With Magento Live Europe just around the corner, we’re gearing up for one of the biggest Magento events of the year. Before we pack our bags and head to Europe though, there are a couple of other events that we’ve been excited about attending all year, and that you definitely shouldn’t miss out on.
Since September is one of the busiest Magento event times of the year, we’ve brought together the events we’re planning to attend, so you can pick and mix based on where your favorite Magento hosting company are going to be.
If you can’t make it, we’ll be publishing what we think the main Magento takeaways are from each event. So keep an eye on our blog post-event.
What to Know Before You Go
Magento events have a lot of opportunities for merchants, developers, and everyone in between. In order to take the most away from these opportunities, it’s important to know what they are and where you’ll find them.
Before launching into the events themselves, we want to make sure you know what you can expect from each of them.
Sessions
All Magento events have sessions. They range from highly technical to more business orientated, and are probably your best source of information at a Magento event.
Before attending, take a look at the event’s website to see what sessions they have in place and which really speak to you and your needs. Try to manage a timetable where you can take advantage of all three things on this list, but prioritize the most important sessions. After all, you’re probably attending a Magento event to learn.
Sponsors
Sponsors are a big part of the Magento community, and almost every event has at least a handful of them. They’re great to talk to because they can potentially provide you with some awesome ideas for how to improve your Magento store.
They’re also a really good source for keeping a pulse on the Magento community. Most of the time they know what’s happening, who’s who, and what the latest developments have been. Why not go over and ask they about their Magento experiences, if nothing else.
We’ll be sponsoring several of the events below and will have our own booth. Come and talk to the team to learn more about how we’re a cloud company that has been with Magento since the start and will continue to support Magento merchants no matter what.
Networking Events
We know, after a long day of listening to sessions and speaking to sponsors, you probably just want to go home. But wait, there’s still more!
Networking events often take place around Magento events. They offer a good place to meet fellow merchants and developers, and continue that conversation with that one sponsor.
We suggest making an appearance and talking to a handful of people, at least. The Magento community is really helpful and supportive of newcomers and existing faces alike.
These events also tend to come with free food and drink as well!
Meet Magento New York is the only Meet Magento event in the US. It provides existing and new Magento merchants with a space for meeting and discussing developments in ecommerce.
It’s also a great chance to meet some Magento sponsors, discuss best practices, and just become a part of the community.
This year, our very own VP, Josh Ward, will be discussing what Magento 1 merchants can do after the End of Life in June 2020. We’ll take a look at what you need to be paying attention to, how it’s going to affect the Magento community, and why even Magento 2 merchants should be keeping an eye out.
Interested in catching up on what happened last year? Fill out this form for access to all of the videos and presentations from 2018.
Mage X events are the place to be if you’re looking to learn more about the application that underlies your ecommerce solution. As a space of learning, Mage X events tend to offer diverse sessions on business and technical topics. You’ll walk away from this knowing a lot more about Magento than you did coming in.
Don’t forget to take advantage of everything on show this year, including a focus on PWA and Headless. Learn more about what it means to code headless or PWA stores, and how they benefit a variety of business models.
This year, our very own Magento Master, Miguel Balparda, will be leading a panel about Community Engineering. Here he’ll talk about what it means to be a maintainer, and how you can contribute to an Open Source project too.
Meet Magento Poland has been going since 2012, and every year the number of attendees only grows.
Just like any other Meet Magento session, Poland offers a perfect opportunity to learn more about Magento and meet interesting people involved in creating the ecommerce platform.
Make sure to join in with the Q&A sessions and ask any questions you have. Also don’t miss out on talking to the Magento representatives onsite. With over 600 attendees expected to be present, it may seem like a busy event but it’s also very personable.
This year, we’re going to be attending, so keep your eyes out for Hostdedi team members walking the floor and joining you in the sessions. Don’t be shy, come and say hi!
Catch Us Around the World
Interested in knowing what events we’ll be attending in the future? Check out our events page and stay up to date. You can also catch us on social media, either through our Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. Keep an eye on our timelines and we’ll let you know when our next event is.
WooCommerce has gained massive popularity in the B2C eCommerce market, but it is also an excellent choice for businesses that sell primarily to other businesses. Compared to consumer eCommerce, B2B eCommerce developed along a different path because it was subject to different pressures. B2B buyers expect more interaction with salespeople, buyers spend more and more products are bought at the same time, and B2B buyers, especially in larger corporations, have requirements that consumers do not. In consequence, B2B eCommerce was slow to take off and was often built on “enterprise” eCommerce solutions with a hefty price tag. But, in recent years, B2B sellers have adopted many of the lessons learned by their colleagues in the B2C space. Millennial buyers, when appointed to buying roles within their business, expect the same convenience and customer-focused approach from B2B as B2C. The rise of B2B eCommerce makes comparing and assessing suppliers easier than ever before. The double pressures of a fluid market and greater expectations have influenced B2B sellers to up their game. As Michael Del Gigante puts it, “With so much of their bottom line on the line, B2B e-commerce companies need to start evolving their businesses by reorganizing their websites to serve their business clients as consumers.”
B2B with WooCommerce?
One of the ways B2B eCommerce users can adapt to B2C-shaped expectations is through the tools evolved to serve the needs of consumer-focused eCommerce businesses. Estimates vary, but about a quarter of the eCommerce sites on the web use WooCommerce, and, although primarily designed to serve the needs of B2C retailers, WooCommerce can easily be made into a powerful B2B sales platform. But what does it take to turn WooCommerce into the ideal B2B eCommerce application? Not a lot. Out of the box, WooCommerce is secure, reliable, and battle-tested. It is capable of supporting many thousands of products and product variants. Its category and tag hierarchies allow for complex custom catalogs. It is free but so popular that support is widely available. If vendor support concerns cause hesitation with WooCommerce adoption, you needn’t worry. Many businesses exist to provide that support.
Bringing B2B Features To WooCommerce
WooCommerce lacks some features that are necessary for B2B and wholesale selling, but they are available as free or paid extensions. As a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce benefits from both WordPress’ massive plugin ecosystem and its own range of extensions. Dynamic Pricing adds the ability to configure bulk discounts. It includes custom configurations for building finely graded pricing plans that can be applied according to volume purchased or to specific groups of buyers. B2B sellers often need to restrict categories of products to groups of buyers. There are several WooCommerce extensions for restricting product access according to various criteria. With WooCommerce Protected Categories, sellers can password protect product groups according to category and lock-down product categories by role or user. The extension can be used to create private areas for individual clients and separate B2C and B2B or wholesale areas. The related WooCommerce Private Store can lock-down a store to create a members-only WooCommerce site. WooCommerce, with the addition of a small number of plugins, is a robust and reliable B2B sales platform, capable of growing as your business grows and adapting to its changing needs.
Lengthy checkouts annoy your shoppers and send them to your competition.
The default checkout page for Magento 2 fails to solve this problem. Fortunately, there’s plenty of extensions in the Magento 2 marketplace that attempt to fix this problem. However, sorting through the available candidates is no small task, so keep reading to help narrow the field.
What Is One Step Checkout?
Optimizing the shop experience is the most reliable way to increase your conversion rate and prevent abandoned carts.
Properly executed, one step checkout removes the annoying hoops between your customer and the Place Order button. The name of the game is quick, easy, and painless.
An effective one step checkout extension limits the process to one page, and:
Suggests a delivery address
Allows customers to add a comment
Includes a field for coupon codes
Allows store owners to configure checkout fields
Supports varied payment methods
Provides clean address, shipping method, payment method, and order review sections
Identifies the shopper’s IP address to expedite future checkouts
Optimizes the page for mobile
Provides checkout analytics and reports
Has a prominent Place Order button
Each of the Magento 2 checkout extensions provided in this article achieve the above. Let’s take a closer look at what each has to offer.
How We Narrowed the Field
At time of publication, the Magento marketplace has 19-and-counting one step checkout extensions available. We’ve narrowed the field to five options that support the latest stable relase of Magento 2 Community Edition, which is currently version 2.3. This version was released in November 2018, and any extension still not compatible is arguably the victim of neglect by its developer.
If you’re sticking with Magento 1 despite it reaching official end of life in June 2020, here’s what you need to know. If you’re running Magento 2, but not the latest version, we recommend that taking immediate action to patch your store. Unpatched software can degrade your store’s performance and expose your customers to significant security risks.
When deciding whether or not to purchase support for any extension, remember that support also includes updates to that extension. Keeping your extensions updates is one of the most reliable ways to keep your safe and secure.
Cost: $299 Support: 3 months free, then 12 months for $120 InstallationService: Not available Front-End Demo Back-End Demo
Featuring a two-column design, Smart One Step fuels auto-address suggestions with GeoIP and Google, and allows unregistered guests to make purchases.
If you’re looking to further expand functionality, Aheadworks offers other extensions for coupon code generation, gift cards, reward points, and store refunds. Between companies, extensions don’t always play nice with one another, but you can prevent some headaches as long as you don’t mind fully hitching your wagon to Aheadworks.
