criterion to consider.

Why do E-commerce solutions need SEO?

Traffic Generate Sales and SEO Generates Traffic

The facts are unambiguous: regardless of whether a business is a scrappy start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, SEO is necessary to optimize an eCommerce organization’s profitability. Without employing SEO methods, merchants are leaving significant sums of money on the table. 

This concept is demonstrated by the fact that the great majority of eCommerce firms if they go into their Analytics Dashboard right now and check where the bulk of their purchases come from, would discover that organic search is at the top of the list.

If you believe this claim is false, there is a good probability you have been ignoring your search optimization responsibilities. The way customers study, find and purchase articles has changed dramatically due to technology, with web search being a critical component of the decision-making cycle.

SEO Can Help You Save Money on eCommerce

Does optimizing a website for superior search results cost money? Indeed, it does. Is SEO reasonably priced in comparison to other marketing strategies? Indeed, it is.

When comparing the expenses of SEO to those of other marketing strategies such as content marketing, PPC, media advertising, and similar modalities, there is just no comparison in terms of pricing. Moreover, despite the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements and PPC campaigns, these efforts often provide effects only for the duration of the campaign.

On the other hand, effective SEO implementation will continue to generate visitors and income for years after the campaign is launched. Also, investment in SEO will compound itself, providing results that generate additional results.

SEO’s Effects Are Sustainable, Making It An Excellent Investment

Search engine optimization produces focused, cost-effective, and quantifiable results – and they last. SEO does not have a week or months-long shelf life. When you stop paying for advertising, your traffic immediately decreases. SEO never stops, working night and day.

The long-term benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy are obvious. Unlike most other types of promotion, which require a new start each year, SEO develops itself to get better over time. You may build on your accomplishments from the previous year and continue expanding until you own your specialty and command the market.

In other situations, you may even take a vacation or focus on something else for a few days or weeks and return to discover that your SEO is still as successful as it was. Unlike sponsored advertising, the flow of consumers and sales will not halt when you apply the brakes. If you run out of money, you may pause your other advertisements and still reach your audience organically through search results.

SEO Establishes Credibility and Trust

The ultimate objective of SEO is to make it as easy as possible for search engine users to locate a website. When a site is included among the top results, it indicates to users that Google considers it reliable and trustworthy, implying that consumers should do the same. 

This corresponds to a repeating trend throughout this segment: the more visitors trust a website, the greater Google trusts it and elevates it in the SERPs, resulting in further users trusting the destination as a result of the positive feedback loop formed through exposure.

In the long term, this implies that eCommerce will likely profit more from SEO than from the majority of digital marketing methods by creating the authority that comes with good search optimization. However, SEO is a long game that requires dedication, perseverance, and a lot of effort.

The Best Ecommerce CMS and Website Design Solutions

1. WordPress

While WordPress is the industry’s most popular Content Management System, it is not an eCommerce platform in and of itself. The WooCommerce plugin is required to convert a WordPress website into an online store.

The open-source WooCommerce platform is extremely popular because of its vast variety of plugins and themes, the majority of which are offered for free. The beauty of these plugins is that they allow lacking features and functionality within the WooCommerce core functionality with a single click. The disadvantage is that installing a large number of plugins adds extra complexity and harms site performance.

2. Magento

Magento is a prominent open-source CMS for eCommerce solutions. It is owned by Adobe and services over 360,000 online shops globally. Magento has a robust set of features and a large expanding market, as well as interfaces with enterprise-level solutions such as CRM, ERP, virtual agents, and many more.

 And, while it is suitable for all merchant kinds, it is frequently preferred by rapidly growing and bigger firms because of its broad setup, price choices, and development needs.

3. Shopify

Shopify is a well-known SaaS-based eCommerce platform. It has been a popular alternative for startup entrepreneurs and small enterprises due to its easy interface and inexpensive price. That is not to imply that this CMS cannot be utilized by larger businesses. The number of features available may vary depending on the plan you select, so it’s a good idea to review the list of features before registering. 

Shopify provides unlimited free support, a library of free shop designs, and a separate point-of-sale system. The disadvantage is that Shopify imposes transaction fees when utilizing third-party payment processors.

