Magento SEO Guide:
Best Practices for Magento Site Optimization
Magento SEO Guide:
Best Practices for Magento Site Optimization
18 mins readCreating a stunning and well-designed ecommerce website is just one of the first steps to building a successful online business. The reason is that your store’s popularity, along with your brand’s awareness, depends on your website’s number of visitors and customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex of measures that can help you make more people find and browse your website. Magento is a modern platform that contains numerous search optimization features. However, maintaining it often turns out to be complicated. For more effective work with Magento, it is good to know its unique SEO features and the best ways they can improve your search engines rankings.
In this guide, you will find the most important tips on Magento SEO:
Table of Contents
ToggleMagento SEO optimization is focused on making your website more visible to search engines. In other words, it allows your online store to get higher rankings in search engine results. The fact is that most potential customers don’t have particular preferences when shopping online. They just Google the products or services they need. Therefore, the higher the rankings your website has, the more likely potential customers will find your website and buy from you.
However, to increase the visibility of your Magento 2 store in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), you need to use diverse SEO strategies. So, why do hundreds of thousands online merchants choose Magento? How can it attract more organic traffic to your website?
Magento 2 is known to be a great choice for ecommerce businesses. Here are some of the top reasons why Magento 2 is beneficial for SEO:
Achieving effective SEO for your Magento store requires more than just a basic setup. As a rule, it involves implementing specific strategies and Magento SEO best practices that align with the latest search engine algorithms. So, here is our Magento SEO checklist that can help you make your search engine optimization efforts more effective.
To shine, your Magento 2 store requires a powerful hosting solution. You need to select the most reliable hosting providers that can successfully cope with high loads and large numbers of customers. So, the first thing you need to pay attention to is the hosting capacity. The higher it is, the more potential customers can use your website simultaneously without delays. But what type of server is better to choose?
Dedicated servers are considered to be the most suitable for Magento websites because they offer maximum performance, security, and control. With Magento’s resource-heavy nature, a dedicated server ensures fast load times and seamless user experiences. It also handles high traffic without slowing down, which is crucial for ecommerce success. Examples of reliable dedicated servers include Liquid Web, SiteGround, and HostGator. These servers provide the power and flexibility Magento needs to run efficiently, keeping your online store competitive.
When it comes to Magento SEO, the first thing you need to check is whether you are using the latest version of Magento. These updates usually contain diverse fixes that provide improved stability, remove outdated features, and provide a better user experience. Here is a list of potential benefits of regular Magento 2 upgrades:
Even if you use Magento latest version, it is always a good idea to double-check whether your ecommerce store is mobile-friendly. The reason is that your Magento SEO performance highly depends on your website’s responsiveness. The truth is that mobile user experience plays a major role in search engine rankings, even if your potential customers use a desktop device.
So, what do you need to consider to improve SEO? These are simple and finger-friendly navigation, screen size, and other mobile user experience parameters. There are many ways to check your online store’s mobile responsiveness:
If you want to prevent numerous Magento SEO issues, it is necessary to regularly upgrade the search functionalities of your ecommerce website. An upgraded search system can significantly improve the accuracy and speed of product searches. As a result, your Magento site will provide a more seamless user experience and bring customer satisfaction to a higher level.
If you implement advanced search technologies, such as Elasticsearch, the search queries will likely be handled quickly and relevantly. Consequently, your website will start working faster and more effectively. Regular upgrades bring stability to your ecommerce website and allow it to handle the growing number of customer demands.
According to Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, Magento website loading speed is crucial for SEO because faster websites rank higher in search engine results. Improved load times lead to better user experience, which search engines reward with better visibility. For these purposes, you can use the following Magento optimization techniques:
To improve SEO for Magento, it is important to secure your ecommerce website with HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.) The reason is that Google and other search engines have been steadily downgrading websites that use only regular HTTP. It is also important to note that about 85% of all Magento websites use HTTPS as their default protocol.
If your online store is still using HTTP, search bots will identify it as less secure.
As a rule, the process looks as follows:Since securing your website with HTTPS requires an advanced technical background, it is better to dedicate this effort to a professional Magento development team.
Meta titles and meta descriptions are the information that customers see displayed in search results. The best approach here is to use unique meta titles and meta descriptions that contain keywords. For better Magento SEO, pay attention to these parameters:
Page titles are very important for your SEO. In Magento, you can set the meta titles of your web pages to be created automatically. However, make sure they contain your product’s main keyword, brand name, and a unique selling point or feature. Keep them concise, compelling, and within 60 characters.
