The average base salary for an SEO copywriter is more than $60,000.

While that’s not a bad paycheck for any career, when you consider that many copywriters work from their laptop while lounging at home or traveling the world, that number sounds even better.

But launching a career as an SEO copywriter is intimidating.

If you’re thinking about a job change, keep reading to learn the basics of what you need to know to become an SEO copywriter.

In-depth Knowledge of SEO Strategies

If you want to be an SEO copywriter, the first thing you need to do is learn everything you can about SEO strategies. And there are a lot of them!

You’ll not only want to learn the best SEO strategies for boosting your clients’ websites, but you’ll also want to learn what strategies can hurt a site’s ranking. This will help prepare you to educate your clients if they request strategies that you know could have the opposite effect you’re going for.

You’ll find an endless number of resources on the web to help you learn all things SEO. If you don’t have any prior web marketing experience, you might want to consider enrolling in a course to help you master the basics first.

Stellar Writing Skills

While SEO strategies are important, if your writing isn’t top-notch, you won’t last long as a copywriter.

Improving your writing, editing, and grammar skills are a must if you want to land clients and then keep them coming back for more.

Constantly Staying Up-to-date on Algorithm Changes

Simply learning SEO and then getting to work will only get you so far.

In fact, it will only get you as far as the next algorithm update.

Search engines use complicated algorithms to determine where websites should rank. These algorithms are constantly being updated to help these search engines stay ahead of schemers looking to rank their poor quality sites.

The ultimate goal of each update is to deliver the best possible results for any given web search. Unfortunately for you as an SEO copywriter, the strategies you were using one day to help your clients stay in the top results could actually hurt your clients’ rankings after an algorithm change.

Staying up-to-date on algorithm changes and what SEO strategies are best at any given time is a must if you want to be successful as an SEO copywriter.

Find Copywriting Jobs

Before you can officially call yourself an SEO copywriter, you’re going to have to land your first job.

Without a lot of experience under your belt, cold calling clients aren’t likely to land you your first job.

Instead, it’s best to seek out copywriting job boards or an article writing service that can help connect you with your first client. These job boards often test your skills for eligibility, rather than relying solely on a resume.

Launching a Career as an SEO Copywriter

Launching a career as an SEO copywriter is a great opportunity to put your writing skills to work in a demanding industry. Once you’ve learned what you need to know and started building your resume, you’ll find plenty of job openings and a rewarding career that gives you the freedom you crave.

One great way to build a writing portfolio to launch your new career is to start your own blog to showcase your skills. Click here to learn everything you need to know to do just that.

Did you know that the average website gets fewer than 20 visits a month? Some of these sites were meant to be shared with a small number of clients, but many were made by aspiring bloggers that can’t get them off the ground.

We live in a generation that is fast paced and innovative. With many businesses popping up rapidly, it is important for them to stand out. And one of the best ways to do that is through following some best strategies and campaigns for SEO optimization. However, SEO is getting harder and harder every year.

According to one study from Ahrefs, 91% of all content on the Internet doesn’t get any traffic from Google.  You are going to need to have some other strategies in place to get more traffic to your website.

With the help of these strategies, you will have an idea on how to get traffic that helps you generate more revenue.

Email Marketing

One of the easiest ways to get traffic is email marketing. Some of you may think that this technique may be outdated, but it still holds a lot of impacts. Not only is it cost effective but it also has a good return on investment (ROI).

If you are a start-up, then this type of marketing is very efficient. When compared to the other types of marketing campaigns and strategies, this type of marketing has four times higher ROI.

Though it holds a lot of power, a lot of people need to know how to get a hang of it. Once you have it under control, Email marketing is one type of strategy you will not regret working on.

Social Media Marketing

More than half the population of the world is on social media. There are quite a few people who run their business with the help of these social media such as Instagram, Facebook, etc. Since almost everyone uses social media, it has become one of the most important digital marketing tools. This is mainly because all the companies will get the exposure that they require, and it also works as a great platform for studying and researching.