Cost: $570 Support: 6 mos $105/12 mos $140 InstallationService: $85 Front End Demo (Back End Demo Not Available at Time of Publication)
With 150 reviews in the Marketplace for their Magento 1 extension, One Step Checkout AS has a well-established reputation in the community. This experience comes with a hefty price tag. In theory, however, a good extension will drive sales and provide value over and above the cost of acquiring it.
If you want the streamlined, barebones experience for your shoppers, you can certainly give it to them. The extension also offers CSS compatibility and fully embraces a modular approach to customization.
If you’re planning to use multiple extensions, OneStepCheckOUT promises easy compatibility. If you’ve enlisted their support service, they also promise to help you integrate troublesome third-party extensions for no additional cost.
If you want one-step checkout but don’t necessarily need heavy customization, MageDelight’s One Step Checkout may be a reasonable choice. Customization is limited to field selection and interface color, which will be enough for owners just looking for consistency with their storefront.
Cost: $189 Support: 1 yr Free, then $588/yr InstallationService: Free Front End Demo (2-column) (Back End Demo Not Available at Time of Publication)
The purchase of One Step Checkout by Templates Master includes free installation, 1 year of support, and free integration of third party modules. However, the cost of support after that first year jumps to $588 annually.
As for layout, store admins have full control over checkout fields and can select one, two, or three columns. Four different checkout page skins are included, and it’s possible to customize your checkout page with JavaScript or HTML.
Cost: $299 Support: 3 months free with free lifetime updates/6 mos $79/12 mos $129 InstallationService: $59 Front End Demo Back End Demo
One Step Checkout by Amasty has something to offer both layperson store admins and seasoned developers. The former can easily and quickly tweak layout, colors, and fonts. For users wanting more control, the extension provides CSS and LESS support.
Notably, this is the only offering on this list to provide free lifetime updates.
Advanced options include gift options, header and footer promo information, delivery date and time, and others.
One Step Checkout Extensions At a Glance
Following is a summary of our findings at the time of publication. The policies, prices, or functionality of these products may have since changed.
Do you run an ecommerce store but aren’t sure how to improve its SEO? Worry no more, this is your complete guide to ecommerce SEO.
From keyword research to technical audits, this expert guide takes you on a detailed journey through the ins and outs of ecommerce SEO tactics for ranking your products on page one of Google.
What are you waiting for, let’s get started!
Laying the Groundwork for Ecommerce SEO
A concrete ecommerce SEO strategy is exactly that: a strategy. And all good strategies start somewhere.
For ecommerce SEO, that starting point is keyword and category research, upon which you’ll build site structure, on-page and technical SEO, and backlinks.
These, in turn, influence the buyer’s journey. From click to homepage, to checkout, your keyword research should provide a clear rationale for the journey a customer takes, even extending off-site into guest posts and social channels.
So before we launch into a detailed look at implementing or improving your ecommerce SEO, let’s take a look at the groundwork you need to cover, and why it’s important, first.
Why Ecommerce SEO Matters
Why does ecommerce SEO matter? Is it really just a form of dark magic held by wordsmiths of a digital age?
Let’s break that down.
Firstly, yes, ecommerce SEO matters. It matters because it’s the key to finding customers and selling products organically. This means without having to pay for advertising.
Sound pretty sweet, right?
93% of online activity begins with a search, with less than 75% of searchers proceeding past the first page of search results. That means that in order to play the organic game successfully, you’ll need to compete and beat out the competition.
Moreover, as we’ll look at throughout this guide, SEO doesn’t just affect your organic search rankings, it has implications that run throughout your entire site. From UX to structure, SEO is the key to creating buyers journeys that are unforgettable and targeted.
So what about the second question. Is SEO just some form of dark magic?
No.
Despite what some “experts” would like you believe, SEO is actually a fairly straightforward process (for the most part) that revolves around you proving the relevancy of the pages and content you create.
For ecommerce, that means attributing value to your products and telling a search engine that is the case.
What’s best, it’s all easily done by following a simple formula. That’s what we’re going to be looking at here.
Defining Ecommerce Products and Categories
Ecommerce search engine optimization is a little different than typical content SEO.
Google handles content differently, buyers expect it to act differently, and the competition is different.
Where ecommerce and content SEO differs is in how products should be treated when compared with blog or other content pages. This is especially true if your store offers a large number of products across several categories.
Take, for instance, if you’re opening a store selling headphones.
Simply stating “headphones” when it comes to the product title and description isn’t enough. Going even further, the category “headphones” won’t do much to help either the buyer or your SEO either.
Modern audiences are looking for personalized and detailed buying experiences. These buying experiences mean understanding the differences between, say, “headphones” and “earphones”, “in ear” and “over ear”.
Understanding the Difference Between Ecommerce and Content
Ecommerce and content SEO is not the same.
Why?
To start, visitor intent is different. Content SEO often has the long game in mind. Ecommerce SEO aims to optimize the sales process. Sometimes this means the long game, other times it means more immediate engagement.
Secondly, ecommerce is arguably a lot more competitive. There are a huge number of products which are very similar. Product attributes then become increasingly important, with even the smallest addition or subtraction potentially making or breaking a sale.
Thirdly, Google handles transactional search queries differently. We will look at this in more detail later. However, what’s important to know is that transactional search queries have search features you won’t find with informational or navigational queries.
Finally, site content will be different. Product pages should be treated a little differently than, for example, blog pages. They should still follow the same general rules of focus and relevancy, but they also need to sell a product. This means you’re going to have to intertwine some emotional resonance in that copy.
As we cover pretty much everything you need to know about ecommerce SEO, keep in mind that every store is different and should be treated differently.
To create incredible, future-proof ecommerce SEO, make sure that your copy is relevant, informative, and useful.
Then do the rest.
Your Ecommerce SEO Stack
Your ecommerce SEO stack should be a collection of applications and websites that enable you to quickly and effectively research and/or confirm your keyword and category suspicions.
Your ecommerce SEO stack is your main toolset for laying the groundwork and building your store’s online presence. WIthout a good stack you’ll struggle to implement a proper keyword strategy.
Here’s exactly how you can use a huge range of applications to isolate product differences, find buyer intent, and understand a product’s market.
The Keyword Map
Before you launch any further into this section, you’re going to need a place to store all of your juicy keyword information. Everything you collect needs to be recorded for later!
If you have nothing else available, we recommend pulling up a spreadsheet and creating something which looks like this:
Keyword
Product
Monthly Volume
Cost Per Click
Keyword Difficulty
We’ll come back to what all these different sections mean shortly. For now, you can focus on keyword and product. Here you’ll put any of the keywords you find through your research and the product they are associated with.
Secondly, create a smaller table that looks like this:
Keyword
Category
This is potential categories. Categories are much larger than keywords. For instance, “Headphones” and “Earphones” may be individual categories as they have large differences. More specific attributes would fall under the keyword sections.
While conducting keyword research, keep an eye on the different keywords that appear and try to gain inspiration on what categories may and may not work.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to get researching!
When Google Is Replaced by Amazon
The first tool you have at your disposal is Amazon. As the most popular ecommerce outlet, with a huge range of products, did you think we would (could) start anywhere else?
Amazon is to ecommerce SEO as Google is to content SEO.
9 in 10 consumers use amazon to price check a product before making a purchase elsewhere. By positioning the right products in the right places along a buyer’s journey, they increase the chance of making a sale.
To do this, they have had to optimize and perfect their internal search engine and ecommerce SEO to deliver only the most relevant results.
So, amazon is the perfect place to get started with keyword research.
Since we’re interested in selling headphones, we’re going to start by typing “headphones” into search and taking a look at Amazon Suggest.
This gives us two different types of information: ideas for keywords, and ideas for categories.
Primarily, the keywords we see above are what we call long tail keywords. They are search terms that are actually being searched by real customers and they provide a lot of insight into what they are looking for.
Taking a quick look, we can see that “headphones for kids”, “headphones with microphone”, and “headphones over ear” are a couple of keywords that stand out.
Since headphones are very close to earphones, we can also take a look at this search result to see if there is any crossover or new long tail keywords we can play with.
Immediately, “earphones with microphone” stands out, as does “earphone splitter” as a potential upsell product.
We can also take a look at the categories referenced in these searches. Cell Phones & Accessories appear in both search results, meaning it’s an important category to consider moving forward.
This tool scrapes a huge number of amazon search suggestions for you, providing keywords for you to add to your keyword and category map.
This can help save a lot of time and provides a fairly big long tail keyword base to work from. As you can see above, the results are different than when we used amazon directly, but are still just as valid moving forward.
The Power of Reddit and Wikipedia
Both Reddit and Wikipedia should be used for generating a longer and more complete list of keywords.
Reddit should be your first port of call as its community is often teeming with advice and recommendations on what others should or shouldn’t purchase. These posts provide a huge amount of information regarding product market, target audience, and keywords.
Of course, this often depends on what type of product you are looking to sell. However, there is often some kind of online community (whether in reddit or not) which talks about products from the perspective of a buyer.
Wikipedia is also an asset when it comes to keyword research. Just search for any product idea you have: like headphones.
We’ve highlighted a few key things which appear in the wikipedia search. First we have synonyms. These are words with the same or similar meanings, and are great keyword targets. Even the slang term “cans” is a viable search terms.