How to add Meta titles and descriptions to your Magento product pages:
How to add Meta titles to category pages:
The main purpose of Meta description is to encourage click-throughs. However, writing Meta descriptions for every product page from scratch can be time-consuming. To cope with it, it is a good idea to use third-party extensions like SEO meta templates. Remember that each of your Meta descriptions must be unique and engaging.
How to add Meta descriptions to your category pages:
If you need to edit the Meta description of your homepage, you can do the following:
To optimize your Magento SEO, it’s crucial to manage your website’s crawl budget effectively. Crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine like Google will crawl on your site within a given time frame. By optimizing your crawl budget, you help search engines focus on crawling your most important pages, improving their chances of being indexed and ranked.
This is how you can improve search crawling:
Magento 2 SEO plan will not be complete if you don’t solve Javascript rendering issues. The fact is that incorrect handling of JavaScript content can negatively impact your Magento SEO.
The search engine crawlers should have free access and interpret JavaScript content precisely to index your product pages effectively. To overcome JavaScript rendering issues, perform these actions:
When it comes to search engine optimization, your website’s URL structure is one of the features that is highly important. Clear, concise, and descriptive URLs not only make it easier for visitors to navigate your site but also improve the ability of search engines to crawl and index your pages effectively. Meaningful and easy-to-read URLs can help you improve your site’s accessibility and relevance. In this aspect, SEO for Magento will include the following practices:
A canonical URL is the one that is marked as preferred by search engines. These are product and category pages that Google bots will start crawling first. If you fail to use canonical URLs, Google can take any product page from your website, even the one you don’t want to show first. In other words, bots may not reach important product pages of your ecommerce website.
Using canonical tags is also necessary for addressing duplicate content issues, which can confuse search engines and affect page authority. Canonical tags can help you prevent duplicate content and ensure that your website maintains strong Magento SEO performance.
To enable Canonical tags, perform the following steps:
Your SEO for Magento ecommerce website should also include a popular practice of using automatic redirects. This solution ensures that your old page URLs still display relevant content to visitors and search engines. Moreover, it prevents different types of errors, including “404 not found.” There are several ways to set up redirects in the Magento platform. The easiest option is to use a built-in URL rewrite tool:
Optimizing images is one of the SEO best practices for your Magento store. The fact is that the size of images on your product pages significantly impacts your website speed. For example, if your catalog page contains 20 products, where each image is about 1 MB, your website needs to download 20 MB each time a visitor opens this web page. This can become a serious issue for mobile users.
Therefore, it is important to find a healthy balance between the quality and size of your images. Additionally, you can implement a lazy loading feature, which will load your images just right before they are going to appear in the viewport, while visitors scroll the page.
If you decide to optimize images on your product pages, you can do the following:
In Magento 2, you can specify ALT tags for product images in Product > Edit > Images And Videos > Image > Alt Text.
Robots.txt files help search engine bots identify the URLs they need to access in your ecommerce store. These files also improve your Magento SEO by preventing crawlers from indexing the wrong pages.
Although the presence of Robots.txt files is not obligatory for Magento ecommerce website owners, it will be good to have them in the root directory of your website.
When creating Robots.txt for ecommerce store you should exclude the following pages from search engine crawlers:
You can create and edit your Robots.txt file directly from the Magento 2 admin panel:
Setting up an XML sitemap is an inevitable part of any Magento SEO strategy. XML is developed to specify for the search engines the web pages available for crawling. In other words, it is a specific file that contains a list of all your store’s web pages that should be crawled by search bots.
To generate the sitemap, perform the following steps:
To enable your XML sitemap, follow these steps:
Many Magento ecommerce stores that operate in different countries have multi-store views. This means they contain similar content in one language but designed for diverse audiences. However, Google sometimes can’t recognize the differences and might indicate these web pages as duplicate content. This is where optimizing Magento websites with Hreflang tags becomes handy.
You can use Hreflang tags to specify for the search engines that web pages with different URLs but similar content are intended for different markets. This is how you can edit Hreflang tags in your Magento store:
Integrating Google Analytics and Google Search Console have a great impact on your Magento store’s SEO success. The platforms provide loads of useful information about your website’s performance.
Google Search Console (GSC)
This tool is one of the most effective ways to analyze your website’s organic traffic and performance. It can help you constantly monitor and improve your Magento on-page SEO performance.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to gather data about how your online store’s visitors interact with your website. The great thing about this tool is that it analyzes different kinds of traffic and provides you with a clear vision of where your visitors are coming from.
To add your unique Google Analytics tracking code to your ecommerce store, perform the following steps:
Using Google Tag Manager is an effective measure for your Magento SEO. It allows you to manage tracking and marketing tags on your ecommerce website with no need to modify code. These tags are an essential part of Google Analytics because they help you track conversions. If you need to add Google Tag Manager to your Magento store, you don’t need to install any third-party extensions:
Another solution that can positively impact your Magento SEO is a schema markup for rich snippets. In simple words, schema markup is used to help search engines organize information. Thus, implementing it on your ecommerce store boosts the chances of Google to show rich snippets.