And if you are a start-up, then social media marketing is one of the best ways to go about improving your business. The benefits that you will have more people visiting your website, help you in getting loyal customers, increase in sales, and helps in generating new leads. Even though many people go about using social media marketing, they end up making a lot of fatal mistakes. However, these mistakes can be avoided. Such as choosing the right social media platform, and choosing a strategy. This can also be made easy by hiring a digital marketing consultant who will give you insight on how to do marketing as well as help you maintain records of your work.

Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click Marketing)

A marketing strategy that makes use of the search engines to make people come to your website is the Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. PPC is an effectual marketing tool to produce sales-ready leads in a short span.

If you are a start-up then you should not ignore the pay-per-click marketing strategy.

It has quite a few practical advantages, such as:

• Reaching your customers with the perfect advertisement at a precise time.
• You will have a high ROI. This is because you will need to pay when an interested person clicks on the advertisement.
• You can control how much you want to spend and you do not have to wait for results.
• The insights and data will help in sharpening the other marketing strategies.

These campaigns must be expertly handled as they tend to be slightly heavy on your budget. But there is no need to worry as there are special engineers to take care of that.

Search Engine Optimization

You might think that having an impressive design means that more visitors will come to your page.  Unfortunately, this is not the case. Aesthetics play almost no role in search engine rankings.

There might be hundreds of websites in your niche alone. If you want to stand out, then you need to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and start ranking for them.

Search engine optimization not only builds trust but it also increases the number of visitors to your website. The higher your website ranks for the keywords that your customer is searching for, the more reputed your business becomes. It will also generate a lot more traffic. An estimated 92% of all search engine traffic goes to listings on the front page. You will notice a huge jump in traffic if you start to rank higher. Hence developing a sort of trust. Following SEO practices will ensure that your company will fare well. You can also hire a good SEO company to help make this happen.

Content Marketing

Irrespective of whether you are a start-up or a full-fledged business owner, content marketing is something you definitely need in your business. This is applicable to both business to business (B2B) and business to client bloggers (B2C). Content marketing is effective because you can create a strategy that will help in dealing with the buyer’s problems. Making it understandable and easy for them. This will eventually build conversation rates and trust.

If you are a start-up you have certain advantages such as:

• You can increase your brand’s visibility.
• You can build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
• Lift your brand’s recognition and awareness, followed by credibility and authority.
• It also supports your SEO and SMO efforts by posting content that will attract people’s attention.
• One thing you should know is that the results are usually not that quick, it will take time to generate the desired response. But the impact that it will create is long lasting.

With the help of these strategies, you can make your business reach heights with an ease of mind.

Choose the Best Traffic Sources for Your Blog

Focusing on the right traffic sources can go a long way towards monetizing your blog. You will want to choose your traffic sources carefully and make sure you focus on them.

If you’ve been around digital marketing for a hot minute, you remember the day Google released their Panda update and crowned Content as the new King of online marketing.

And if you weren’t there, you have definitely heard the Content Is King phrase at least once.

However, back in 2012, when YouTubers weren’t mega-stars and YouTube itself was still a toddler, most “content” referred to written content.

Times, they are changing – and these days, studies show that more than 500 million hours of videos are watched every day (on YouTube alone!). Even more, 87% of digital marketers use video content to amplify their efforts.

Sure, there’s a lot of video content and a lot of it is watched.

But does that make video content an actual Search Engine Optimization ranking factor?

We have plunged into the topic for you – so read on if you want to find out more.

Is Video an Actual Ranking Factor?

Back in the day, ranking factors used to be more or less clear – but as soon as Google algorithm updates started to pour in, these factors also started to change. Sometimes, ranking factor differences between one update and the other are hardly noticeable. Other times, they only target specific types of sites (e.g. Google Medic targeted medicine-related websites). And other times, these ranking factors can change overnight (such as in the case of the then-dreaded Mobileggedon, in 2015).