Second is potential categories. We already know that mobile phones are a viable category from the Amazon suggest results. We can now add musical instruments, radio, and video games.
Finally, we’ve also marked up some words which may be helpful for building out a more complete keyword strategy, including keywords like “bluetooth”, “DECT”, and “high fidelity headphones”.
Tip: Don’t forget to take a quick look at the table of contents too. Here you’ll find some good ideas for both categories and keywords. For headphones, we can see a couple of options listed under types.
Identifying Semantic Keywords
Additional bits of language conceptually related to your keywords or products are what are known as semantic keywords (LSI – latent semantic indexing). They are not one of your primary keywords.
Semantic (LSI) Keywords are those that are linked conceptually.
We can also identify these as Qualifiers and Attributes. They are excellent for building our and understanding categories, as well as for bulking up your keyword strategy.
For example, LSI keywords for Headphones may be”
Bluetooth
Noise Cancelling
Beats
Microphone
On-Ear
These link conceptually and co-occur with instances of “Headphones” frequently. However, they do not have the same meaning.
In the wikipedia example above, two examples may be “open back” and “closed back”. These are potentially great binary categories, and provide customers with a clear UX path to purchasing the product they want.
Remember, these keywords should always be checked with a keyword tool (which we’ll get to later).
Google Trends
Google trends is useful tool for seeing what kind of trends are taking place in the market currently. In the past, we’ve found this tends to require a lot of sifting of data, but it can help you to find golden SEO opportunities if done right.
To begin, we’re again going to want to use the auto suggest feature to see what kind of searches are popular. Luckily, there are a few suggestions for headphones, including the popular search term “noise-cancelling headphones”. We can add that to our keyword map.
Once we’ve done this, we can scroll down and take a look at the related topics and queries. These can provide us with some good, long tail keywords, and help us to gain deeper insight into the categories we’re looking to create. Oculus VR can probably fall under video game, MacBook Air can fall under computers, and AirPods can fall under mobile phones.
Tip: Sorting through Google trends can take a long time but it really does offer a wealth of information for merchants that are able to act quickly. Remember that trends are exactly that: trends. There is no guarantee that what is popular now will be even 1 month down the road.
Google Keyword Planner
Once you’ve collected all of your keywords, it’s time to run them through a keyword tool to see what kind of buyer/searcher intent exists. There are a lot of options available to merchants, but we’re going to start with good old Google Keyword Planner.
Yes, Google, not Amazon.
The reasons we’re using google is because a large number of ecommerce searches come from search traffic outside of amazon. While Amazon has grown to be larger than Google in terms of ecommerce searches, Google still accounts for over 34% of product searches.
So, taking a look at the list of keywords we’ve found, we’re going to start putting them into the keyword planner to see what it suggests and what we’re looking at in terms of search volume and competition.
Starting with the keyword “earphones with microphone”, taken from our first look at Amazon suggest, we’re given a deeper look at how that keyword would perform and several additional options.
But what numbers are we really looking at here and what do they mean?
Avg. monthly searches
This is the average number of searches you can expect each month. Google keyword planner isn’t accurate in this area and we’ll be using another tool later for a better number.
Competition
This is how hard it is to rank for the keyword. On your keyword map, we’ve called this DIFF.
Top of page bid (both high and low)
These provide a guide to how much an ad would cost per click. This number gives us a really good indication of competition. The higher the cost, the more competition. The lower the cost, the less competition.
Go through your keywords and add the numbers you find here to you keyword map. We’re going to be using them more later.
Once you’ve completed everything else, we recommend taking your keyword map and exploring it further with a paid keyword tool.
For the purposes of this guide, we’re using Mangools’ KWFinder. It’s lightweight, provides a lot of the information we’re going to need, and we’ve found it to be pretty accurate at predicting success in the past.
We’re going to start this section of our research just like each of the other ones: by searching for “headphones”.
Here, we’re given a lot of information on how useful our keywords are. We’ve got a lot more detailed information on search volume, a clear idea of the cost per click (CPC) and an easy metric for judging ranking difficulty. We can also see how search volume has changed historically.
All of these metrics are ones we can use.
It’s also possible to take a look at autocomplete suggestions and questions that are asked using the keyword. These sections also provide detailed information on search volume, CPC, and difficulty.
Once you’ve looked through all of this information and moved what you think is relevant into your keyword map, you’re ready to start sifting through and putting together your primary keywords.
Sifting Through Keywords
Well done on getting this far. If you’ve proceeded through each of the previous steps, you should now have a fairly expansive list of keywords, potential categories, and metrics available to you.
But it’s probably too much. How are you going to take that list and shorten it to create a clear idea of what keywords to use and where to use them? After all, you can’t just stuff it all onto one page.
To solve this problem, we’re going to need to take a deeper look at those metrics we pulled earlier.
When looking at keywords and metrics, it’s important to remember three general rules:
Higher search volume means more potential
Lower difficulty means easier ranking
Lower CPC means less competition
Without further adieu, let’s take a look at the types you metrics you’ve gathered and what they mean.
Don’t forget to check the semantic keywords you found as well. These can come in handy during category creation.
Search Volume
Search Volume is a good indicator of how much traffic you could potentially see to your product. Know that this is searches, not click throughs. Even result number 1 doesn’t receive all of that traffic (but a fairly significant portion of it).
Knowing what number is good here is really about understanding how niche your target audience is. Clearly, headphones are a large consumer market (who doesn’t own a pair in the mobile phone age?).
As a result, large numbers are going to be good here. We would say anything with over 1,000 searches per month is going to net you a return. If you’re looking to sell more specific or specialized headphones or products, such as headphone amplifiers, a smaller search volume is ok.
“Headphones with mic” has a search volume of 2,400. This is pretty high and means that if you make it to the first page, you’re probably going to get a good amount of traffic. For merchants who stock this product, they would probably want to add priority to this keyword.
Keyword Difficulty
Before looking at CPC, we’re going to take a quick peek at keyword difficulty.
Different tools measure difficulty in different ways. KWFinder measures it in terms of the link profile strength from other competitors on the first search engine results page. We like this method as it provides a nice understanding of page 1 ranking competition.
The lower the score, the better. It’s going to be harder to rank for higher numbers.
KWFinder’s color coding here is really helpful. Anything in green is usually very easy to rank for – depending on a few factors. These are low hanging fruit and you’re going to want to target them if possible.
In the example above, keywords like “neckband headphones” have really high search volume and low difficulty. A combination of these two metrics makes this a high-value keyword. Similarly, “best DJ headphones” is another with this perfect combination of factors.
Finding this golden SEO combination is the key to isolating the best keywords available to you.
Cost Per Click
Cost per click (CPC) indicates how much an individual click will cost in Google ads.
But wait, you want to rank organically, not for paid ads. Why does this matter?
CPC is a great indicator of competition. The higher the value of a click, the more merchants are bidding for a smaller customer pool. This number can fluctuate a lot. According to Search Engine Watch, the most expensive keyword in terms of CPC in 2016 was “best mesothelioma lawyer”. Each click was valued at $935.71.
You should not expect numbers anywhere near this large. The most expensive CPC for headphones is just $3.24. This travels all the way down to just $0.14 for “gumy headphones”.
What you’re really looking for is a number in the middle here. You don’t want to go for a keyword with too little competition as there’s probably a reason for that (it doesn’t lead to a high conversion rate). You also don’t want to go for something too high as it may be because it’s too hard to rank for or compete on.
Taking the top and bottom numbers of “headphones”, we’ve set a range between $0.60 – $1.50. This actually only filters out a handful of results and leaves us with a pretty broad spectrum of results.
Bring It All Together
Once you’ve done this, you should now have a pretty complete picture of what your keyword strategy should look like.
Take those keywords remaining on your keyword map and organize them based on relevancy and metrics (remembering the general rules above).
Site Structure
Once you’ve completed your keyword research, it’s time to put that research into practice by using it to inform your site structure (or site architecture).
Site structure is already an important part of SEO for any site. However, with ecommerce sites, it’s even more important due to the number of products and pages.
A clearer site structure makes it easier for customers to find specific products, for search engines to index them, and for merchants to create exquisite buyer journeys. The more pages and products you have, the more important this stage will be.
Don’t Skip this
Optimizing site structure means following two simple rules:
The rule of simple scalability
The rule of proximity to your homepage
These two rules embody two core principles behind best practices web development: simplicity and connection.
They show that it’s important to add pages to your site in a way that supports simple site architecture, while also ensuring that no page is more than 3 clicks away from you homepage.
These two rules relate heavily to “deep” site architecture.
Creating “Deep” Site Architecture
In general, most external links (packed with backlink juiciness) are going to be directed towards the homepage. This means that most of your authority is going to exist on this page (probably).
As you build out your site, you’re going to want to create a clear pathway for that authority to “flow” from the top to the bottom.
In the example below, domain authority filters from the home page down through to the product pages (which are just 2 clicks away).
With more complex sites with more pages, this would probably have to be built out even more. It would include multiple mid-level pages and many, many more product pages. Whatever you do, it’s important to ensure that product pages are no more than 3 clicks from your home page.
