Do You Know if You are Making the Right Choices?

With all the choices in the marketplace today for ecommerce platforms it can be difficult to know which one is right for you. Some cost more, some less, but most function off of one dynamic index page, which offers no beneficial SEO for ecommerce purposes.

Many of these plug-in systems have become popular products for ecommerce companies to sell because of their simplicity for newbie webmasters; however, the sales people fail to mention the longterm repercussions of choosing one of these platforms. The price is relatively low for one of these platforms, usually around $100 a month, but the long term cost turns out to be extreme once you understand time and SEO.

For ease of use, those platforms are a bit more plug-and-play for the site owners, and a good learning experience to develop basic webmaster skills. However, once enough understanding of SEO for ecommerce is obtained, there is a dreadful realization that whatever search engine rankings that may have been achieved are held hostage by an inferior system that guarantees SEO mediocrity. To further the pain, the idea of moving the entire website to a completely different platform usually paralyzes the site owner into accepting the scenario and hoping that their current platform provider will make the upgrades they’d like to have very soon…

Don’t hold your breathe. They chose to use a dynamic index page because it’s easier, and since most of their customers don’t know any better… well, they have no real economic incentive to change anything. The bottom line is they just don’t really care.

Saving small business owners from this scenario is a top goal at LinkScience. We’ve already gone through this process with our own ecommerce sites. We understand the process, the sacrifice, the results, and the benefits. Converting away from one of these hosted platforms (NetworkSolutions, Volusion, etc.) and similarly functioning software is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the serious business owner that wants to be able to compete for higher organic search engine rankings.

Good SEO for ecommerce has a lot to do with the infrastructure of the way a platform works, the behind-the-scenes mechanics, and the URL formatting. The evidence of the inferiority of many of these systems can be seen by the scores of “work-arounds” that have been employed by SEO consultants to attempt to overcome these inherent weaknesses.

Whether you already have an ecommerce website or you are considering it… choosing the right platform for your business is of paramount importance.