Officially, there is no clear information to show that videos are an actual ranking factor (such as in the case of spammy links, for example, where the ranking factor has been established for years and it stuck with the algorithm throughout all the following updates).

However, this doesn’t mean you should not consider videos (or even worse, label them as useless from an SEO point of view). And here is why:

• There are industry studies showing a strong relationship between videos and content that ranks higher on the search engines. Like this study, for example.
• A video is approximately 50 (!!!) times more likely to pop in the Search Engine Results Page than a normal web page.
• A blog post that includes at least one video is more likely to be naturally shared, giving you the opportunity to build more backlinks organically, with no extra effort put into this.
• Videos can decrease the Bounce Rate because they capture your users’ attention for a larger amount of time than written content does. This might be related to the fact that most people can find some sort of emotional connection in videos, or it might simply be related to the fact that the attention span of an average internet user stops at around eight seconds.

No, videos might not be an actual, Google-confirmed ranking factor. But they can be a complete game changer for pretty much anyone doing online marketing (which, at this point in time, should be pretty much everyone).  Regardless of whether you are an educational institution or a business, including videos in your entire content marketing strategy will benefit you from at least one point of view.

How Do You make Videos that Actually Rank High?

Video marketing might not (officially or directly) affect your site’s SEO.

But it does have a huge influence (as shown in the previous part of this article).

The higher your video ranks, the more likely it is that it will have a positive impact on your site’s ranking.

But what are the ranking factors for videos and how do you “make it”, given the staggering amount of video content produced every day?

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Create genuinely qualitative video content. Tossing some photos in a slideshow with a royalty-free musical piece on the background might have semi-worked in 2008. But given how much video content is produced these days and what a high-quality it has (both from the videography and from the actual content-related point of view), it is of the utmost importance to create video content that looks great and offers excellent information.

The great news about this is that it’s also easier than ever to gain access to this kind of video content. For instance, Renderforest is an AI and machine learning-based automated video creation tool that allows anyone to create videos that are eye-catchy and entertaining. Basically, you just have to select the template you want and let the tool do its job.

2. Optimize your content for YouTube. Google and Youtube rank videos differently, so if you want to post your content on your YouTube channel (and then embed it in your written content on the site), you will first have to make sure your YouTube video is fully optimized. Some of the ranking factors include:

• • Brand your videos (not necessarily a ranking factor as a way to make sure people associate your videos with your brand – and that your videos aren’t simply stolen and re-posted as plagiarism);
  • Include a customized thumbnail;
  • Create a SEO-friendly YouTube description for each video;
  • Create an SEO-friendly title for your YouTube description;
  • Choose the right keywords and categories in YouTube;
  • Create videos that are long enough to provide information and entertainment, but not long enough to become boring (a short video should be of about 2 minutes and a long one between 7 and 10 minutes);
  • Be recurrent in your video marketing efforts (posting one video now and another one next year will not yield the results you are looking for).

3. Share your videos. Make your channel known, make your video style known. Share your video content on all of your social media channels and embed them in as many blog posts as you can (both those that go on your site and those you submit as guest posts to other sites).

4. Embed videos in your content. If you have embedded your videos in the core content of your site, make sure to create a video index and submit it to Google Webmaster. This might not help with ranking the videos higher per se, but it will help Google determine what your site is all about and rank it accordingly.

Video marketing can change everything for you and your business. Aside from the positive influence it can have on your SEO efforts, video content can also bring users closer to you. It can help you create a closer connection to your customers. It can help you understand them better – and help them understand you better as well.

Video marketing can push your business towards new heights!

Efficient SEO for blog posts can help you feature in the prized first page on Google. Here are some ways you can make that happen!

Can you guess how many blogs there are on the internet currently? Take a guess!

Let me give you an idea:

As of October, Tumblr, a microblogging website and social media platform, had more than 165.5 billion posts. And the social network just accounts for less than two percent of social media website visits in the United States. You can now imagine the total number of blogs on the internet!

