There has been an increase in buyers, but there are also more sellers. In 2020 alone over 9000 new NZ ecommerce stores
have started operations. This is from the NZ Ecommerce Association. From another research by NZ post, 170,000 adult New
Zealanders shopped from Ecommerce stores for the first time during the first 6 months of 2020. The demand for shopping
online has drastically increased in 2020. During the coronavirus induced lockdown rest of NZ’s population learned the
convenience of online shopping. Even during level 4 while only essential products were being sold ecommerce traffic went
through the roof.
Why SEO matters for an Ecommerce website?
Around 44% of users start their online shopping journey on Google. This is a massive number that cannot be ignored.
Having the best website or product isn’t the most important thing to increase ecommerce store revenue but the ability to
drive relevant traffic to your ecommerce website. This is where we ecommerce SEO can help your business.
The most common ecommerce platforms used in New Zealand and how SEO impacts them:
BigCommerce is a top ecommerce platform that allows you to create an online store with thousands of products for a
monthly fee. Most tools come built in which reduces the necessity to use external apps. The BigCommerce backend has a
specific panel for SEO which helps you cover the basics.
BigCommerce’s SEO features are quite flexible and easy to use but like every other platform they do come with its own set of flaws. The redirect
functionality doesn’t allow you to manipulate multiple redirects efficiently and the standard sitemap generated by
BigCommerce cannot be manipulated to better suit enterprise level businesses.
Shopify is another ecommerce platform for small to medium businesses that allow you to create an online store for a
monthly fee. Shopify is great for SEO, easy to use and covers almost all the bases.
Major disadvantages of Shopify SEO are that they don’t allow you to change architecture of your ecommerce store. This can be a hindrance for medium to
larger ecommerce stores that require a specific structure to align with their business.
WordPress is a free platform that is not specific for Ecommerce and can be used for any business/blog. WooCommerce is an
open-source ecommerce plugin which is the most popular way to manage a WordPress ecommerce store. WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box and can be manipulated in any way to achieve the required outcome.
The biggest flaw with WordPress is that there are too many hands involved on the website. Too many third-party plugins
which can break during updates and create security flaws. These plugins tend to bloat the website with HTTP requests
which can slow down the website.
Talk to an Ecommerce SEO Specialist
To talk a company who specialise in Ecommerce SEO, contact Online Asset Partners to speak to one of their Ecommerce Specialists. Online Asset Partners are based in Ponsonby, Auckland.