Many eCommerce platforms today are powered by Magento. Magento is extremely popular due to its innovative customization features. Whatever your needs are, Magento has a solution. Although Magento is so popular, it has some drawbacks. These drawbacks are related to SEO and organic search engine visibility. To make sure that you don’t lose out on SEO in spite of having a perfect Magento eCommerce site, it is important to know some ways to improve Magento SEO.
We are pretty sure that any reputed Magento 2 development company would be following these tips too!
Before we get started with the Magento SEO checklist, let’s discuss some basics like what is Magento SEO and its advantages.
What is Magento SEO?
There are chances that you know about Magento, but if you don’t know about SEO, this is for you! The focus of SEO for Magento is quite simple. It is to improve your visibility in search engines which will ultimately result in business growth.
SEO is basically a compilation of strategies to optimize your website. Magento SEO best practices can range from keyword research to the creation of content.
The whole idea of Magento SEO optimization is that when a user searches for a keyword that is targeted on your webpage then your website will appear on the top of search results.
Magento SEO will help you optimize your website with the help of these strategies. Magento is somewhat different from other websites like Joomla or Drupal. So, you will need additional measures to improve SEO rank with Magento.
Advantages of Magento SEO
We have listed down some advantages of SEO so that you focus more on how to improve Magento SEO.
☛ SEO provides a better user experience
Some of the ways to improve user experience are to provide relevant information to the audience, mobile-friendly website and easy to navigate web pages.
Better user experience will result in a higher conversion rate. SEO helps you achieve exactly that.
☛ It is a primary source of leads
Inbound strategies are one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Inbound strategies include SEO, content marketing, social media, and others.
☛ SEO brings higher close rates
Recent statistics suggest that on an average 14.6% close rate is achieved due to SEO leads. This is because in SEO leads a customer is actually researching about you.
☛ SEO will ensure a higher conversion rate
A good ranking of your website on search engines may give you high conversion rates. Your target audience will become more aware of your presence as long as you are able to maintain your top position.
☛ It helps you build brand credibility
Top rankings in the search engine results will make your customers think that you are one of the top players. It will portray that you are popular and many users have already searched for you.
☛ SEO will help establish brand awareness
Brand awareness is all about how much the target audience recognizes a brand. Magento SEO will make sure that your products/services are easily found by search engines via regular and organic search.
☛ SEO will make sure that your website is mobile-friendly
One of the parameters for ranking in Google search is the mobile-friendliness of your website. A mobile-friendly website will provide a better user experience and easy navigation.
☛ It can be a long-term marketing strategy
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. The reason is that it takes a long time to get in top rankings as well as reduce the rankings. 6 months is the minimum time period to hold your ranking.
☛ SEO helps increase followers on social media
By the time you reach top rankings of search engine results, more and more people will know about you. As people visit your website, there are high chances they will visit your social media pages too. Eventually increasing your followers on social media.
☛ SEO will give you an edge over your competitors
You are bound to grow once you have included digital marketing strategies in your overall organizational plan. Integrating all the digital marketing strategies together including SEO will give you an edge over your competitors.
We are pretty sure that by now you have made up your mind to pay more attention to SEO. So, here are some tips to improve Magento SEO!
Magento SEO Checklist:
1. Upgrade Your Magento Site to the Latest Version
This is isn’t just one of the SEO tips for Magento 2. Staying updated to the latest version applies to any platform.
In reference to Magento, it is important because when Magento will release updates it may have improved SEO features. Also, regular updating will protect your website from bugs as the team patches the security loopholes at regular intervals.
Moreover, Magento has also announced that it will officially stop supporting Magento 1.x versions after the year 2020.
Fun Fact: Approximately more than 25,000 websites are powered by Magento but out of them only 11,000 are powered by Magento 2!
2. Alter the Default Settings
When you are building an eCommerce store on Magento 2, it is crucial to change the default Title and Meta Description immediately.
You can do that with the following steps:
- Navigate to Content>Design>Configuration in Magento admin
- Click on “edit” in the default store view
- Scroll down for the HTML Head section. In this section, you can edit your default title, description, keywords, etc.
3. Optimize Your Product Descriptions & Images
We all know that the eCommerce world is highly competitive. So, it is very important to have a unique product description with relevant keywords.
