We’ve improved Ecwid’s SEO: stores on Ecwid Starter sites will rank higher in search engines and get more free organic traffic.
In case you didn’t know, each Ecwid user has a one-page website with a built-in online store. Ecwid can be embedded on any website, Facebook, Instagram, or marketplaces, but what makes our Starter site great is that it’s ready to sell within minutes of a no-brainer setup and is perfect for a quick launch.
You can attract customers to your Ecwid Starter site by different means, including free methods like search engine promotion. We have made Ecwid websites more Google-friendly, so it takes much less time and effort for your Ecwid Starter site to get indexed and rank higher on the search results page.
If you know your way around SEO and indexing, feel free to jump to the Ecwid updates now. And if you have added Ecwid E-Commerce to your own website, stay tuned for the updates.
Why SEO is Important
Search engine optimization is what you do to get your website as high as possible on the search engine results page to generate free traffic to your online store. Picture this: a user Googles a product and sees your store first, not someone else’s. In this case, you get the most clicks, and many of them can result in purchases. That’s why you need SEO.
There’s 644 million websites on the internet, so yours won’t get to the top of Google naturally. You have to enter the race for the sweet spot by working on your website SEO: collect keywords that customers use to find your products, include them in your product titles and descriptions, use only original and unique website content, advertise it, and make others want to link to it on their resources. That’s quite a bunch of work, so before doing it, you want to make sure the search engine actually "sees" your website and can index it.
Three New SEO Features for Ecwid Starter Sites
We have been working for a long time to make Ecwid stores better for search engines, and now we have released important updates that will improve the indexing of all stores running on Ecwid Starter Sites:
1. Smooth and fast indexation
We’ve improved the visibility of Ecwid store pages for Google so that it understands their content much better and can index them faster. Your customers will not notice anything — your store pages look the same to them.
Also, to get the most important store pages indexed first, we hide content that customers won’t search for (so search engines don’t need it either). For example, it can be the cart page, account page, and other service pages.
Ecwid automatically shows the search engine what to index and what not (service pages mentioned above) in the robots.txt text file. All Ecwid Starter Sites have it.
2. Sitemap helps search engines discover your content
Sitemap is a file of links to all pages of your site. With this file, the site owner shows the search engine all the existing links of the site in one document. That way, search robots do not need to look for product pages themselves, browsing categories, subcategories, and beyond. Sitemap simplifies and speeds up indexing. We update it every day, which means that search engines will quickly find out about all the changes you have made in the store.
Without a sitemap, indexing a website takes more time: nobody can tell when the search engine crawls all the site links on its own.
In Ecwid stores, the sitemap is generated automatically and includes the store’s homepage and all the category and product pages.
To view your sitemap, type "/sitemap.xml" after your website domain in your address bar (for example, myshop.ecwid.com/sitemap.xml):
The automatic Sitemap feature is available for Starter Sites on all Ecwid paid plans.
3. Microformats transform page content into rich Google snippets
Microformats are a set of tags that you can add to the HTML code of your web page to help search engines understand its structure and display it correctly in the search engine results page.
Compare these two snippets:
The rich snippet is more compelling to users as they see what’s called social proof (in the form of a star rating) and promo details. With microformats, you too can point Google to your page titles, headings, reviews, descriptions, prices, etc.
Ecwid uses the Schema.org — a standard markup worked out in a collaboration of popular search engines. And voila, it’s added to all Ecwid store pages automatically.
More Ecwid SEO Tools
Make sure you also use the other Ecwid SEO tools and features:
- Clean SEO-friendly store URLs: Ecwid store links are free from extra characters. Easy-to-read, user-friendly links are clear to search engines and can be the reason for the higher ranking of a site in search results. For Starter sites, these links are enabled by default (if you’ve got Ecwid on other websites, please enable clean URLs using our guide.)
- Custom meta tags for products: control how exactly Google displays your product pages in the search snippets with custom meta titles and descriptions.
- Site verification in Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a special service that helps to launch site indexing and monitor it. To start using the service, you must confirm that you are the owner of your site.
- Rich social snippets for product pages: This feature doesn’t impact SEO directly, but it makes links shared on social media and messengers more compelling to your potential customers. On Ecwid Starter Site, each product page link has a title, image, and description. No actions on your side to set it up.
- Managing indexation of different storefronts: Ecwid Starter Site gets indexed automatically, but if you’ve added Ecwid E-Commerce to another website (on WordPress, Wix, or another platform) and you don’t want your Starter Site to duplicate its content, you can hide it from search engines by disabling its indexation in Control Panel → Starter Site.
Your Actions
Here’s what you can do right now to see noticeable improvements in your Ecwid Starter Site SEO soon:
- Get your Ecwid Starter Site verified in Google Search Console to start measuring your site’s search traffic and performance.
- Add Your Sitemap to the Search Console to help Google discover the right content on your site.
- Write good SEO-friendly copy on the first tile of your Starter Site. Not only should it provide value and be compelling to your customers; it should also include keywords that they use to find your products. Check out how to build keywords for your store and how to design your Starter Site if you need help.
- Register your store in Google My Business. Complete these steps to improve your local SEO and increase visibility in your area.
- Be sure to create unique product descriptions spiced with target keywords.
- Regularly share links to your store on different social media and try to get other websites to post links to your store too.
SEO takes time, and the result is not immediately visible. But if you decide to optimize your Ecwid store for search results, Starter site is completely ready for it. If your Ecwid store is embedded to a different website, see how you can improve your store SEO and stay tuned for the updates.