4. Wix

Wix is a popular drag-and-drop website builder for small businesses. Although it is not strictly an eCommerce content management system, website owners can install the marketplace module if necessary. Wix is an enticing choice for total novices and non-coders due to its diversity of templates, built-in functionality, and no-code SEO-friendly approach. 

If you have a restricted product line and need to jumpstart your firm immediately, this strategy may work. Bear in mind, however, that once you pick a template for your business, you cannot alter it in the future.

5. Kentico

Kentico enables you to build e-commerce storefronts, high-performance websites, collaborative websites, and corporate portals for your clients. You may Hire Kentico Developers that are knowledgeable in utilizing all of the Kentico Xperience capabilities to create responsive websites and elegant eCommerce stores.

Kentico has pre-built solutions for community management, blogging, landing pages, newsletters, e-commerce, and mobile website development. It certainly assists marketers in managing content while analyzing visits and modifications using a fully integrated structure of advertising tools.

6. Joomla

Joomla is an open-source web design solution that makes it possible to create and publish eCommerce stores online. While eCommerce is not built into Joomla, there are a lot of free extensions that may help you convert your website into a powerful eCommerce store.

7. Drupal

Although Drupal is not designed specifically for eCommerce, it may be used in conjunction with other extensions and frameworks to allow eCommerce capabilities. Indeed, it is one of the most commonly used open-source CMS, rivaling WordPress and Joomla in popularity. Regrettably, Drupal is not especially user-friendly for people without considerable coding experience (although this is gradually improving).

Drupal commerce, like a CMS, provides versatility, and also combined with other plugins, it offers the best of both worlds: a fully configurable interface and a fully hosted backend.

8. Sitecore

Sitecore is a market-leading platform for digital applications that integrate media, eCommerce, automation, and customization with designing and editing capabilities. Entrepreneurs may utilize the platform to build digital retail experiences and deliver personalized eCommerce interactions.

You can integrate cloud eCommerce capabilities with Sitecore’s rich built-in content offerings using different plugins.

9. Prestashop

Prestashop is another open-source web design system that uses MySQL for data administration and enables extensive modification of the backend code. It has a myriad of add-ons and templates, allowing entrepreneurs with no technical knowledge to build an online store from the ground up. However, keep an eye on the total cost, since some extensions are too pricey.

The best part is that you do not need to be a professional to create a Prestashop website, to makes it an excellent choice for beginners and medium-sized businesses. 

10. OpenCart

OpenCart is another free and flexible open-source CMS. 

It includes numerous pre-configured layouts and a thriving plugin ecosystem. OpenCart allows the integration of over fifteen payment gateways and eight delivery options. As an eCommerce content management system with no monthly costs, it’s a popular choice for newbies on a shoestring budget.

Benefits of Combining eCommerce with CMS

Websites Are Simple to Update

In eCommerce, both innovation and efficiency are critical. Whether it’s trying to respond to the latest trends, incidents, or competitive pressures, combining a CMS and an eCommerce platform provides you with the techniques and versatility to maintain your store’s content regularly easily.

Becoming an Industry Influencer 

Brand recognition is not easy to achieve. However, if you possess specific experience and information that you are ready to offer, you may rapidly establish yourself as a thought leader. It would produce a significant interest of consumers in your business, which would increase sales for your items.

Easily Manage Orders and Inventories

You don’t need to be bothered about centralized inventory managing across multiple channels, shipping, or payment methods with the advanced capabilities of eCommerce platforms. In this manner, you may confidently expand your business!

Integrate with third-party Payment Providers

With CMS you can link major payment gateways to instill credibility and trust in your business. Even better, integrations are so simple to complete that they just require a few clicks!

Conclusion 

Nowadays, when we “want to purchase,” we either ask Siri to suggest a product for us or spend hours on Instagram admiring the outfits of fashion influencers. The industry of eCommerce is constantly changing. That is why selecting an excellent eCommerce web design solution or a CMS is so important – we must examine everything including SEO to design to the technical capabilities and future demands as well.