SEO in WordPress and Shopify

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital to the performance of

any website.
Without good visibility in search results, you can’t really expect
much in the way of traffic or sales. Yes, you can use Adwords to
drive traffic to your site, but a decent placement in organic
search results is in most cases vital to the long-term success of
an online business.
If we’re dealing with general content (static pages and posts),
I’d argue that WordPress is definitely the winner in the SEO
department in a WordPress vs Shopify shootout.
For a start, WordPress allows you to install Yoast, one of the
best SEO tools available. This tool analyses your content in
some depth from an SEO perspective, and outputs a list of key
steps you can take to improve the quality of your pages and
posts.
The Yoast plugin for WordPress gives you a complete overview
of all the things you should do to improve the SEO of a piece of
content.
On top of that, it allows you to create SEO-friendly sitemaps and
set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content (something
Google very much approves of).
WordPress is also better for creating clean URLs (short, simple
URL structures that Google likes).
And because a WordPress site can be hosted on any server, you
can choose a super-fast one; you aren’t restricted to the shared
hosting on Shopify (which, whilst acceptable from a speed point
of view, is not necessarily the fastest available). ‘Page speed’ is
important because it’s a ranking signal, with faster-loading sites
given preference in search results.
How good the e-commerce SEO side of things is on
WordPress, however, depends very much on your chosen e-
 commerce solution. When you’re deciding which solution to go
for, some key things to watch out for are:
 How editable the titles, meta descriptions and alt text are
on your product pages
 How ‘clean’ you can make the product page URLs
 How fast your product pages load
 Whether or not you can use AMP to display products
You should ensure that whichever plugin you use to handle e-
commerce on your WordPress site is robust with regard to all of
these.

Shopify vs WordPress: conclusion

Ultimately, WordPress is unquestionably a better-established

and more flexible platform than Shopify. It’s got a significantly
bigger user base and a much greater selection of themes and
apps to choose from; given the right skills and resources, you
can basically build any sort of website you like with WordPress.
That is not to say, however, that it’s right for every user— there
are times when Shopify will be the better choice, particularly for
those who have low budgets or lack web design skills.
If content production and management is a key concern
for you – for example, if you wanted to run a sophisticated
magazine site with a store on the side – then there is a LOT to
be said for going the WordPress route. Its blogging
functionality, content archiving and content management
system are all significantly more flexible and sophisticated than
Shopify’s offerings in these areas.
It’s fair to say that WordPress has an edge in the SEO
department too: the fact that you can use Yoast, choose your
own hosting and create cleaner URLs for your content gives it a
bit of an edge over Shopify.