If you are a blogger, life’s tough! With more and more blogs being created and published each day, you need to do something amazing each time you create a blog.

Getting on that prized first page of Google is any blogger’s dream come true. But how do you get there?

See: How To Find Early Readers For Your New Blog

This is where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comes in.  

SEO for Blog Posts

For Google, ‘relevance’ and ‘intent’ hold the key. When the user searches for an answer on Google, they expect it in the first few results of the page. These results are likely to get more clicks.   

As a blogger, your goal is to provide relevant answers to people’s questions. You want to help solve problems and build trust. But before all of this, you need to make sure that your blog becomes visible on the first page results. After all, a very high-quality blog hiding on Google’s third page is of no value to anyone.    

You can boost your chances of ranking by doing effective SEO for blog posts. Here are 9 SEO tips for bloggers:   

Do Keyword Research for Every Blog Post

Before starting to write any blog, it is essential that you spend some time doing keyword research. The idea is to have insights about what your target audience is thinking about and the language they are using to find that information.

One of the free tools for keyword research is Google’s Keyword Planner. It tells you relevant details about popular searches around the world. It can also inform you how often people search for specific keywords.

It is a good idea to have one primary keyword and a few secondary keywords for a blog post. However, make sure that you are only naturally using your keyword. You do not want to be guilty of keyword stuffing. What’s more, Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) that helps it identify the content’s context and synonyms related to a particular keyword, so you don’t need to use exact keywords everytime.      

Do Not Miss to Score with Long-Tailed Keywords

Long-tailed keywords are highly specific search phrases. They have low competition and low search volume. Let me give you an example:

Say, you sell cars. A relevant keyword would be ‘Cars for Sale’. However sometimes, users do not search that way. They might type ‘Buy Maruti Suzuki Ciaz Facelift’. Now this is very specific and shows that user has intent to buy a particular car type.

While ranking for a general keyword (Cars for Sale) can be very difficult, you cannot miss out on a high intent keyword (Buy Maruti Suzuki Ciaz Facelift). Searchers looking for these kinds of long-tailed keywords are more likely to read your blog and seek more information from you.  

Make Your Content Engaging

For visitors to keep coming to Google, it has to ensure that it is providing value to them. This means that it always has to rank the most relevant content – content that solves user’s problem first. It would not be wrong to say that it is in Google’s self-interest to promote good content at the top.  

This is why creating engaging, high-quality content has become all the more important. Lower bounce rate of a page helps its search engine rankings. Surely, if fewer people immediately leave or bounce off your page, it tells Google that your page is indeed providing value.

Here are some tips to help make your content more engaging:

• Writer shorter sentences,
• Break longer paragraphs into shorter ones,
• Add images and videos.

Optimize Meta Description

Meta description is the short, additional text that appears below the SERPs. It tells the reader what the link is about and whether it is the content they are looking for.

Not only should your meta description be clear, it should also contain the regular or long-tailed keyword that you are trying to rank on. This particular term will get bolded in the meta description to help users learn if the content matches the intent.

Google displays around 300 characters in the meta description field. Make sure you make the most of this space.

Optimize Images’ Alt Text

As mentioned above, you should make your blog pleasing by adding images in it. Since search engines cannot see the images the way we do, the image’s alt text helps them understand what the image is about.

Your alt text helps enhance the user experience and hence, Google is more likely to favor your blog when it has the alt text. It occurs when the image cannot display and is also very helpful for people who are using screen readers. What’s more, it’s another opportunity for you to slip through a keyword. Just take out a few minutes to add a short description in the image tag in HTML.      

Use Fast and Reliable Hosting

Since the speed of your website determines user experience, page speed or page load time is a critical SEO factor. People do care about the speed and therefore, Google does too.

To ensure good website speed, you need a fast and reliable web hosting service. Many people ignore the importance of good web hosting and choose an inexpensive one. This is surely not a good practice.