Rich snippets are advanced search results that display additional information about your product, such as ratings, reviews, and images, directly in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They can increase your brand visibility and improve click-through rates.
Unique product descriptions are one of the key ways to bring your Magento SEO to a higher level. As many marketers often say, “Content is still a king.” This means you should avoid just copying and pasting manufacturer’s product descriptions to your website but try to be more creative and combine technical information with some engaging texts. To do the best for your product descriptions, pay attention to the following:
It is also a brilliant idea to test different types of product descriptions. You can use A/B testing to identify the best alternatives for your products. Don’t be afraid to play with tone of voice, structure, and points to include. This approach will give you an idea of what types of descriptions bring you more traffic and sales.
Headings are crucial elements that build the structure of your web pages. Why are they important for Magento SEO? The fact is that they help search engines understand the architecture of your web pages. To develop good headings, you may follow this effective SEO strategy:
Keyword research is an integral part of any Magento SEO strategy. It allows you to find out the terms and words your potential customers are using to find the needed products and services, analyze the competitiveness of those keywords, and improve your content plan accordingly. These are the main reasons why keyword research is important:
What does high-quality content mean? This means that all your product descriptions, blog articles, and other types of content available on your Magento ecommerce website should be unique, relevant, and interesting and should contain an organic number of keywords. Remember that you write not only for search engines to better index your website but also for website visitors shopping on your online store.
Here is what should be taken into account when creating content for your Magento SEO:
If you would like to bring your Magento SEO to a brand new level, starting a blog on your ecommerce website can be a great step. Setting up a blog can help you constantly keep your website content fresh and easily indexable. Moreover, blog posts can also attract visitors with buyer intent.
With a blog feature, you can enjoy the following benefits:
You can use one of the most popular blog extensions to add this feature to your online store. For example, Magento 2 Blog Extension can flawlessly integrate into your Magento store. By the way, don’t forget to use your unique keywords when composing articles for your blog.
The related products carousel is a feature that suggests additional items to customers based on their current product view or purchase history. This feature can display products that are similar, complementary, or frequently bought together. If you Integrate the related products feature into your Magento 2 ecommerce website, you can enhance user engagement. As a result, you will likely have an improved Magento SEO. To enable the related products feature, perform the following steps:
Many Magento ecommerce websites are overloaded with numerous third-party extensions. Unfortunately, this solution can significantly slow down your online store and negatively impact your Magento SEO.
Therefore, you need to audit all your third-party extensions regularly. For these purposes, you can turn each module on and off, clear the cache, and see if the site speed changes. It is necessary to test all the most important page types, including the home page, product, category, and checkout pages.
Off-page SEO refers to all the optimization activities performed outside of your website to improve its search engine rankings and visibility. Paying attention to off-page SEO is essential for enhancing your website’s visibility and authority beyond its own content. As a rule, off-page SEO activities include the following:
To keep your website running optimally, you need to conduct regular audits. There are many tools and extensions that can notify you if you suddenly face any issues:
When it comes to Magento SEO, even small mistakes can have a big impact on your rankings and visibility. Here is a short rundown of mistakes you need to watch out for:
Magento 2 offers advanced SEO features like customizable meta tags, clean URL structures, and enhanced site performance. It also provides built-in tools for rich snippets and XML sitemaps.
High-quality hosting ensures faster site speed, better uptime, and enhanced reliability.
HTTPS secures data transmission between the user and the server. In most cases, it effectively protects sensitive information. It is also an important ranking factor for search engines, as it indicates a secure website.
Make your Meta titles and descriptions unique for each page, include relevant keywords, and keep them within the recommended length.
Use XML sitemaps to help search engines find all your pages, make sure your URLs are clean and descriptive, fix broken links, and implement robots.txt and meta robots tags appropriately.
Enabling Canonical URLs helps prevent numerous duplicate content issues.
Magento is one of the most modern, powerful, and scalable platforms for building ecommerce websites. Its built-in SEO functionality allows merchants to improve their search rankings and increase brand awareness among their target audiences. However, while editing meta tags or optimizing content doesn’t require merchants to be tech-savvy, setting up the server side, tuning analytics, and other more complex measures might be challenging for most ecommerce website owners.
So if you’ve got any questions related to Magento SEO or need some professional assistance with your Magento store, feel free to contact us anytime.
Share This Article
Note: Don’t forget to specify the alt text for your logo image in Stores > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Header.