For small to medium sized businesses, there is a lot of choice when it comes to selecting an e-commerce platform. In recent months one in particular has caught my eye through a lot of advertising on Twitter and YouTube, EKM.
Having worked with a lot of ecommerce websites, I’ve only ever personally come across the platform once, despite it’s high volume of ratings, and the claim they have more than 50,000 customers.
Interestingly, EKM also have a support article titled “What Can An SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Company Do For Me?”, and the opening line of the article reads:
If you’re using ekmPowershop the answer is usually not much, as most of the SEO work has already been done for you.
This is quite a claim for any ecommerce platform that it’s 100% SEO friendly out of the box, especially given the issues faced by enterprise level platforms like SalesForce Commerce Cloud, Magento, Hybris… And even WooCommerce/WordPress (which is typically one of the more SEO friendly platforms OOTB).
How I Conducted This Review
With any review, it’s important that methodology is transparent. This review has been conducted based on:
- A review of a list of 13 websites sent to me via email by Tony Rushe, an Account Manager at EKM as examples of live sites.
- Conversations with EKM live chat executives and their responses to technical related questions.
This review is not a review of whether or not EKM websites rank within organic search; it’s possible for all platforms to rank. This is a review of how close to best practice these websites are, and any common issues they have.
So without further adieu…
Technical SEO Review Of 13 EKM E-commerce Stores
First, I’m going to start at looking at EKM’s claims of SEO proficiency that are highlighted in the previously linked to article. These claims are that EKM benefits from the below SEO factors OOTB:
- Search engine friendly design
- H1 tags for product names
- Matching page titles
- Meta Keywords and Meta Description
- Standard SiteMap
- Google Sitemap (I’ve literally no idea what this would be?!)
- XML Sitemap, using the sitemaps.org standard
- Automatic Google Product Feed generation
So let’s start from the top.
EKM SEO Friendly Design
Top line: The websites provided as examples all had issues on mobile, in terms of elements being too close together, elements not readable… Rather than responding to smaller viewports page elements just appear to get smaller.
For example, this is the homepage on desktop for Mon Michelle, an example site provided by Tony:
And on mobile you can see that the header banner just gets smaller, rather than the elements responding to the mobile screen size:
Given Google has now pretty much moved all sites over to the mobile first index, issues like this can be key in maintaining performance.
On a top level, all of the sites had missing viewport <meta> tags in the <head>.
H1 Tags for Product Names
Ok, so a H1 on a product page – that’s standard, however what’s interesting is that in the code there are two H1 elements, one for mobile and one for desktop.
H1 is also used to style the “search” text. Whilst this isn’t a major issue, a lot of value can be place in maintaining sound information architecture.
Matching Page Titles
Back in 2015, Google said that page titles (aka title tags, meta titles) and H1s should be consistent for rankings. However there is a difference between something being consistent, and something being the same.
Consistency is key. One thing we always try to get right is extracting your headline. And if there are different places on the page that point to different headlines, that’s very confusing for the bot.
And that is why we get publishers sometimes writing in – “oh, you guys got my headline wrong!” And we say, “well, there are different parts of your page that say different things.”
So really try to be consistent, it is the best way for us to correctly index your headline, index that snippet below. – John Mueller
Across all the sites I look at, all of the title tags and H1 tags matched, meaning you had search results with categories literally with the title tag “Jackets” or “Dresses”.
And in instances were the use of ALL CAPS is great for the on-page H1, couple that with a long product name and the resulting title tag just looks spammy:
Using the example of dresses and jackets, I’d have wanted to optimise the title tags for better information architecture, better user experience (and CTR from SERPs), and inclusion of search phrases to match a variety of search intents.
We also know from various studies and experiments that title tags carry a reasonable amount of weight as a ranking factor in Google.
Meta Keywords and Meta Description
Awesome that you can edit the meta descriptions of your pages, but looking at the thirteen sites, using a site: command, very few are optimised beyond the homepage.
Some of the meta descriptions also reveal that some hygiene pages, such as Terms & Conditions, and other policies (key user trust signals, for any ecommerce or YMYL site) are templated:
Privacy Policy This privacy policy sets out how ekm sitename ekm sitename uses and protects any information that you give ekm sitename ekm sitename.
