SEO has become more important than ever before. Ensuring your website gets discovered organically by search engines can make a massive difference in how well your business performs and reaches those who are looking for your product or service.
Along with being discovered, ensuring your website has a great user interface, is easy to navigate, has a good mobile experience, and ensuring the website is fast is more crucial than ever.
Luckily there are some excellent website platforms or content management systems (CMS) that are designed with basic SEO fundamentals in mind, but which CMS platform is the best for SEO?
The three platforms we will review are WordPress, Squarespace, & Shopify.
WordPress
WordPress is probably the most complicated of the 3 platforms but also allows for the most customization through various plugins, which can assist in website optimizations, improving website speed, compression of code, and images to allow for an overall faster experience. The must-have plugin for anyone using the platform is Yoast. Yoast makes the process of adding SEO titles and meta descriptions for each page quite seamless and easy.
While WordPress is a great CMS, it is also a little more complicated than some of our other options here, especially if you aren’t very tech-savvy. If you do have some knowledge or comfort working with any kind of CMS, there probably isn’t a better option for your overall SEO efforts, for most businesses.
For e-commerce websites using WordPress, it can be a little more challenging as it does involve adding more plugins and then ensuring those are set up correctly.
Squarespace
Squarespace is probably the easiest of the platforms to navigate. It offers an easy setup with all the core SEO functions built into the platform, so there is no need to install and set up any kind of third-party apps or plugins.
The basic setup allows you to update the meta description and SEO title for any page. The only tricky part of using this platform is adding alt tags (referred to as alt text in Squarespace). Depending on where you are optimizing the image they may also call it description, file, or caption.
Squarespace sites are also usually well optimized for website speeds and usually provide a smooth user experience with very few glitches. There are additional apps for those in the higher tier of the Squarespace platform, but none of it is necessary for a smooth setup on the basic tier.
Shopify
When it comes to e-commerce websites/businesses there probably isn’t a better platform than Shopify. This is the type of platform the company founders envisioned when they had difficulty finding snowboarding products and then even setting up their own website for e-commerce.
They were looking to create an easy online platform that would make it easy for any business owner to set up an e-commerce website with basic SEO functionality added and not much hassle.
With Shopify, you have access to a variety of apps and integrations for a smoother e-commerce experience, easy setup of inventory, including setting up drop-shipping. The website platform makes the process of optimizing SEO tiles easy, as they are automatically generated.
Adding custom SEO optimizations can be a little bit of a clunky operation versus the other two platforms.
The process of starting an e-commerce business through the Shopify platform with basic built-in SEO optimizations could not be easier, but if you are not an e-commerce business, then the website platform can be a little clunky at times, and you are most likely better served with either Squarespace or WordPress.
As you can see these are all excellent SEO platforms with their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the users’ skill level and the type of website they need for their business or own personal website.
For those business owners who either still find this process intimidating or don’t have the time or resources to dive deep into their website’s SEO, Jelly Marketing has you covered with our SEO Services.
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Insights, Marketing Insights, Marketing Tips, SEO, Website