If you have fewer products, it’s important that they are no more than 2 clicks from the homepage. This ensures a streamlined customer journey and makes for easier indexing by search engines. Take a look at some of your competitors if you’re unsure and see how they do it.
Tip: don’t put too many pages in level 2 if you can help it. The more pages on each level, the lower authority each page is given. The “deep” structure is designed to dilute that authority vertically instead of horizontally.
Bad SEO Site Structure
Bad site structure is easy to diagnose. It flies in the face of both simple rules above:
The rule of simple scalability
The rule of proximity to your homepage
Instead of allowing for authority to drip down from the top, it creates meandering mazes that create uneven buyer journeys and hard to navigate UX.
The example above also puts 6 pages between the homepage and the product.
That’s 7 clicks between arriving at the site and finding the product they want. Not only is this terrible UX, it also all but guarantees that your conversion rate will drop significantly (unless you happen to have an audience that loves website mazes).
Tip: If your site structure looks like it does above, don’t rush into moving everything around and changing your site structure. This will lead to changes in URLs, which means a lot of pages will lose their existing SEO value. Before engaging in a site redesign, we recommend getting in touch with an SEO professional to help, if it’s something you feel needs to be done.
Categories
Now that you know the basics of site structure, we can start to apply the keyword research we performed in the last step.
Where this is mainly going to make a difference is on the category pages. Do you remember those qualifiers and attributes we identified in the first section? We also called them semantic (LSI) keywords.
These terms are great for creating categories. Make sure that you check them with the keyword tool as well.
For the purposed of this exercise, we’re going to start with two category pages, “open back” and “closed back”. These provide us with a nice way to split any products we have down the middle, despite not necessarily having some of the best keyword metrics around.
If you structure your site for best results, your URL structure should mimic your site structure.
Take the “open back headphones” and “closed back headphones” example from our wikipedia research. These would create two different categories “open back” and “closed back”, and the following URLs:
Product variations should not be addressed in your site structure. Differences such as color, size, material, or similar attributes should be addressed with your ecommerce CMS.
The line between these variations and genuine categories is a thin one. Generally, best practice is to keep niche attributes with high volume or competition as categories, while taking more general attributes such as color and size, and setting them as variations.
Magento is particularly powerful when it comes to setting up product attributes. Not only does it allow you to set different values and settings, it also allows for attributes to be displayed differently in different parts of your store or different regions.
Other applications like WooCommerce are also very capable of managing attributes, but don’t have some of the advanced functionality you’ll find with Magento.
Tip: Before actually putting together your site structure, it’s a good idea to compare the differences between ecommerce CMS. Make sure to check for features which line up with your requirements for SEO. We recommend Magento in most cases as it allows for much more customization.
The Best Ecommerce SEO Site Structure
The best ecommerce site structures follow the two simple rules above and ensure that all authority and links flow from the homepage towards categories and then out to products.
In the example above, the categories have been separated into two levels, allowing for more products to be represented and simplifying the buyer’s journey. In turn, these level two categories flow into the product pages along the bottom.
If you were setting up site structure for an earphone/headphone site, you may place “earphones” as one top level category, and “Headphones” as another. Level two would then diversify into other features such as “Noise Cancelling”, “bluetooth”, or other options.
We do not suggest going past this 4 level structure as that would mean more than 3 clicks from the homepage to reach a product. This will lead to a bad user experience and a hit to conversions.
On-Page Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization
Ok, you’ve made it this far.
You’ve got your keyword map and you’ve created a solid site structure. Now it’s time to start creating the actual pages and optimizing them for SEO.
Here we’re going to show you how all that groundwork you’ve prepared is going to pay off. We’ll walk through keyword placement, on-page optimization factors, and what makes ecommerce SEO unique.
The Ecommerce Focus
There are 3 primary query types defined by Google and each shows different types of results.
Transactional
Informational
Navigational
Optimizing SEO for ecommerce is different because Google treats ecommerce search results differently than they do other queries.
Since we’re talking about ecommerce SEO in this article, we’re going to focus on Transactional search engine results pages (SERPs).
To do this, let’s take a look at a simple ecommerce search query and break down what we see. The query we’re going to use is “buy bluetooth headphones”.
Immediately, the first thing we’re shown is a sponsored product carousel. These are products that Google has deemed relevant to your search query and are based on you own ad selection settings. They are paid ads (we can tell by the sponsored tag in the top right), so ranking here is going to depend on numerous factors, including your ad spend.
Directly below this, you can see the delivery of an adwords ad, along with typical search query results. These usually last for a couple of results before moving back into another ecommerce SERP feature.
In the case of our search query, that is a carousel for the best bluetooth headphones and headsets. This is actually more of an information section, providing information scraped from popular sites and displayed in an easy to read manner. It is organic.
Scrolling down a little, we are then shown the “People also ask” box. Here, long tail questions with higher search volume are listed and answered in easy dropdown text boxes. This is also organic and not paid.
Further down still and we’re shown a series of articles relevant to our search query. These allow for buyers to perform even more research before making a purchasing commitment. These are also organic.
Below this, we’re able to refine our search based on brand. We’re offered a couple of options here. Clicking on one takes you to a google search for that brand’s name combined with your search query above.
Finally, the last thing you will see if a map with the location of local businesses you can purchase the product you’ve searched for from. To really make the most of this section you need to optimize your local businesses SEO.
The Move to Informational
Following some level of criticism over too much paid placement in search results, Google have dialed it back a lot more recently. A lot of the information we see on the results page is actually informational – despite the fact that we have a transactional query.
This means that content and a solid content strategy is an ever increasing part of ecommerce search optimization.
Take a look at your keyword map and see if there are any clear opportunities for content creation. Then take a look at whether you think it is a good idea to start a blog on your website.
We’ll be picking up on how to implement an SEO content strategy for ecommerce sites a little later.
A Deeper Look at Keywords
How Many Keywords?
It’s often one of the first questions asked by merchants trying to solve their SEO woes: “How many times should I use this keyword”. Well, there’s no precise answer to this question, but just as with everything SEO, there are a couple of rules you can follow.
Keep usage clear, relevant, and precise (no keyword cramming)
Consider use of semantic keywords
Make keywords meaningful
We’ve seen articles that state you should only use them 3 or 4 times. We’ve seen articles which state they should be used 5 or 6 times.
Yes, best practice states that using a keyword less is better than using it more. However, there’s also something to be said for how Google (and language processing networks in general) analyze text. As long as your keywords are making semantic sense and appropriate, write away.
If that’s not good enough, as a general guide, use 1 keyword per page and use it 3-5 times per 1000 words.
Mix in a small number of semantic keywords where needed and you’re good to go.
Take the text below as an example of a product description for a pair of noise cancelling headphones we want to rank.
The Audio Creator To the Beat Noise Cancelling Headphones are some of the best on ear,active noise cancelling headphones around. Take your music wherever you think it’s needed with either bluetooth support or the 3.5mm jack. Experience high fidelity sound like you never have before.
The words in bold above are semantic keywords we identified during our keyword research. We’ve included a lot of them in the product description, but they all make sense and none are out of place.
Long Tail vs Short Tail Keywords
When putting together content, you’re going to see that there are primarily three different types of keywords you have to play with. The first two are short tail and long tail keywords.
Short tail keywords are exactly as you would expect: shorter. They tend to have much higher monthly search volume and difficulty. But that’s ok because these pages should be closer to the homepage. That means they will have more authority flow into them: and so will have more power to rank.
An example of a short tail keyword would be “bluetooth headphones”, or even just “headphones”.
Long tail keywords are longer. They have lower search volume and difficulty. More and more, long tail keywords and mimicking natural language patterns; usually in the form of questions.
An example of a long tail keyword would be “what are the best bluetooth headphones?” or “The best bluetooth headphones of 2019”.
We recommend using a mix of short tail and long tail keywords on pages when possible. The higher up in the site structure, the more you’re going to want to optimize for the short tail.
Optimizing Category Pages
In this example, the category pages are optimized for Noise Cancelling and Wireless short tail keywords. These pages would contain some text about the different attributes and internal links to the top products.
Below these would be the long tail keywords for the products themselves. The Audio Creator To the Beat headphones would be searched by fewer customers than just “Noise Cancelling Headphones”. We still want to rank for it, but because of the lower search volume and difficulty, it’s ok to place this on the product page – further from the homepage.
Semantic Keywords for Ecommerce (LSI)
On top of short tail and long tail keywords, you also need to consider semantic keywords. This are also known as LSI (or Latent Semantic Indexing).
As we discussed earlier, semantic keywords are those that are conceptually linked to the main keywords. For ecommerce, these are often product attributes and features.
If you’re unsure about what semantic keywords there are, take a look at Amazon and search for you product.
In the example above, we highlighted several keywords which seem to appear frequently across the page in the product titles. These include words like “active” for noise cancelling, “bluetooth”, and “over ear”.
We could take this deeper and explore product descriptions to see relevant, frequent words. We recommend looking at several different products like this and then putting the semantic keywords you find into your keyword map.
They should then be sprinkled throughout copy on different pages – especially in product descriptions. They tell Google that your page is relevant and informative.
Don’t overdo it. Moderation and relevance is key here, so follow the same rules as you would for other keywords with the exception that you can use multiple semantic keywords on one page.
