Shopify vs WordPress SEO: Which One is Best for You? [2024]

Search Engine Optimization is the art of ranking high on the Search Engine Results Page. SEO basics lie in how and in what various ways a website can provide a structured plan for search engines to crawl and read the data. Popular search engines like Google and Bing use crawling and add them into their index database to rank the data based on parameters such as relevant keywords, tags, etc. While using platforms such as Shopify and WordPress, every business is keen on who wins the battle of Shopify vs. WordPress SEO!

When a large audience shifted online during the Covid-19 pandemic, the need to rank higher increased with time. While SEO is a bunch of best practices that keep your precious website in line with the visitor’s searches, a healthy SEO-optimized website will rank higher on the result page for relevant search terms.

Take your SEO efforts to the next level using our curated list of best free SEO tools.

Google gets billions of searches these days, and to think of growing organically in a competitive market, requires the best SEO practices. 😀

Contents

• Why Is SEO Important?
• Shopify SEO
  • Pros Of Shopify SEO
  • Cons Of Shopify SEO
• WordPress SEO
  • Pros of WordPress SEO
  • Cons of WordPress SEO
• Final Take: Shopify Vs WordPress SEO

Why Is SEO Important?

Before we start the WooCommerce vs Shopify SEO comparison, let’s consider understanding why SEO is important.

When you list your website on Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster, the search engines utilize web crawlers to read the content on your site and include it in the database index. The websites are reflected on the results page in the order of their ranking. The rank awarded is Google’s opinion of your website; clear and sharp mapping of your pages with the most relevant content will get a higher rank. A higher rank on the SERPs allows you to serve your audience with the pieces of information you want, leading to higher ROI.

Most users open the first five results that appear when they enter a search term. People searching for the keywords relevant to your business automatically becomes your audience that voluntarily looks for the service. Since your target audience is searching for them, you are bound to optimize your web pages for these terms.

Through SEO practices, websites can pave the way for Google to rank them higher and serve the purpose. Search engines are smart enough to organize just the right content for the audience, but a little help from you can never go wrong.

Search engine optimization can help your website become a go-to destination for anyone looking for the services your business provides. Before we jump into the differences between Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO, let’s first look at their SEO in-built capabilities.

Shopify SEO

Shopify is being used by more than 4.5 million live websites worldwide. Many popular brands use Shopify.

More than building a gorgeous store, efforts to make it visible to your customers are an essential aspect. Shopify SEO is a set of methods to optimize the score of your Shopify website, which will lead to higher organic traffic and increased sales.

You can also use third-party applications to help you rank better. It has numerous methods through which any vendor can improve the rank, like the site structure, sprinkling with the right keywords, and building backlinks to the website. Shopify provides ample opportunities to grow online reach.

Pros Of Shopify SEO

1. Premium Search Engine Optimization

Shopify has some great built-in SEO features which are easy to use and not much technical. It automatically generates your sitemap. A sitemap is the blueprint of your site that helps the search engine crawl through it. You wouldn’t want the search engine penalizing you with lower ranks because it was harder for crawlers to go in, and they could not index certain parts because they were not accessible quickly.

Other features include canonical instructions, 301 redirects, URL customization, etc. Good SEO helps you overcome your competitor through a higher rank in the same niche. These high-end features let you perform Shopify SEO optimization by yourself.

2. Mobile Optimization

Internet users nowadays want everything to be accessible through their phones.

For a website to be successful, it should be responsive and work flawlessly across the platforms. Mobile optimization is also another factor Google uses to rank your website, making it pivotal to work on small screens. Shopify gives you the advantage of providing mobile-friendly themes optimized to be ranked higher.

3. High Speed

Shopify is a lightweight model software that relies on adaptive applications. It is faster than many other eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce. Loading time is also one of the parameters that Google uses to rank your website. Shopify supports built-in caching, which saves a cached copy of the web page every time a customer visits which helps it save the loading time.

You can do various things to make it load faster, like checking up on your theme and font, lowering the resolution of your images, and installing a lazy loader.

4. SSL Certificates

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a typical protocol file that encrypts, secures, and authenticates all communications on World Wide Web. They include the website owner’s details and are installed on a website’s origin server. Shopify issues SSL certificates as a part of its subscription. SSL certificates are a ranking factor for search engines to identify a website.

5. Third-Party Apps

There are plenty of Shopify apps that can help you increase traffic to your site and can help you streamline the techniques well. The applications can reduce the labor of putting the method to work yourself. If you deliver the content a user is searching for, you become a part of their trusted cycle, where they keep coming to get the answers.

Cons Of Shopify SEO

1. Expensive Applications

Shopify is expensive software to keep, but keeping in mind that Shopify websites are eCommerce stores, it is different from a standard website with loads of content. The applications that you need to install to make it suit your product also come with a pricey tag. Without those applications, you have a primary store with limited SEO operations.

Shopify has numerous applications like SEO Doctor, which starts at $14.99/month, SEO Booster at $ 39/month, and Smart SEO at $29.99/month. While vendors already pay for premium Shopify themes and applications to support their store, an additional SEO application may seem unaffordable for some.

2. URL Customization Limits 

For any website to flourish visibly, its URL should be well-refined. Messy and long URLs that contain nonsensical alphanumeric characters may puzzle the search engine and the users.

