The Best Ecommerce Platforms for SEO in Canada

With an overall score of 4.6/5 in our independent research, Wix reigns supreme in our ecommerce platforms for SEO. It has a wealth of SEO tools that are already built-in to its interface, meaning you no longer need to install third-party apps or plug-ins to rank well on search engines! 

It's also intuitive and beginner-friendly, thanks to the Wix SEO Wiz, which gives you step-by-step SEO prompts. It'll assist you with setting up the fundamentals and demonstrates how to improve your online presence by highlighting weak points and providing helpful SEO tips. It is worth noting that Squarespace, which scores 4.3/5 in our research, does not offer prompts like this but it does have a faster server response time than Wix, which is also crucial to SEO as Google drops sites that tend to load slower in its rankings.

Wix integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console – the gold standard of website analytics! With these, you can easily track your SEO performance, from click-through rates to website impressions. You can also get insights into which sites receive and send traffic to your page, including the bounce rate, timeline, and other aspects of your website. 

It recently integrated with SEMRush and improved its page-level SEO settings, allowing you to customize technical SEO factors, like structured data on a page-by-page basis from a single settings page. However, you have to add structured data manually, which can be tricky and time-consuming, especially since it requires code. Here, we'd recommend our ecommerce top scorer Shopify (4.7/5). Shopify offers Smart SEO in its app store, automatically providing detailed structured data for Google and other search engines, allowing them to better understand your website’s niche. However, Shopify does not have keyword support, which is already integrated into Wix. 

Our research may have hailed Squarespace as the Design Guru because of its rich catalog of website design tools, it can also “square” up with its competitors with its SEO features. With an overall score of 4.3/5 in our research, we found that Squarespace has stellar keyword support!

Squarespace has a Keyword Search Analytics panel available on all of its plans. With this, you can see which keywords drive traffic to your site. With this data you can curate your website for your target market. It is worth mentioning that even though Wix offers keyword support, it only analyzes your keyword rankings, which is a considerable difference from what Squarespace offers. 

It’s also mobile-friendly, which ticks another box in the SEO checklist. Sites that are more mobile-responsive rank higher on Google. However, we’ll hand it to Wix since it enables you to edit how your site looks both on mobile and desktop with just a single click, thanks to its Page Layout Optimizer. 

Still, Squarespace packs a punch with its 0.5-second server response time, faster than Google’s recommended 0.6 seconds and below. Since Squarespace loads your website and all its contents more quickly than Wix, Google will prioritize it higher in its rankings, which can help you earn higher click-through rates.

Our independent research sees BigCommerce as the third-best ecommerce platform in Canada, with an overall score of 4.4/5. 

When it comes to SEO, our researchers named BigCommerce as the best for advanced SEO as it dives deeper into the Google Algorithm, which typically involves metadata, structured data, and all the complicated codes on the backend. 

BigCommerce's themes automatically incorporate microdata or "rich snippets" in your pages. Microdata adds a layer of vital information to your pages, such as ratings, price, brand, or stock level, as they appear on search engines. This can help improve your click-through rates in your online store.

Another helpful feature is the content delivery network (CDN), which helps your pages load faster, allowing people to comfortably explore your online store with a lengthy wait. With CDN servers in Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, your website’s pages should load at lightning speed, no matter the location. 

As a comprehensive ecommerce platform and website builder, you can let out your creative flair with its vast theme options up for grabs. What gives Bigcommerce the upper hand is that it doesn't have any transaction fees, which is a major plus for budding businesses that want to waive as many fees as possible! 

Unfortunately, it has an Achilles’ heel. You can't do keyword research with BigCommerce. You can only integrate it with keyword research tools, like SEMRush, to find the keywords to include in your content. Since keywords are also a confirmed Google ranking factor, we recommend Squarespace, which scores an overall 4.3/5 in our independent research. Squarespace uses Keyword Search Analytics to analyze the keywords that drive traffic to your website and shows you how it's performing on search engines. 

Shopify, which scores an overall 4.7/5 in our in-depth ecommerce research, is best known for its diverse app store. It's home to the SEO boosters you need to help your online store rank higher in Google search results. Shopify offers a bountiful selection of 167 SEO apps and plug-ins to help optimize your store and generate traffic. BigCommerce (4.4/5), which we named the best for advanced SEO management in our research, only has 10 options. 

These apps and plug-ins crack the SEO code all too well, so you no longer have to focus all of your time optimizing your pages to help make an excellent first impression on Google. SEOMetriks, for example, allows you to spy on your competitors' websites to compare traffic and analyze performance. It also monitors how a product performs on Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, and other social media platforms. But the downside is that it’s pricey. To unlock these apps, you have to pay a monthly fee in addition to your subscription fees.

Another disadvantage to Shopify is that it does not have keyword support. As such, your only choice is to pay a little extra for SEO plug-ins that can research and analyze keywords that will help increase your ranking. It would be better for your pocket to opt for an ecommerce platform with keyword tools that are built-in, like Wix (4.6/5). Wix gives you access to excellent keyword research tools, like SEMRush, which researches the suitable keywords for your site.

With an overall score of 4.4/5 in our independent research, Square is the best ecommerce platform for affordability because it’s an economical yet power-packed ecommerce platform. It lets you unlock all the ecommerce essentials sans the costly price tags. For a fraction of the price of its competitors you get all the basics, like social media integration, custom metadata, and canonical tags.

Square also integrates with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, like Wix (4.6/5). Moreover, it provides SEO tips and guides on the Square Support Center to help you get started with boosting your website.

It is also worth noting that Square’s free plan allows you to sell using social media platforms, access its website builder, sync with its point of sale (POS), and integrate with various payment methods, like Apple Pay and Google Pay. As such, we named it in our research.

However, there are lots of limitations to Square's SEO. It doesn’t offer keyword support or SEO-specific apps. It also does not have SEO consultation, so you'll need to find SEO experts to do the job for you. Another flaw of Square's SEO toolbox is that it takes weeks to index your information for search engines. Indexing is the most critical factor in SEO, as content outside the index cannot rank for a search result and it will affect your click-through rate. 

As such, we recommend opting for a comprehensive SEO-friendly platform, like Wix. It has intuitive SEO tools that are built-in, so you no longer have to find third-party apps to boost your SEO. Plus, it offers keyword support, which Square does not provide.