How Much Content?
Talking about the number of words, how many should you have on each page?
This isn’t a length thing. It’s not the more words you have the higher your pages are going to rank. If that were the case then everyone would be writing 10,000 word articles.
It’s that a well-written article or product page provides more than just a quick answer or description. In terms of ecommerce, a well written product description goes into depth about the product and what it can do.
When google then analyzes the page and its text, it will be able to see your keyword (assigning relevancy) and any semantic keywords (assigning extended relevancy) present.
Ecommerce On-Page SEO
An ecommerce product page optimized for search will look (roughly) like this:
So what is everything there and how can you ensure you’re providing enough information? Let’s walk through each of these different areas and look at them in detail.
The Ecommerce Title Tag and Meta Description
Meta content is vital, not only for your ecommerce store’s SEO, but for click through rates from the search results page as well.
When deciding on a title tag, be sure to include the main keyword for the page and place it towards the front of the title tag. Try to make the copy here convincing as it will directly affect click through rates. Including terms like “The best” or “Cheap” or something similar can really help to improve click through rates.
The meta description isn’t as important in terms of direct SEO. However, it’s still going to influence click through rates. Again, using terms like “Cheap” and “Best” here will probably increase click through rate. Just make sure that it’s easy to read and understand.
The URL
There are two key things you URL needs to consider:
Site structure
Your keyword
Implement both in this section and you’ll be fine.
The example above uses both the “noise-cancelling” keyword from our category page and the keyword from our product page.
The H1 Tag
This is one of the most important pieces of information you’ll have on the page and best practice is to keep it simple and short. In some cases, it’s even worth just using your main keyword directly.
Of course, this depends on the page.
Products should include the product name. Take a look at what Amazon does with their main titles on the page.
This H1 tag is long and wordy. Part of the reason for this is how Amazon’s search algorithm works and the competition between similar products.
However, if we take a look at a product like Bose, who are trying to rank on Google, we see a different picture. Their H1 tag is short and simple. It is the product name itself. This is because their product has search volume in its own right.
Tip: deciding on how you are going to treat your H1 tags depends on the products you’re selling. Does the product itself have search volume? If not, it may be worth taking more of an Amazon seller approach.
For category pages, it’s recommended that you stick to the short tail keyword you’ve opted to use. For the example above “Noise Cancelling Headphones” would be perfect.
Product Description
This is the meat of your page and where most of its SEO value will come from.
As we discussed earlier, at a minimum, you’re going to want to include 1000 words here. The more the better (within reason).
Don’t forget that you should also include your keywords here: both short tail and semantic. We recommend aiming for 3 uses of your main keyword, with an additional sprinkling of your others.
Take a look at some of your competitors to see how they have done this. This can give you a lot of insight into what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
This content should also have emotional relevance and pull for your audience. This is outside the purview of ecommerce SEO, so we won’t cover it here, but a clear understanding of your target audience (personas) is vital to creating this content. Your keyword research should help to inform this.
We also recommend placing keywords in H2 title tags if possible. H2 tags are given higher priority than body text, so well positioned keywords here attached increased relevance to a page.
The Alt Image
Google understands that images help make content easier to digest. When was the last time you clicked on a web page and there were no images? Even Wikipedia has images scattered throughout.
As a result, including images won’t only make a difference in terms of conversion, it also helps with SEO (yes, really).
When inserting an image, try to think of a relevant alt tag. This should describe the image for those with sight impairments. If it’s a side shot of a pair of headphones, something like “side short of Audio Creator To the Beat headphones” would work.
An Ecommerce Internal Linking Strategy
Depending on the ecommerce platform you’ve opted to use, you should already have a lot of internal links on your site. Links from category pages, links from product pages to frequently viewed products, and more.
This makes ecommerce SEO much easier than in a lot of other industries.
However, putting in some strategic internal links is aldo going to help and it does align with SEO best practices. So how do you do it?
Start by taking a look at which pages are high priority. Which pages get the most traffic and see the highest conversion rates / are vital to the customer journey?
Are you going to have a blog?
We recommend that you start a blog.
When you publish new articles, link them to the high priority product pages. The higher the article with rank, the more authority will flow into the product page (just like with our homepage down technique).
Remember, when creating anchor text (the actual link text), use a keyword rich search term.
In the above example, we’re linking to the noise cancelling headphones category page, so are using the anchor text “The best noise cancelling headphones”. This is both relevant and has high volume according to our keyword research.
Rich Snippets and Product Reviews
What’s one thing ecommerce SEO has that content SEO only sometimes has?
That’s right, reviews.
Take a look at the results of “bose noise cancelling headphones 700”. Every single one on the first page includes review stars. Every. Single. One.
So how do you get this on your product pages?
By using Schema Markup.
Schema markup is a code for telling Google and other search engines more about a page and what information is on it. It’s vital for having “rich snippets” in search results, and for including product review stars in the search results.
It’s also possible to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. This provides a simple wizard where you are siven several options on what to do and what you want to appear. It will then create the code for you, which you can just copy and paste onto your page.
Remember, to input reviews for the structured data markup here, you’ll want to select the products category. This will allow you to add the review and more information.
To check if these are working, head to the Google Search Console and check under Enhancements. The different schema that Google is able to track will be listed here under the different categories.
Since we selected the products category above, we can see products listed in this section. If you have not activated schema properly (or it hasn’t been indexed) then nothing will show up here.
Technical SEO
You should now have an ecommerce SEO optimized website.
You’ve conducted keyword research, you’ve created a concrete site structure, and you’ve optimized on-page copy and meta.
The Next thing you’re going to want to do is launch a technical SEO audit. This is going to help you diagnose any problems with your SEO from a technical perspective.
Technical audits can easily find themselves stuck in the weeds. In this section we’ll take a look at how you can conduct a simple audit for yourself, and how to fix some of the most important issues which spring up.
What Does a Technical Ecommerce SEO Audit Include?
A technical SEO audit takes a look at what may be broken on your site. It scans the site code to look for issues that can easily be fixed and often provides a clear way to fix them.
Some of the errors an SEO audit should pick up on are:
Broken links
Faulty redirects
Page title and meta issues
Duplicate content
Incorrect XML sitemaps
Bad robots and directives
Site structure and architecture problems
JavaScript hiccups
Schema “rich snippet” issues
There are additional areas that a technical audit will touch on, but the above are the main areas this guide is going to cover.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to use Raven Tools. We’re choosing this as it provides information on all the areas we’ve mentioned above, and is arguably the easiest to use. To keep taking advantage of it you’ll need to pay a subscription. However, you can get started with a 14 day free trial.
Screaming Frog is also a good tool for conducting technical audits. It provides information on a lot of different areas and allows site owners to look a lot deeper into the issues their site is having. This means that it is a lot more complicated to use than Raven Tools, so we’re not going to talk about it here. We do recommend taking a look at it if you want to delve deeper.
Finding Technical SEO Issues
Start by signing up to Raven tools and logging in. Once logged in, you should be presented with a request to set up a campaign. These campaigns are based around website URLS. So go ahead and enter your website URL for the campaign or project you want to manage, then click continue.
Once you’ve gone through the setup wizard and selected the choices, head to the left sidebar and then open the SEO research drop down and then SEO Auditor Classic. After your site has been crawled, you’ll then be provided with a summary of the different areas you need to respond to.
Now you’re possibly going to see a lot of different things here. We simply don’t have space to go through each of the different technical audits you’ll see. Instead of covering everything, we’re going to look at the most important issues the tool can highlight and show you how to fix them.
Let’s get started.
Solving the Top Ecommerce SEO Issues
Duplicate Content
Despite being a major concern in terms of SEO, this is a very common problem. The very nature of ecommerce sites (especially large ones) does not help.
However, it’s an easy fix with the right time commitment and a few changes to your technical SEO.
How to Fix It
Fixing duplicate content issues is simply done by following three techniques:
Make sure content across your site is unique
Employ Canonical URLs when needed
Avoid heavy boilerplate content
Yes, creating unique content can be a huge time drain – especially if you’re aiming for 1000+ words for each product. However, it will make a huge difference in terms of how well your site will rank.
The second thing you should make sure you’re doing is using canonical tags.
Do you have a few pages that have to be very similar? In these cases it’s best to implement a canonical tag on that page.
The canonical tag will state which page is the primary page – which one you want to rank in Google.
Let’s say we have two products that are very, very similar. We want them both to rank in Google, but they can’t because they are just that similar. One is selling A LOT more than the other, and we’ve decided it’s time to start climbing the SEO ladder.
We would take both product pages and implement a canonical tag that directs to the higher-performance page. This will tell Google that this is the page you want to be indexed.
Canonical tags can be implemented with a SEO plugin or through code. However, we recommend getting in touch with a technical SEO professional about this as there is a smorgasbord of rules to consider (too many to list here).
A Slow Site
Slow sites are a common problem and there’s no one way to fix it. It really depends on the reason behind why the site is slow.
This can be:
Hosting problems
Global customers accessing a single data center location
Uncompressed images and files
Poorly coded content
How to Fix It
The first thing you should do is check your hosting platform. They are not always the problem, but it’s an easy first port of call.