We’d suggest Cloudways as it is one of the most high performing SEO hosting services out there. Their custom designed hosting stack, called ThunderStack, ensures enhanced website performance. With faster page load times, you can enjoy higher SERP rankings. They also provide 24/7 customer support that gives you peace of mind.   

With almost no downtime, your website always remains up and running with Cloudways. Their powerful servers across different locations around the world can help you get into Google’s good books.

Make Blog Mobile-Friendly

More and more people are turning to mobile these days. In 2018, mobile phones generated around 52 percent of all of world’s website traffic. This means that more people are searching from mobile phones than from their PCs. When optimizing for search, it would be naive to ignore mobile.  

Not just that, Google also prefers mobile-friendly websites. Use ‘responsive designs’ to ensure that your blog runs on both types of devices with the same URL. Having one URL is also great for SEO purposes as any inbound links will not have to be divided into separate URLs.   

Use Guest Blogging

Link building is a very crucial part of SEO. Links are a virtual currency of trust. The more links from high authority websites your blog gets, the better it will be for the SEO.

This is where guest blogging can help. Many bloggers think that just producing high-quality content for their own website is enough. It’s not!

Creating valuable content for other relevant websites not only helps you get links, it also allows you to build relationships with key players in your industry.

Research blog websites in your niche that accept blogs. Take some time to study the kind of content on these websites. After that, pitch your idea and tell them how it would be useful for their readers.

There will be many rejections along the way, but when your blog gets published, it will all be worth it.

Employ Google’s Search Console

Google’s Search Console is a collection of tools and reports to help measure your website’s search traffic and performance.

In the ‘Search Analytics Report’ section, you can analyze clicks from Google search and which keywords people are typing to discover your blog content.

With these and more insights from the report, you can optimize your future blogs more efficiently.  

Final Words

As a blog writer, you want your blog to be read by as many people as possible. If it’s hidden on Google’s 10th page, your efforts might not have been worth it. This is why you need to optimize your blog posts for search.  

SEO for blog posts is tough and takes a lot of time. You need to ensure that you are making consistent efforts, even after you have published the blog.

From determining the right keywords to target to choosing the right host, there is a lot that goes into successful search engine optimization. Follow all the above SEO tips and get incredible results over time to increase your blogs market reach.

Hope you liked my SEO tips for bloggers! Let me know your thoughts in the comments’ section below.

As an SEO specialist, you know how important SEO is in your professional life, especially if the chosen tool can save you a ton of time.

And Linkody is one of those tools.

About Linkody

Imagine a situation where you are creating link building campaigns for your clients or for yourself. How do you track and analyze them? You probably use tools.

Well, Linkody is exactly that sort of a tool – and it’s fantastic!

It’s a tool for monitoring and analyzing a website’s backlink profile, whether you utilize Linkody’s features to track your own backlink campaigns or to check who is linking to your competitor’s website.

Linkody is fully automated and it draws the newest backlink data all the time along with the most important SEO metrics.

Keep reading to find out about Linkody’s features.

Linkody Review – Beginning Process

Linkody’s user interface is really well designed and easy to understand for any first time user.

Registration process takes only around 3 minutes and you will be surprised to find all the features that Linkody has to offer.

Starting Process

As mentioned before, the UI is pretty straightforward and after the registration is complete, you can start adding your domains.

Linkody guides you with  four easy steps to add your domain:

1. Connect with your Google Analytics account
2.  Add your domain (manually or using Google Analytics)
3.  Add your competitor’s URL
4.  Connect with your Ahrefs account (optional)

Website Dashboard

After you add domains of your choice to Linkody, it takes about five to twenty seconds to refresh. Linkody tool will automatically analyze domains and domain backlinks with all the necessary SEO metrics.

The dashboard additionally shows features like gained and lost backlinks within a specified time interval, latest competitor links, and latest discovered links.

