Nowadays, Magento is one of the most preferred open-source platforms to build a robust eCommerce store, due to its innovative and extensive customized features.
Here are a few reasons why retailers use Magento for building their eCommerce website:
- it is one of the most flexible platforms that gives the online shop a unique experience;
- it offers an abundance of out-of-the-box features to operate your business;
- it is fully scalable, so whether you’re selling 100 items or 1,000,000, Magento can deal with it effortlessly;
- it offers 24/7 support worldwide.
All these benefits attract the vendors to build their online stores in Magento. Moreover, the Magento 2 platform is capable of enhancing the website’s visibility through its excellent SEO support. Although, there are many things that can still be improved upon. By using the checklist below with some of the highly effective Magento 2 SEO tips, you will enable you to optimize your site for top search engines like Google.
The top technical Magento issues
Let’s talk about technical SEO tips for Magento you should use to unlock the true potential of your ecommerce store.
- Speed up your eCommerce website. Your page load time plays a big role in the experience your customers have on your site. Moreover, it is one of the key factors that affect search engine rankings. There are various practices you can apply to optimize your site loading time. Check out the best ways to speed up your Magento 2 store.
- Upgrade to the latest version of the Magento platform. It will give you access to new functionalities, such as improved SEO features, advanced built-in security options, performance optimization, bug fixes, and more. The Magento development team updates the platform regularly with the essential features.
- Optimize your product images. Optimized product images are essential as they ensure that the website storage is not overloaded with too much storage and lead to higher rankings in organic search results. It is applied to reduce the file size of your images while maintaining its high resolution. Moreover, make sure that all the images have proper alt-tags that describe the images because search engines can’t read images and we need to add proper alt text.
- Use a mobile-friendly Google Search Console and Google Analytics. One of the best ways to improve the search engine presence in Magento 2 is to set up a Google Analytics and Google Search Console. With Google Search Console, you can monitor and maintain your site’s presence in the search results, and how Google can crawl your site correctly. Meanwhile, Analytics is a practical tool to track data about the traffic on your site. Both tools are free and easy to implement.
- Optimize Magento 2 Store URL. Every URL need to be unique, static and perfectly optimized according to SEO guidelines. If you give relevant titles to the URLs, Google will find out the theme of your page.
- Use HTTPS instead of HTTP. One of the key things is to ensure your Magento store has a proper SSL (secure sockets layer) Certificate. Since 2014, Google has officially announced that website security is another important signal for Search engine rankings. Hence having an SSL layer installed is a necessity if you do not want to skimp on your SEO rankings.
- Duplicate content issues for many pages. It is one of the most common SEO issues affecting the thousands of Magento store-owners. So to get rid of this issue you must use canonical tag by going to: Stores > Configuration > Catalog > on right side scroll down to Search Engine Optimization and set Yes for Canonical link Meta Tags for Categories and Products.
SEO tips for Magento 2
Keyword and competitor research
This is the most basic and one of the most effective SEO techniques to date. Start your keyword research by analyzing your target audience and competitors. Take the time to perform thorough keyword research to select the ones that are relevant to your content. Make a list of competitors’ online stores and review their product pages. Check out what keywords are directing customers to your competitors’ websites.
SEO tip in Magento 2:You should try to find less competitive keywords instead of promoting the most competitive ones. Use these keywords in your content and in the meta tags.
Add a blog page to your Magento store
With a blog, you can have numerous unique URLs and pages of content with targeted keywords you usually would not use when selling items. In addition, blogs will drive maximum exposure for your business.
SEO tip in Magento 2: Update the blog section regularly. When you post blogs frequently, Google will also notice it, and give your blog a preference on the search pages.
Get quality links to your store
The use of internal links and backlinks will help to strengthen your Magento SEO strategy. The more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely customers will click on your store and go through your products.
SEO tip in Magento 2:The next Magento 2 SEO tip is to build a great network of internal links. Your blog allows you to create internal links. By following links, search engine crawlers can determine the relationship between the pages, blog posts, guest posts, and other content on your eCommerce website. Internal links can forward users to other blog posts or to product pages.
Use Canonical Tags / Robots.txt
The canonical link is an HTML element that looks different but references back to the same page. These links allow search engines to distinguish duplicate content and avoid any negative effects. The Robots.txt file is one of the most important files which guides search engine with instruction to crawl certain pages and not to crawl some others.
SEO tip in Magento 2:You can edit your robots.txt file from your admin panel itself which is a very helpful and quick way for admins to manage robots.txt. This is one of the best things the developers did while adding SEO features in Magento 2.
Magento 2 XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are text files that identify data types. This protocol helps search engines to easily understand your website structure while crawling it and list a website’s most important pages.
Fortunately, Magento 2 by default has a number of updated XML sitemap features that enable merchants to create amazing and optimized sitemaps. Go to Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemaps. The open options for the XML sitemap allow setting the category, CMS (content management system) pages, priority, and update frequency of the product.
SEO tip in Magento 2: For a business with a large number of products, you can use a module like Magento 2 XML Sitemap for a better crawling from search bot.
Social share integration
The social share button allows a customer to share their favourite items on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc. These buttons won’t only help to drive traffic from social media but will also make your website more visible on the Internet and improve the engagement rate.
SEO tip in Magento 2:Equipping your site with the social share is not so difficult to do. You can get support from a developer or install a free module from the Magento marketplace.
Conclusion
If you’re having trouble gaining higher rankings on major search engines like Google, Baidu, or Yahoo!, keep up with the above mentioned Magento tips to unlock the true potential of your online store. The information covered in this article is just the tip of the iceberg and there are many other things to take into account when it comes to Magento SEO optimization. Thus, the best way to optimize your Magento 2 search engine optimization is to hire an experienced Magento development agency that has a vast experience in creating SEO-friendly websites.
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