So the second point here, meta keywords.
At the time of writing this, Google has on record and publicly told webmasters that they don’t use meta keywords in web ranking, nor have they used them for 9 years.
For reference, here are the meta tags that Google does support, and here is a post from their official webmasters blog on the subject.
Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword meta tags completely.
So it’s disappointing that a modern, forward thinking cloud-based platform still includes this field as something for their users to get distracted by.
Standard SiteMap (HTML Sitemap)
By this, they mean a HTML sitemap – which is good, as it helps with crawling, and helps other search engines such as Bing.
However, on some HTML sitemaps on the example stores, such as this one:
- https://www.bankruptfashion.com/sitemap.asp
There are 1,766 links on the page (in total). That’s huge. Internal linking structures are vitally important, and resolving them can reap huge SEO benefits, to have a single page on the site is detrimental.
With a HTML sitemap, not every single product URL needs to be included, and as EKM is an ecommerce platform, this is a bit of an oversight and is creating pages damaging to crawl efficiency.
Why are these large HTML sitemaps an issue?
They’re an issue because of internal linking. As SEOs, we tend to use a rule of “100 links per page”, and this in part goes back to the days of PageRank sculpting.
With PageRank sculpting, you wanted to sculpt internal links to pass authority to key pages within the site.
During this time period in SEO, Matt Cutts said the following in an interview with Rand Fishkin:
The “keep the number of links to under 100” is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we’re not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb.
Whilst this is a rule of thumb, hundreds (or 1,000+) links on a page is detrimental.
XML Sitemap, using the sitemaps.org standard
They do, but they also contain tags such as:
- <lastmod>
- <changefreq>
- <priority>
Tags I personally wouldn’t include based on experience.
Speciality Sitemaps
None of the thirteen example stores had speciality XML sitemaps, all pages (products, hygiene) are bundled into a single sitemap.
Will this affect Google crawling the website? Not at all. Will it affect an SEO’s ability to use Google Search Console to it’s full potential and identify indexing issues? Yes.
XML Sitemap Issues
I also crawled the thirteen XML sitemaps, and found that a lot of them contained non-200 status code URLs.
These URLs should be excluded from the XMLs to prevent wasted crawl resource.
Automatic Google Product Feed generation
This is actually really useful, and out of the box this can instantly make a small/medium sized business more competitive within organic search.
Other EKM SEO Observations
So, that’s the end of the list included in EKM’s SEO support article. So the rest of the analysis is done based on reviewing the thirteen example websites.
Do EKM products have an issue with being indexed by Google?
In order to test this, I chose 10 products at random from each of the 13 websites, and attempted site: on them to establish if Google was indexing the URL.
Out of the 130 products, only 103 were indexed and returned a URL through a site: command. This means ~20% of the products I tested weren’t being indexed by Google.
This is something common on a number of SME level e-commerce platforms, and is something I’ve come across on other platforms such as Shopify (especially during this webinar, were we reviewed Lauren Moshi). This can be resolved through better internal linking.
Does EKM have native blog functionality?
Not that I can see. Some websites I’ve found on EKM do have blogs, but they are WordPress installs reverse-proxied to a /blog/ subfolder. The WordPress blog feature is actually promoted to users, with instructions on how to install.
This isn’t a bad thing, as a WordPress blog is a great thing to have – however every one I’ve come across hasn’t been covered by the SSL, covering the EKM main platform. It also doesn’t appear that EKM’s customer support and “evolution mode” extends to helping customers get the most out of their WordPress blogs at a basic level.
This is concerning, as an out of date, or insecure WordPress platforms can lead to serious security breaches, even if they’re not the primary platform. This is a security risk that I’d love to see EKM address for it’s users, especially in a post GDPR era.
Internationalisation with EKM
Can EKM support Href lang? In short… No.
During a live chat with one of their representatives I asked this question, about whether or not I can implement Href lang from my online store – and I was advised that I should setup individual EKM stores (one for each target language), although none of them would be be connected by Href lang, a single database… Or share the same database.