The dashboard will show you different SEO metrics:

• Moz rank
• Domain authority
• Spam score
• Total backlink count (no-follow & do-follow)
• Social shares
• Trust flow
• Citation flow
• Alexa rank

Additionally, 5 of these measurements can be utilized to track progress. Individually, you can see the historical data which looks something like this.

No worries if your current competitor doesn’t have enough backlinks. Just use “Add a Competitor” tab, link to other competitors straight from the dashboard, and see how all their backlinks magically appear in front of you. (Don’t forget to refresh the page.)

At the lowest point of your dashboard, you will see extra windows with information on the latest changes of your backlinks and link status summary pie chart.

Links & Metrics

Among the Dashboard and Competitors tabs you can see Links – this is the most exciting part. The “links” tab shows all of your backlinks with metrics that you can select.

Additionally, you can customize the columns and have the table show you exactly the metrics you need.

And this is what the above metrics show you:

• Date Added – the day this domain has been discovered by or added to Linkody
• Status – the status of the link when it was last checked
• URL From – the URL of the page linking to your domain
• Landing Page – the landing page on your site the link is pointing to
• Anchor – the visible, and clickable text of the link
• Rel – NF (nofollow) or F (follow), where NF means that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine’s index (Read more.)
• Moz – includes Mozrank, Page Authority and Domain Authority which represent a link popularity score and reflect the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Click on the mini-menu to switch between each metric.
• Spam Score – a metric from Moz that indicates how likely a website is to be penalized by Google (Read more.)
• Shares – the total number of social shares (hover over to see distribution by social network)
• IP – the hosting server’s country
• TLD – the Top Level Domain’s corresponding country (.com .fr etc.)
• EFL – the External Follow Links is the number of links on this page pointing to a different domain (that the domain the page is on).

You can also press on the magnifier in the “Status” column to expand more information about the link. For example, page title, social shares, IP address, etc.

View All Competitors Links

Click on Competitors tab to see it in detail and see what options Linkody provides. This segment will show you competitor’s top-pages, specific competitor backlink profile, and all the backlinks together in one neat .csv file if you choose to export it.

You can sign up for a free 30-day trial subscription. Doing so allows you to add one competitor to monitor and well… compete with him.

Top-Ranked Pages

The “View Top Pages” option is only available in the competitor’s section after you click on a competitor.

The motive behind using this feature varies from person to person but its primary purpose is to find which article performed the best and attained the most links.

And then…you have to come up with a new title for the same topic and produce a content that is 3x better than your competitor’s. Success!

All Competitor’s Links

This feature is where Linkody shines the most and it’s no wonder because it’s a backlink monitoring tool.

It’s crucial because you need to add competitors who work in a similar niche or products/services as you do. It’s important because you need to increase the chances of other blogs featuring you as well.

You can see all of your competitor’s backlinks along with vital information that a SEO guru needs to know. Although in the image above you can see 289 links, it can go as  high up as 60,000+ links.

Also, you can customize columns just like we did in the Links section.

You can even use the search option to look for specific website types, for example:

• Search for “Blog” – to be able to find all your competitor mentions in different blogs. This hack is great for people who are looking for guest post opportunities
• Search for “Review” – to see a list of backlinks who’ve reviewed your competitor
• Search for “Forum” – to see on which forums your competitors are active. This can potentially bring you a lot of referral traffic

Of course, I don’t have to tell you what to do. Your imagination is your limit – try various combinations and perhaps even share some cool tricks in the comments below.

Analytics

If you cannot find necessary SEO metrics in the Links or Competitors tab, Analytics will definitely have more options to choose from.

You can filter the data on the graphs, check backlink status, analyze data, etc.

In the analytics section, you can see graphs like:

• Moz metrics distributions
• Spam score distribution
• Your top TLDs
• IP geolocation
• Most linked landing pages
• Dofollow/Nofollow distribution
• Class C IP Distribution
• Domains with most links to your content

Check If Your Link Is Indexed

This is probably the coolest thing after the latest Linkody update!