If you make the mistake of using the manufacturers’ product description then Google will consider it as duplicate content. There are high chances that Google will not even index your website.
Hence, one of the key ways to improve Magento SEO is to optimize your product descriptions and image alt-tags.
4. Canonical Tags for the Duplicate Content Issue
Duplicate content is one of the most common Magento SEO problems. It is an issue that affects the majority of Magento store owners. This problem can be solved using canonical tags.
These tags will tell Google the “actual” location of the true page.
For instance, you have 10 pages of duplicate content on the basis of a single important page. The canonical of those 10 pages will be set to that crucial page’s URL.
5. Customer Reviews
The presence of customer reviews on your website will increase the rate of conversion. As per a survey, customer reviews are proven to convert 58% more visitors and increase the revenue in each visit by 62%.
Therefore, having authentic customer reviews on your website is a proven way to improve Magento SEO.
6. Meta Description & Title
One of the important Magento SEO tips is to make sure that every product page has engaging meta titles and descriptions. Also, the inclusion of keywords in them is a must. Engaging meta title and description will improve your on-page optimization and will tell your customers what the page is all about.
7. Sitemap Creation & Optimization
Magento 2 still doesn’t have support for automatically generated sitemaps. The way out of this is either install Magento SEO extensions or generate the sitemap manually. Our recommendation is the Dynamic HTML Sitemap for Magento 2.
The right extension will do the following for you:
- Automatically generate the sitemap
- Customize listing order
- Add links to the external domains in your sitemap
- Configure dynamic sitemap settings
8. Internal Linking
Internal linking will help the search engine bots to understand your website better and give another opportunity for optimization.
Optimized anchor texts on internal links are important but make sure they are varied and natural. The Magento platform has a lot of features to improve your internal linking network.
Again, making sure that your internal link network is proper is one of the ways to improve Magento SEO.
9. Structured Data for Quality Snippets
Structured data has recently become one of the important factors in the SEO industry. If you mark certain specific elements as structured data by using formats such as Schema, you will give Google and other search engines a better idea about your web page.
Make sure that you mark the product images, product reviews, SKUs, etc. All this information will provide the search engines a chance to actually understand the content of your eCommerce store.
Ultimately, improving your Magento SEO rank.
10. Keep Even the Out-of-Stock Products Live
These pages may have built-up SEO since the time these pages were made live. Due to this, it is better to keep these pages even if the product is not available right now.
You always have the option to update content and mention when the product will be back in stock.
Here you go with one more simple tip to improve Magento SEO!
11. Make Your Magento Store Mobile-Friendly
A responsive theme is one of the integral one in the Magento SEO checklist. A responsive theme is the one that is compatible with all screen sizes.
Today, more than 50% of websites get traffic from smartphones. Hence, a mobile-friendly website has become a necessity.
Now, search engines penalize the websites that are not mobile-friendly which means they will be pushed down in the SEO ranking. Just ensure that you have a mobile-friendly website and you are on the way to improve Magento SEO.
12. Site Speed Optimization
Speed is not something that Magento is known for. But again there are ways to improve the speed of your Magento store.
We have listed some ways below:
- Enable caching
- You can enable “flat categories” and “flat products”
- Combine the JavaScript and CSS files. These files can be combined in the Magento 2 admin
13. Header Settings
When you install Magento, the default title is “Magento Commerce”. The title is for the users to know the name of your company.
Making it all the more important to alter the default title for improving Magento SEO.
14. Modify the Robot.txt File
The role of a Robot.txt file is to help the search engine robots identify pages on the website that should be crawled or not.
Search for your robots.txt file by entering your eCommerce store URL in a web browser and include /robots.txt in the end.
15. Know Your Competitors Strategies
Analyzing your competitors’ strategies is one of the ways to become a Magento SEO expert. Prepare a list of your competitors’ websites and assess their product pages. If you want to create a unique SEO strategy then it is crucial to scrutinize their performance.
Conclusion
The tips we have mentioned in this article to improve Magento SEO are not exclusive. There are a lot more ways to do that and who knows some new methods can come up in the future too.
These are the top 15 tips and tricks to improve SEO on your Magento eCommerce store. Of course, when you hire Magento 2 developer, he/she will be able to guide you better on the most suitable way for your Magento site.
Are you having trouble with managing SEO of your Magento eCommerce store? Our experts are available on [email protected] to help you all along the way!