Get in touch with your support team and see if they can see anything wrong. If they can’t find anything, then that means it’s probably something wrong with your code or content.
Hosting isn’t always the problem with site speed, but it’s an easy first port of call.
To narrow down what code or pages are causing problems, head into analytics and take a peek at Behavior > Site Speed.
This will give you a good idea of the different page timings and which pages are showing the problem. Remember, metrics like TTFB are not the ones you should be looking at. From here, you may be able to see consistencies across you site and resolve the problem yourself.
It’s very possible that certain pages just have elements which are taking a long time to load (e.g. images). If this is the case, try lowering their file size with compression and see if site speed improves.
Perhaps the speed issue isn’t your hosting or your code, but a location issue. If a large amount of your site traffic is coming from a different country than your hosting provider, it may be time to either switch hosting provider or (the better option) invest in a CDN.
A CDN will give you a good kick in terms of speed around the world, and it makes your site more secure!
Unsure how to choose a data center location? Check our guide.
Your Site Is Not Secure
This is a big one and something that a lot of ecommerce merchants have been slow to buy into. However, it’s a really easy problem to fix and can be resolved in a few minutes.
Not only does it affect how Google ranks you, it also has a huge impact on click through rates. Just 2% of customers will proceed past the dreaded “not secure” warning page of a site without an SSL.
Not sure where to get an SSL certificate? Let us help you and head to our SSL page.
Time To Put Your Ecommerce SEO to the Test
Now you’ve read about how to get started with ecommerce SEO, it’s time for you to put it all into practice.
Spin up your admin panel and get to work creating your keyword map, site structure, and finessing your technical SEO.
We want to know what you think is the most important for ecommerce SEO.
What strategy did you find most useful and what does your keyword map look like?
John McPhee, a renowned writer of non-fiction books and magazine articles, describes in his book “Draft No. 4” the editorial process his articles must pass through before publication in the New Yorker.
The first phase involves multiple drafts and editing passes by McPhee himself. When McPhee submits the article, there is a conversation with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, which may prompt further rounds of rewriting.
Next, an editor scrutinizes the article line by line, suggesting edits for McPhee to approve. Then, each fact in the article is cross-checked and verified by a professional fact checker. The process culminates with a minute examination of every sentence by one of the world’s most gifted grammatical nitpickers. Altogether, the process can take several months.
And, after all that, mistakes still often find their way into the print edition.
Bloggers and writers who write primarily for the web do not have anything approaching the editorial support structure of a magazine like the New Yorker. They are often their own editors, proofreaders, and fact checkers.
Until recently, WordPress bloggers who used the Jetpack plugin collection were helped in this task by After the Deadline, a grammar checker that could highlight errors before the writer hits the publish button. Sadly, After the Deadline is no more. It was removed with the release of Jetpack 7.3.
After the Deadline was removed because there are many alternatives on the market. Most are unreliable, but there are a few that can be trusted to let writers know where the embarrassing mistakes lurk.
Grammarly
Grammarly is the best-known and best-regarded grammar checker on the market today. It’s not perfect, but it can spot errors that other checkers miss, and it is available as a browser plugin, a standalone application, and a mobile application on iOS and Android. The browser plugin allows Grammarly to work with WordPress text fields and other web text fields.
One of Grammarly’s best features is how it explains why it has flagged an error, rather than just putting a squiggly line under it and expecting the writer to figure out what’s wrong. It can also fix many errors with a single click.
Grammarly is available both as a free service with basic features and as a paid service with more advanced grammar checking.
Hemingway
Hemingway is less a grammar checker than a style dictator. It highlights what it considers grammatical errors, but its primary goal is simplification. It lets you know when your sentences have become convoluted and flags constructions that are often found in bad writing.
For writers who like to use the full capabilities of the English language, Hemingway can be frustrating. Its idea of clear writing is a little too simple for many, and its standards are arbitrary. McPhee’s articles become a sea of red and yellow when pasted into the Hemingway app (as do the novels of Ernest Hemingway himself).
But, if you find your sentences tend to be overly complicated and difficult for readers to parse, Hemingway is worth checking out.
Google Docs
Google recently added machine-learning powered grammar checking to Google Docs. As you might expect from Google, its grammar checker is based less on traditional rules of grammar and more on an analysis of how language is used in a large corpus of written material.
Docs is not as harsh a grader as either Grammarly or Hemingway, and it sometimes lets glaring errors like word repetitions through, but it’s a welcome addition to a platform that many WordPress users rely on. If you’re a user of Google Docs and WordPress, you may find the Wordable service useful; it can export documents stored in Google Docs to a WordPress site, which ultimately is much better than copying and pasting.
Most web searches are carried out on mobile devices, as they have been for several years. This shift in user behavior shouldn’t be news to any site owner or ecommerce retailer, and nor should Google’s enthusiasm for the mobile platform. The search giant has been cheerleading for mobile-friendly design for the best part of a decade.
This July will see another adjustment in the way Google balances the importance of desktop pages and mobile pages as it will enable mobile-first indexing for all new domains.
There is some confusion about what exactly that means, so it’s worth clarifying what will change and what won’t. The most important point to understand is that there is only one index. Google does not keep separate indexes for desktop sites and mobile sites. All results are drawn from the same index.
What may change is which versions of pages are indexed. Google aims to show mobile users a URL that provides a good mobile experience, and the same is true for desktop users. However, in the past, it was desktop page content that was indexed, not mobile pages.
To put it another way, Google’s web crawlers were based on a desktop browser, so they only saw the desktop version of a site.
Starting the first of July, all new domains will be crawled with a bot based on a mobile browser. It will see the mobile version of web pages, and it’s the mobile version that will be indexed.
What Does Mobile-First Indexing Change?
If you’re wondering what that means for your site, the answer is: probably nothing. The majority of modern WordPress sites, WooCommerce stores, and Magento stores use responsive themes. They send the same page to desktop and mobile browsers, and the layout of the content “responds” to the dimensions of the screen. For sites with responsive design, a mobile-first index changes nothing.
If your site doesn’t have a responsive design and doesn’t have a separate mobile-friendly version of its pages, there will also be no change. In this case, the desktop version is the only version, and that is what will be indexed. However, mobile friendliness is a ranking signal, so if your desktop version doesn’t provide a good user experience on mobile, you can expect to see it rank lower than mobile-friendly sites in mobile search results.
Mobile-first indexing will only affect sites that serve different content to both desktop devices and mobile devices. If a site has separate URLs for desktop and mobile, Google will index the mobile version. If the site dynamically generates different content depending on the user’s device, Google’s bot will see the mobile version, and that’s what will be indexed.
Most sites will not be affected by the change to mobile-first indexing. If your site or ecommerce does serve different content to mobile users, you should take a look at Google’s guidelines and ensure that the mobile version is properly optimized for search.
Consumer-focused retailers were quick to embrace ecommerce when it became a practical sales platform more than two decades ago. Today, the majority of B2C retailers have an ecommerce store. B2B suppliers, however, were slow to adopt ecommerce. B2B sales relationships are quite different to those in the B2C world, often involving contractual negotiations, personal relationships between procurement and sales professionals, and a host of other concerns that don’t apply when selling to consumers.
Even today, it is estimated that 80 percent of manufacturers and distributors process orders manually rather than via an ecommerce store. However, the winds of change are blowing through the B2B commerce space as millennials begin to dominate procurement roles. Half of B2B researchers and buyers are digital natives who expect B2B sales to offer the same convenience as the consumer stores they are familiar with.
Businesses that fail to embrace B2B ecommerce will soon be at a substantial competitive disadvantage compared to their more forward-looking competitors.
Business Buyers Rely on Google
Once upon a time, a procurement professional would pick up the phone and talk to a supplier’s sales advisor when their company wanted to buy a product.
That’s no longer the case. Most B2B product searches start with Google. On average, B2B buyers carry out 12 searches before they interact directly with a potential supplier. If a B2B seller doesn’t have an online presence with a detailed description of their products, they won’t even be on the buyer’s shortlist.
Online Catalogs are Non-Negotiable
A survey conducted earlier this year found that 83 percent of B2B buyers will spend more to make a purchase “from suppliers that offer a robust ecommerce experience.”
Why would they willing to spend more? Because ecommerce reduces the complexity of B2B procurement and the amount of manual labor involved. The cost efficiencies of ecommerce-based procurement are of real value to businesses looking to reduce procurement spending. Buyers are often prepared to pay a little more to suppliers because ecommerce reduces their overall procurement spend.
Ecommerce Offers Easier Integration
We have already noted that business buyers prefer solutions that allow them to find cost efficiencies within the procurement process. That’s why so many businesses have invested in eProcurement and spend management platforms. EProcurement allows businesses to see what they’re spending and where, to implement rigorous procurement policies, and to eliminate manual labor.
However, eProcurement platforms are only as good as the data they have access to.
Many B2B buyers now require suppliers to integrate with their eProcurement platform to automate the transfer of data. They want catalogs, purchase orders, and invoices to move between the buyer and the seller automatically. An ecommerce store makes integration relatively straightforward; there are many solutions that can integrate eProcurement platforms with major ecommerce applications like Magento and WooCommerce.
