You have finally made your Magento eCommerce store and are ready to sell your products on the web. But what’s that? No one can find you online? Worry not, Magento is an SEO friendly platform and easy to set up for you appearing in the search results. Making your store easy to find is a necessity, and implementing good SEO practices with Magento is not difficult.
Magento has many features out of the box. There is actually a lot more that you can do with it that is not explicitly stated. SEO is one of them, and fully utilizing it will bring your business to the forefront and ahead of competitors. When you are deep into SEO, you truly begin to understand what it is that makes your potential customers tick. Knowing that you can strategize how to appear in front of them the next time they open Google.
With thoughtful Magento Website Development, you can easily implement the best practices it takes to rank on the search engine results page(SERP). That’s because having a stable website is also considered by Google when ranking. Let’s gloss over how you can leverage the SEO features of Magento to achieve these goals.
Principal methods of natively improving SEO in Magento 2 projects
Headers and title tags
Magento on its own has the capability to create title tags automatically. With further Magento Customization, you can start creating them manually for added functionality. You can add predefined title tags and create different product groups. Defining the hierarchy of headers is also important, you can place them with clear differences from inside Magento.
Enable web server rewrites
Configure URL rewrites in Magento 2 in order to optimize your site for SEO by enabling Web server rewrites. This will make the URL easier to read by users, making it more SEO friendly. You can customize the URL for each and every product, a basic tip is keeping it as short as possible. That means not including every detail, especially the product category which is generally added automatically to each product page. Magento gives you the option to speed up this process. There is an option in configuration settings that automates the addition of the categories path which you can simply disable. Now you can make shorter URLs without having to edit the path every time yourself.
Configure individual catalogs and products for SEO
Configure the URLs, meta titles, keywords and meta descriptions where you can be more specific about your product and its offerings using relevant keywords.
Configure canonical tags to avoid content duplication
Tackle content duplication issues by setting canonical tags on pages that contain the same content in order to prevent search engines from excluding the content from SERPs. The general practice would have you make every product description unique on your Magento eCommerce Platform. Your uniqueness will be heavily considered when ranking your website in the SERP. Unfortunately, sometimes you will have a plethora of similar products that do not warrant one of a kind descriptions. Magento lets you create a canonical tag for situations like this, use the tag to link these duplicates. Google will then recognize this action and not penalize your site in the SERP.
Exclude irrelevant content
Your eCommerce store will have a lot of pages that you do not want to be indexed. These include checkout pages, the cart, admin pages, and more. By adding “nofollow” links to these types of pages, these will not be appearing on the results page. You don’t want these on the SERP because they lead to content that is undesired by new prospects.
Generate HTML and XML sitemaps
Sitemaps gives the bot a clear overview of the website structure and how pages are linked with each other; making it easier for the bot to crawl and index your website.
Create a robots.txt file
Robots.txt files are created to tell bots which URLs should be indexed on the website and which should not. You can save your crawling budget by excluding irrelevant pages and letting the bot crawl pages that are most important.
Magento Extensions for SEO optimization
In addition to the principal methods discussed above, Magento also offers multiple extensions to further improve the functionality of your website; helping further enhance user experience.
Here is a list of some of the best Magento extensions for SEO:
Rich Snippet Suite
The Rich Snippet extension lets you stand out from competitors as you can show relevant store information such as products, services, descriptions, ratings, reviews, SKUs etc…right below your store link on search results.Snippets help increase the visibility of your store on SERPs as well as make your store look more attractive to potential customers eventually leading to a higher click through rate and better SEO ranking.
Magento 2 SEO Extension by Mageplaza
Magento 2 Extension offers multiple features that help bring more traffic to your site and make your site appear on the first page of search engines. This extension includes automated duplication prevention features, automatically generated rich snippets, dynamic metadata setting as well as automatically generated SEO reports. All these features can help your store perform better on SERPs.
Magento 2 SEO Extension by BSS Commerce
This extension offers advanced features to make your website more SEO friendly. The extension offers features such as rich snippets, advanced breadcrumbs leading to better site navigation and canonical tags to prevent duplication of content as that can have a negative impact on your site’s ranking. Another key feature of this extension is a search box in search results which allows users to search for products or information directly from the search engine.
SEO Toolkit Extension
The SEO toolkit extension helps stores maximize their SEO effectiveness by helping counter optimization problems. You can view the effectiveness of your store SEO as this extension highlights key variables such as heading tags, meta descriptions, linking issues, broken link issues, anchor lengths and much more. All these variables can have a great impact on a website’s ranking in search results hence with the help of this tool, you can optimize your website for SEO at its best.
SEO Suite Ultimate Extension for Magento 2
SEO Suite Ultimate offers effective features that can really help boost SEO optimization such as XML and HTML sitemaps, making it easier for crawlers to discover your site and index it. Layered navigation, allowing better navigation to filter pages on the site, built in SEO reports, canonical tags and many other features that help improve your site’s performance leading to better site navigation and less chances of error.
Summary
Besides creating an eCommerce site to showcase and sell your products, Magento will allow you to also make your products SEO friendly. The importance of this cannot be overstated, while your store may look nice, what’s the point if people can’t find it? SEO is a little complicated, but that should not scare you when you are using the most SEO friendly eCommerce platform. Following the right practices and using the right extensions will allow you to take your online store to new heights!
Interested? Rolustech is a full-service Magento e-commerce platform development firm and our experts can make sure your e-commerce platform serves your business in every way possible. Get in touch today for a FREE Business Analysis session!