You can check Google Index Status, meaning, you will see if the backlink is indexed by Google or if you still have to wait.

Green – URL is indexed by Google

Yellow – Referring domain is indexed

It takes at least 24 hours to update the status after the post is published.

Conclusion

Also, Linkody’s pricing is pretty wallet-friendly, so it is easily affordable even for a small start-up. And the features they’re providing are definitely worth the money.

Take the free trial and test it out for yourself and spy on your competitors. Have fun with it!

Also, let us know in the comments as to why you choose other tools over Linkody and how are you tracking links currently?

Shopify and WooCommerce are the chosen e-commerce platforms for more than four million online businesses combined!

While both platforms share similarities, it’s important to understand the differences between Shopify vs. WooCommerce to make the most informed choice.

Which is more expensive? Which caters to your niche more? Which looks better?

Get the answers to these questions and much more with this quick and easy guide to Shopify and WooCommerce.

Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Which Is Cheaper?

As a business owner, you want to cut costs where you can. But you don’t want to sacrifice quality either.

Not only are Shopify and WooCommerce the two most popular e-commerce solutions, they’re also the most affordable.

In fact, WooCommerce is entirely free to use!

To enhance your customer experience, you can install WooCommerce extensions for Amazon, eBay, subscriptions, dynamic pricing, shipping, hotel booking, and more.

While WooCommerce is initially free, many of these extensions range from $49 to almost $250.

Shopify Pricing

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that you install. But Shopify is an online e-commerce platform with monthly plans.

Depending on your needs, Shopify may be a more cost-effective solution for your business despite WooCommerce’s free plugin.

Shopify is ideal for sellers who don’t code and need a simple and seamless e-commerce platform.

The basic plan starts at $29 the month. This option will get you the following:

• Your own online store
• Unlimited products
• At least two staff accounts
• Tech support
• Sales channels
• Order creation
• SSL certificate
• Shopping cart recovery
• Printable shipping labels
• Fraud analysis
• Point-of-sales application

If you want more than just the basics, you can choose Shopify’s $79 plan or the advanced $299 plan.

Advanced plans offer everything in the basic plan, along with these features:

• Gift cards
• Professional sales reports
• Third party shipping rates
• Discounts of up to 74%
• Lower credit card fees for as little as 5%
• Hardware peripheral support
• Unlimited Shopify point-of-sale pins

Shopify also offers an enterprise ‘Shopify Plus’ solution for large operations. And for sellers just starting out, there’s a ‘lite’ version for as little as $9 a month.

The ‘lite’ plan has very minimal features and isn’t the best option for e-commerce businesses looking to grow.

Which Platform Looks the Best?

Your products may be amazing, but consumers won’t bite if your online store doesn’t look professional.

This is one of the biggest draws to both Shopify and WooCommerce. But which is the most aesthetically-pleasing choice?

Design is one of the biggest differences between Shopify vs. WooCommerce.

Shopify offers “out-of-the-box” designs created by professional web designers. This is an ideal option for sellers looking for an install-and-go solution.

There are more than 50 shop designs to choose from including 10 free complementary designs. All designs are mobile responsive and allow sellers to change their color scheme.

However, one drawback according to sellers is that Shopify websites have a tendency to look the same. This is further exacerbated by the fact got Shopify is the most non-technical of all the platforms.

This leaves less room for sellers to customize their shop design.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is compatible with a wide range of e-commerce
designs. Plus, many premium WordPress themes already come with integrated WooCommerce plugins.

For sellers who really want to stand out, WooCommerce may be the best option for creating a unique shop design.

Start Selling

While both platforms come with their pros and cons, Shopify and WooCommerce are the most effective and user-friendly solutions for online sellers.

It’s all about choosing a platform that fits your needs and goals.

Bookmark this guide to have on-hand as you build your first online store. Check back to learn more about Shopify vs. WooCommerce and to discover tips and tricks for attracting customers.