Businesses without an ecommerce store can’t offer the level of integration buyers expect, and they’re unlikely to win sales from businesses that prefer suppliers who can offer close integration.
A B2B supplier without an ecommerce store is invisible to a large part of the market and unacceptable to many buyers, which puts it at a competitive disadvantage.
One of Craft CMS’s greatest strengths is its collection of high-quality plugins. There may not be as many Craft CMS plugins as there are WordPress plugins, but Craft’s Plugin Store, which was introduced last year with the release of Craft CMS 3, offers a satisfying range of functionality to the already feature-rich content management system.
If you haven’t already, we urge you to spend a few minutes exploring the plugin store. In the meantime, here are five of our favorite plugins.
Feed Me
Feed Me is a content importer for Craft CMS. It can import content from many different sources, including RSS, XML, CSV, and JSON. Feed Me allows users to select field mappings for the files they want to import so that they can map arbitrary data to Craft CMS entries, categories, tags, users, and more.
Feed Me is an incredibly useful tool for developers and designers who need to get information from other sources into Craft CMS. Pixel and Tonic, the developers of Craft CMS, thought the plugin was so useful that they bought it.
CodeMirror
CodeMirror is a full-featured JavaScript code editor that can be embedded into web pages. You have seen CodeMirror in action if you have used Adobe Brackets, Bitbucket, Codepen, or the Firefox Devtools. The CodeMirror Craft CMS plugin brings CodeMirror into Craft CMS as a field type so it can be embedded into any page.
Image Optimize
Image Optimize is — as you may have guessed — a Craft CMS plugin that optimizes images. It performs lossless image optimization on several image types, including JPEG, PNG, SVG, and GIF images. Lossless optimization strips metadata and performs other optimizations that reduce the size of images without impacting their quality. The image optimizations are processed automatically.
SEOMatic
SEOMatic is the leading Craft CMS search engine optimization plugin. Like other SEO plugins, SEOMatic adds information to Craft CMS pages to help search engines understand the content. Among the metadata SEOMatic adds are Facebook Open Graph tags, enhanced sitemaps, robots.txt and humans.txt files, and HTML meta tags. SEOMatic isn’t vital to good SEO on Craft CMS sites, but it helps site owners publish content that has the best possible chance of ranking.
Splash
Splash is a helpful little plugin that provides a search interface for the Unsplash image collection within Craft CMS. Unsplash hosts thousands of high-quality images that are free to download and use with attribution. Chances are, you’re using Unsplash anyway, and the Splash plugin is a pleasant convenience for clients. As the plugin’s developers point out, Splash can “stop clients uploading bad images ever again! (Just kidding, of course they will).”
We’ve looked at five plugins of the several hundred top-notch plugins available from the Craft CMS store. If you’d like to learn more about Craft CMS and Craft CMS hosting on the Hostdedi Cloud, get in touch today.
Choosing the right ecommerce CMS is important. Not only does it influence what you’re able to do, it also allows you to set expectations in terms of development costs and timeframes.
Two applications you’ll be introduced to early on are Magento and WooCommerce. Both are used by an impressive number of stores. WooCommerce has over 3 million stores using it as a platform, while Magento has over 200,000. Both also offer great feature sets that can be expanded easily with extensions, and both have incredibly supportive communities.
So why would you choose one over the other?
This article takes a look at exactly that, by pitting Magento and WooCommerce against each other. If you’re a merchant that still needs to make this choice, then keep reading to find out more.
Summary
Magento Pros and Cons
Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform capable of empowering merchants to create storefronts unlike any other. Originally released March 2008, it has since grown and inspired the release of a new version, Magento 2, in 2015. This version has gone on to become the perfect ecommerce platform for storefronts with a global reach.
Pros
A powerful ecommerce platform capable of creating unique user experiences
Offers more customization options that WooCommerce
An incredible community that, despite being smaller than WooCommerce’s, manages to easily hold its own
True hosting optimization through an optimized Magento hosting provider
Cons
Requires a developer to create a fully functioning storefront
Costs more than a WooCommerce implementation
WooCommerce Pros and Cons
As a plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce comes armed with features that make it great for managing both content and ecommerce. Originally launched in 2011, it has grown to become the most used and versatile ecommerce platform around, with over 3 million active installs worldwide.
Pros
Easy to use and get started with
A huge range of templates and themes for merchants without any coding knowledge
Allows for better integration of the ecommerce and content sections of a site
Cons
Doesn’t afford the same level of customization as Magento
Doesn’t allow for the creation of unique buyer experiences to the same degree as Magento
Lacks some of the truly powerful integrations available
Performance
Questions about speed and power are usually some of the first questions merchants ask. Most of the time, merchants need to prioritize one. That especially holds true when comparing Magento and WooCommerce.
While Magento may offer more in terms of power, it also requires more resources to deliver the same experience as WooCommerce. WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a very lightweight and fast platform, but it lacks a lot of the functionality you’ll find with Magento.
WooCommerce Is Lightweight
We’ll say it again: WooCommerce is lightweight. This means the same hardware and resources can serve more customers with a WooCommerce store than with a Magento one. Take a look at our SIP and SIPWOO plans to see what this means in terms of real numbers.
Magento
WooCommerce
Daily Visitors
5,000
10,000
*Based on a SIP 400 server build.
Despite meaning more customers, the lightweight WooCommerce platform has comparatively limited functionality. When creating a Magento store, merchants are empowered to create integrated, omnichannel journeys, where their online storefront is just a part of the buyer’s experience. With WooCommerce, this just isn’t the case.
WooCommerce lacks an out of the box ability to track activity through other channels and deliver a personalized experience. This feature can be added by installing several plugins. However, any store overloaded with plugins is then going to suffer in terms of performance.
Magento Requires the Right Host
For Magento, it’s important to host with a provider that offers optimized infrastructure. While several providers state that they offer optimized hosting, the reality is that only a handful truly optimize their infrastructure for Magento. Hostdedi is known to offer a truly optimized hosting foundation. Here are four reasons why.
In addition to finding the right hosting provider, the quality of the code used to create a Magento store can also have a significant impact. Poorly edited code and unoptimized extensions can easily cause any server-side optimizations to lose their significance. If you’ve tried everything else and your store is still crawling, it may be a good idea to start a code audit.
Poorly edited Magento code and unoptimized extensions can easily cause any server-side optimizations to lose their significance.
Two Different Performance Bands
Like much of this comparison, Magento and WooCommerce fall into two different performance bands. WooCommerce is a lightweight contender, with comparatively less power behind it, but it is quick and nimble. Magento has much more power behind it, but it needs a lot of support from behind the scenes.
We’re calling this a draw, with the better application’s performance-based specific use cases and what they need: power or speed.
Functionality
Magento has long been known as the ecommerce king of functionality. Not only does it allow for the creation of unique and personalized user journeys, but its integration capabilities are second to none.
With that said, a savvy developer can still get a lot out of WooCommerce. Both applications come with REST API, allowing developers better management of products and orders. This also provides flexibility for developers to build an API that meets the needs of diverse merchants.
The WooCommerce REST API documentation (including hooks, endpoints, filters, and more) can be found here. Similar documentation for Magento can be found here.
WooCommerce Requires WordPress
While the use of REST API with WooCommerce does give it an edge in terms of functionality, the ecommerce platform still isn’t on par with Magento. WooCommerce requires WordPress. With that comes design and functionality limitations you won’t find with Magento.
For most merchants running WooCommerce, this shouldn’t be a problem. While the limitations exist, this hasn’t stopped a lot of merchants from creating unique storefronts that appeal to large customer bases.
Coffeebros.com, for example, has created a storefront that includes discounts, calls to action, and a clean, easy to understand buying experience. Weber.co.za, the grill provider, has also created an easy-to-use store that integrates both their ecommerce and content recipe sections seamlessly.
This is one of the biggest pros for WooCommerce: it lets merchants integrate the content and ecommerce sections of their site seamlessly. This process can be a lot more difficult with Magento.
Magento Powers Global Commerce
Magento powers some of the biggest ecommerce stores in the world. There’s a reason for this: the functionality it offers global retailers.
Magento allows for Global storefronts with regional differences.
HP transformed their selling experience in the Asian Pacific through Magento. They launched five different stores on a single platform, with regional differences and global similarities. This allowed them to meet local requirements for payments, fulfillment, language, and order technicalities, while also optimizing site management with global consistencies.
Rubik’s also managed to create a strong global online presence quickly, using Magento to expand worldwide. Magento’s functionality made it easy for them to spin up new regional storefronts and landing pages. Something which would have been a lot more complicated with other platforms.
Not only does Magento allow for easier access to international markets, but it also enables more in-depth customization of the buyer’s experience. Just take a look at the difference between a typical Magento site and a typical WooCommerce site.
Still the King of Functionality: Magento
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this category goes to Magento. Its ability to customize the buyer’s experience and create unique, international storefronts is something you just can’t do in the same way with WooCommerce. Moreover, with Adobe’s integrations weaving themselves into the Magento ecosystem, its functionality is only going to improve.