I can see this working (of sorts) if you’re targeting say Great Britain (English) and Spain (Spanish), but if you’re targeting multiple countries with the same language (UK, Ireland, US…) this would just cause duplicate content issues.
URL Structures
All of the EKM stores have a flat URL structure, with everything sitting on the root.
From an information architecture and information retrieval perspective, there could be some gains here if users could implement a simple, and standard e-commerce URL structure such as:
- example.com
- example.com/product-category/
- example.com/product-category/product-subcategory/
- example.com/p/product-url
This structure will not only provide better architecture, but also enable better analytical analysis, making for better data led decisions.
Site Speed
When measuring site speed, I love to use Google’s official page speed insights tool, however all of the thirteen websites returned an “unavailable” when checking the speed, apart from one – which actually scored the best on the optimisation scores (mobile and desktop combined), clocking in with a fast 1.3s FCP 1.2s DCL.
They did however return the optimisation statistic (out of 100) for all thirteen sites.
All of the thirteen websites also shared a number of speed optimisations, these included:
- Compression enabled
- CSS minified
- HTML minified
- JavaScript minified
- Images had been optimised for load and file size
- Critical render path content (content above the fold) had been optimised for first interactive paint
Robots.txt Errors
Similar to Shopify, the robots.txt for EKM platforms appears to be standardised across all EKM websites. Whilst nothing in the disallow:’s looks out of place, there is one interesting inclusion at the bottom of the .txt list:
Crawl Delay & SEO
Simply put, crawl delay is not a search engine friendly command and I strongly doubt any of the EKM websites (seeing as they have annual revenue limits of £1million on their highest paid plan) command such excessive crawl budgets.
However, this does make more sense if all the sites (or a lot of them) are sharing the same servers, and this is to prevent successive commands causing down time.
As ContentKing put it in their academy article:
Avoid using the crawl-delay directive for search engines as much as possible.
It’s also important to note that Google ignores the crawl-delay: directive in robots.txt files:
So all this is doing is harming other prominent search engines in the UK, such as Bing (which in my opinion has difficulty crawling deep links of a site anyway), and I’ve never, ever known Bing to be an aggressive crawler.
Looking at latest data, Bing holds a market share of around 12%, so 1 in 10 people use the search engine – that’s a significant number when you’re an SME looking to attract business online.
JavaScript
Simply put, do EKM websites work with JavaScript disabled?
Impressively, yes. Aside from the menu drop downs I was able to navigate the websites without restriction or loss of content.
Whilst Google can crawl JavaScript, it costs more in terms of resources (and resources cost money), so the fact that these sites appear to have plain HTML links as fall backs and work without JS – without compromising user experience is a huge win.
Schema Markup/Structured Data
The only schema I was able to find was breadcrumbList, which is a shame as there are opportunities (out of the box) to include things like product schema on the product pages, and other options to include things like organisation schema.
I also know from EKM’s documentation that users can inject custom HTML into the head, so Organisation/LocalBusiness should be included – unless the EKM team haven’t advised this for some reason.
Conclusion
If you’re a small/medium sized business looking to sell online, enterprise level solutions such as Magento, SalesForce and Hybris come with hefty price tags and development challenges.
EKM offers a good solution to SMEs who want to get ahead in the digital world and establish an ecommerce foundation, and as a starter platform to provide initial growth and brand establishment.
However, that being said – from working with a number of ecommerce platforms over the years, I would choose Shopify ahead of EKM. For the out of the box issues, I feel Shopify is a much more workable platform and a lot of the SEO issues I’ve come across can be resolved with some tweaking – even on site’s pushing £2million+ in annual online revenue.
I would however place EKM in my top 3, ahead of BigCommerce, SquareSpace and OpenCart as e-commerce solutions for SME businesses on a budget. My new top 3 being:
- Shopify
- EKM
- SquareSpace
EKM has some great potential and with some relatively minor amends to it’s technical SEO capabilities, EKM can easily rival Shopify in my opinion for OOTB proficiency, from an SEO standpoint.