For instance, which of the following URL gives the idea of its content:

• https://example.com/shopify-vs-wordpress-seo.html
• https://example.com/post-7202-shopify-vs-wordpress-seo.html

Of course, the first URL.

Search engines utilize this same principle and index a site higher with precise URLs. Shopify does not provide much space for your eCommerce store URL customization.

3. Less In-Built Features

Shopify SEO techniques depend tremendously on third-party app support. It has fewer in-house features, making users highly doubt the functionality. However, it has a good supply of applications, but the reliance is too much. Shopify has many features to help you optimize the store, but those are what Shopify wants to offer you.

You cannot technically refine it after a limit as it is a closed platform. The given hierarchy is fixed and cannot be tweaked further to add subcategories. This works fine with small businesses, but it becomes difficult for larger companies with many products to organize them effectively.

4. Low Space For Blogs

Since Shopify is essentially a transactional website, there is little space for you to write down content in blog posts. A more significant part of SEO is the content covering keywords around your niche, and blogs allow us to sprinkle relevant keywords and get higher ranks.

Nevertheless, if you choose this platform for setting up your online store, you can take help from some of the free Shopify SEO apps & tools available in the market to make it more search engine-friendly.

WordPress SEO

WordPress hosts many websites like blogs, personal websites, business/commercials, online marketplace, portfolios, and so on. This free and open-source software revolutionized the content market and hosts more than 43.2% of the websites on the Internet today.

WooCommerce is a premium plugin that WordPress provides for eCommerce websites. It is slightly different in hosting aspects and provides long-term maintainability. It is famous for being a simple and easier-to-understand website plugin. As it is hosted through WordPress servers, WooCommerce is said to have a powerful Content Management System (CMS). Let us understand the pros and cons of WordPress SEO in detail.

Pros Of WordPress SEO

1. SEO Optimized Code

One thing WordPress is famous for is its stronghold over SEO aspects. Users get various options to tweak the website and get relevant results. It lets you edit your WooCommerce store’s metadata and attach various plugins to ensure a highly optimized website. Unlike Shopify, which does not allow access after a specific limit, you can download numerous plugins to access all the source code on a WooCommerce website.

2. Blogging Support

If there’s one thing WordPress is exceptionally famous for, it is blogs. It is where this content management system beats its competitor in the SEO WordPress vs Shopify comparison.

It revolutionized the content marketing industry, and many favorite bloggers today have started their journey through WordPress-backed blogging. The WordPress-based store allows you to own your SEO aspect wholly. Essential SERPs are blog posts nowadays, which makes them a key attraction of organic traffic. Not having enough space to write about service is a significant disadvantage.

3. Better URL Customization

We already know how important it is to have an understandable URL. With WordPress, you can better control your permalinks that can be understood easily by the Search Engine crawler. Customization availabilities with WooCommerce are endless.

4. SEO Applications

WordPress SEO gets a substantial boost with external third-party plugins that empower your SEO game further. One of the most popular applications is the Yoast SEO plugin which lets you customize website aspects like the name, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc.

Cons Of WordPress SEO

1. Manual Expertise Needed

While working with a self-hosted WordPress website, you must understand how things on WordPress work. WordPress has more manual work than Shopify, which was built to have low technical web hosting requirements. Many details are to be manually set in WordPress, and you may find yourself in doubt while working with it for the first time. Check out our expert tips for WordPress SEO.

2. Lower Customer Support

WordPress lacks the facility to call the customer support team. To get your queries answered, submit a ticket on the support forum. If the problem still exists, you will have to manually search for a solution on the platform.

3. Low Speed

While Shopify offers a high-speed storefront, WordPress lags in this section. WooCommerce often faces the wrath of hosting server problems and takes time to load due to its highly tweaked user source codes. Its speed also gets lowered due to poor site plugins and image resolution problems.

4. Unresponsive Themes

When it comes to website themes, WooCommerce lets you choose from the available collections, but many of the themes are not mobile-friendly. Considering the amount of risk it possesses for any website owner if the user tries to access it through a smartphone, it is a significant disadvantage.

Final Take: Shopify Vs WordPress SEO

Healthy SEO practices will always yield the dream results when employed consistently. Shopify and WordPress are the best eCommerce platforms introduce newer changes to let users get the most out of them. While the debate around Shopify vs. WordPress SEO has been going around for a while, it is harder to choose one of them.

The choice of platform should depend on your business needs. While WordPress provides complete control over your SEO aspects, Shopify lets you finish it in no time. On the other side, WordPress has much space to add your content, while Shopify comes with plenty of useful apps. If Shopify has a speedy loading time, WordPress shines in the content marketing area, and these two platforms provide state-of-the-art SEO accommodations to boost the rank of your store.

After examining Shopify SEO vs WordPress SEO, choosing any of them solely depends upon your requirements. You should always consider going through every aspect of the platforms. Considering your budget can help determine the right platform for your business store. You can choose WordPress to have more of a personalized brand, but if you want your site to have premium features, Shopify will do the work for you.

The decision can also be determined by how much technical knowledge you are ready to put on. While WordPress has a ton of space to perform SEO best practices manually, Shopify has many tools that work with just a click. While both support third-party applications, your needs may demand more in-house features like WordPress.

All in all, it depends on your needs of the business store. For people seeking high technical requirements, Shopify can be an answer, and for individuals who want a more customizable website to build their brand story, WordPress has your back.

 

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