Security
Security for an ecommerce store is vital. Not only does it help prevent loss of customer PII, but it also ensures that merchants remain in compliance with the Payment Card Industry standards (PCI Compliance) needed to sell effectively online.
While both applications offer environments backed up by security teams and vigilant communities, WooCommerce suffers from one major disadvantage: WordPress. As a plugin, it is vulnerable to the same exploits as its parent application. In 2018, 57% of web application vulnerabilities identified were from WordPress.
This doesn’t mean Magento has no problems of its own. In research conducted by Astra Security, 62% of Magento stores have at least one security issue. That’s still lower than the 73% of WooCommerce stores reported by EnableSecurity, but only by 10%. These are not complex vulnerabilities, but are easily detected using free automated tools.
So why such large numbers? For many sites, it is because they are out of date. Clunky update processes or simply forgetting are two of the biggest reasons for security vulnerabilities across modern websites.
For this reason, one of the best security features offered is the ability to easily update. Magento security patches aren’t easy to apply when compared with the WooCommerce update process. With WordPress, you can set updates to occur automatically.
73% of WooCommerce stores have at least one security issue.
Despite this, Magento does have a lot of positive security features going for it, including:
Enhanced password management
Cross-site scripting (XSS) attack prevention
Flexible file ownership and permissions
Non-default Magento Admin URL
Two-Step Verification
The Magento 1 End of Life Impact on Security
Magento can be split into two versions: Magento 1 and Magento 2. Each is largely unique, in that moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2 requires replatforming. Currently, a large percentage of Magento stores are still on Magento 1.
In June 2020, official security support for the Magento 1 platform will cease. This means security will become a pressing concern for merchants still on the platform. If you’re a Magento 1 merchant looking for alternatives, we recommend reviewing your options and downloading the After M1 guide.
Security Compromises
Security is never simple. The nature of vulnerabilities means that every application’s community needs to remain vigilant. WooCommerce offers some great security features for automating the update process and keeping everything up to date. However, it also has a lot more vulnerabilities to begin with thanks to running on WordPress.
Magento has better security tools and features, despite patches being hard to implement and take full advantage of.
Despite its flaws, Magento wins this category due to providing a better security experience overall, but WooCommerce is a close second.
Design and Templates
Before a site can go live, a merchant needs to decide on design. Without design there is no site (at least, not an attractive one).
With WooCommerce, this is an easy process. There is a large selection of templates and pre-designed themes available. Taking these and tweaking them to individual requirements is a quick process, making the time from ideation to creation much faster than with Magento.
Magento does have a limited number of templates. However, these are relatively simple when compared with what Magento can do. They also are not particularly attractive. To take advantage of the platform, most merchants will need to hire a developer to design and code their site.
Headless Possibilities
Design becomes a lot more complicated when headless implementations are considered. For Magento merchants, the application’s API makes implementation a relatively simple process. There are several headless Magento sites already using headless architecture to deliver unique user experiences.
Headless architecture allows for stores to utilize an optimized ecommerce API and flexible front-end design.
For examples of live Magento sites currently using PWA, you can take a look at Alaskan Harvest or Soomzone.com. Both of these sites effectively leverage the Magento API to create unique JavaScript front-end experiences.
With WooCommerce already being a plugin, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to use it in a headless implementation. Instead, it may make more sense for merchants looking towards headless WordPress to opt for something like BigCommerce instead.
WooCommerce vs Magento: Template vs Design
WooCommerce, with its huge library of themes, is much better in terms of templates. Magento, with its expansive functionality, is ultimately much better in terms of design (with the caveat that you need a developer).
If you’re a small business with a limited budget, we recommend using WooCommerce and taking advantage of its themes and templates. If you’re a medium-sized store though, Magento’s design capabilities offer a lot of advantages in terms of UX and improving your bottom line.
Extensions and Plugins
While an application needs to have great out of the box functionality, it’s also important to be able to expand and customize it with plugins or extensions. Today, almost all CMS offer plugins or extensions in one form or another; WooCommerce and Magento are no exception.
In terms of numbers, WooCommerce wins due to having access to the WordPress plugin library. However, these plugins are not all optimized for WooCommerce.
Magento, on the other hand, has over 4,700 plugins optimized specifically for its ecommerce platform. Not only that, but Magento’s extensions provide a lot of in-depth customization that you can’t find with WooCommerce.
Magento extensions allow for merchants to:
Upgrade internal search functionality
Build custom checkout experiences
Improve sorting and categorization functionality
Create up-sell and cross-sell campaigns
Customize shipping and fulfillment options
Dedicated WooCommerce extensions are relatively light. They provide some useful social and payment integrations, some basic enhancements, and a few useful shipping and fulfillment extensions. Overall though, the options are not as powerful or diverse as Magento, despite growing quickly.
When it comes to extensions, Magento is still the better application in terms of functionality, with a huge range of diverse extensions available to suit all merchant needs. However, like most things Magento, they also come with a much larger price tag than their WooCommerce counterparts.
Product Management
Managing an ecommerce store means managing products. That includes how, when, and where they are delivered to customers. Many ecommerce stores today deliver personalized buyer journeys, setting the bar high.
It’s Magento’s advanced functionality that shines here. In addition to offering merchants the ability to provide regional deviations in product delivery, it also allows for the creation of unique journeys within a specific area. This includes up-sells and cross-sells. While this functionality can be added to with the use of extensions, the default feature is powerful in its own right.
WooCommerce doesn’t offer the same flexibility. What it does provide are:
Categories
Attributes
Types
Extensions can be added to provide more functionality, but in terms of user journeys, the same level of personalization can’t be reached with a WooCommerce store. For smaller stores with a limited number of SKUs, this is fine. For larger stores with a lot of SKUs, this can lead to a drastically reduced conversion rate.
Magento Is Great for Medium-Sized Stores Looking for Great Functionality
Magento does what it does best when a merchant wants a custom implementation. It allows for unequaled exploration of the buyer’s journey and creates personalized sales funnels tailored right down to the individual.
Unfortunately, this level of customization and functionality has meant that it requires a development team to support its full range of capabilities. Implementing its best features needs to be planned down to specifics. So while it will likely increase your bottom line and lead to a surge in sales, it also takes investment to get you there.
As a result, we recommend Magento for medium and large-sized businesses looking to continue growth. If you’re interested in getting started, take a look at our Magento cloud hosting solutions and talk to a member of the Hostdedi team today.
WooCommerce Is Great for Smaller Stores Looking For Ease of Use
WooCommerce really shines in how easy it is to get started and manage. Not only does it provide a great ecommerce storefront, it also provides and equally create content management tool.
However, it doesn’t provide the same level of store customization as Magento. For that reason, we recommend WooCommerce to smaller stores. If you think that means you, see our WooCommerce cloud hosting solutions.
Readers with long memories will recall the suspicion the cloud was greeted with when it was first introduced more than a decade ago. Site owners who managed their servers doubted that cloud vendors could do a better job, especially where security is concerned. Who knew what lurked beneath the virtualization layer? In subsequent years, as cloud platforms came to dominate the infrastructure hosting world, concerns about their security largely evaporated.
In 2019, most companies run most of their infrastructure in the cloud. The benefits of cloud infrastructure have proven immense for improving reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency for everyone from boutique ecommerce retailers to the largest online stores. Cloud adoption has not resulted in widely exploited vulnerabilities. Servers are still hacked, and data is still leaked, but the exploited vulnerabilities are almost at the application or database layer, not at the virtualization layer or in the underlying physical hardware.
However, no platform is entirely secure, including the cloud. Last year, the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities hit the headlines. Flaws in some CPUs allowed malicious users who could run code on a server to access sensitive information owned by other cloud users. This year, further vulnerabilities were discovered, including ZombieLoad, which could allow an attacker to steal data recently processed by a CPU.
All servers with affected processors are vulnerable to this type of attack, but because cloud platforms are shared computing environments, the risks are higher. A malicious user could exploit the vulnerability by running code in their cloud environment, accessing the information of other cloud users hosted on the same server.
Does this mean the cloud is no longer secure?
No. In fact, cloud platforms like the Hostdedi Cloud are still the most secure infrastructure hosting option. While processor vulnerabilities like ZombieLoad are a real problem for the hosting industry, cloud platforms are best placed to protect their users.
Cloud platforms have access to greater technical expertise. Building a secure cloud platform is not easy, and cloud platforms are not equally secure. However, we have staff developers and system administrators who have decades of experience with infrastructure security. They understand what the risks are and how to manage them. Few hosting clients have access to such breadth and depth of knowledge.
Patches are applied to all servers quickly. When news of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities broke, Hostdedi quickly patched its servers and released a blog article explaining what was happening. We follow the same procedure for all vulnerabilities that might impact our cloud hosting clients. Ecommerce retailers and other businesses running on owned servers cannot react with the same speed and agility.
Platforms like the Hostdedi Cloud are not secure by default; they are secure because engineers build and maintain them, constantly monitoring security threats and reacting accordingly. Our cloud platform is secure because security is our top priority. That’s not true of most businesses, which is why owned infrastructure tends to be less secure than cloud infrastructure. Bloggers want to blog and ecommerce retailers want to sell. But we’re obsessive about security, and that’s why our cloud platform is the secure hosting choice.