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For fully customised E-commerce sites, Magento has you covered. Unlike Shopify, Magento’s software offers a range of extra options to develop your site the way you want it. Whilst choice is often an advantage, extra options can also add to the confusion when implementing Magento SEO. Luckily, by tweaking certain areas of your site, Magento is largely well set up for SEO.
This post will briefly cover the basics of E-Commerce SEO, however, aspects specific to Magento websites in general will also be highlighted.
An area of weakness when it comes to Magento SEO is the existence of duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs for many reasons through Product filtering, Product sorting, Pagination, Products spanning multiple categories, and through product variations. Duplicate content ultimately results in confusion as Google does not know which URLs to rank in its search results. Luckily, removing these are simple using Canonical tags. Canonical tags identify the ‘master’ content copy to Google and should be implemented for all product and category pages. To implement canonical tags on Magento, follow these steps.
1.Go to ‘Configuration Settings’
2.Then to ‘Catalog’
3.Click on ‘Search Engine Optimisations’
4.Change ‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories/Products’ to ‘Yes’
By changing these options to ‘Yes’, Google will treat these pages as the master copy
HTML Sitemap is another are that requires attention. These are required to be submitted to Google so that they know which URLs need to be crawled and indexed in search results. Magento does not do this automatically, this process can be performed as shown below.
It is very important that every store URL is SEO friendly. Every URL needs to be static, unique and optimised to Magento SEO guidelines. An end outcome for your URL’s should look something like this,
Category page = ???.com/category/
Sub Category page = ???.com/category/subcategory
Product page = ???.com/category-subcategory/productname/
By using URLs in this format we can avoid messy characters and stop words such as ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘of’, ‘the’ and ‘at’ that are counterproductive to SEO.
To achieve these optimal URLs follow these steps,
1.Once you log in, go to ‘Stores’ >> ‘Configuration’ >> ‘General’ >> ‘Web’
2.Go to ‘Search Engine Optimisations’ and make sure ‘Use Web Service Rewrites’ are selected to ‘Yes
Select ‘Yes’ on ‘Use Web Server Rewrites’ to optimise URL’s
A guide to SEO for Magento would not be complete without mentioning the crucial basics in SEO for E-Commerce.
SEO should really start with identifying your target keywords and this is done through keyword research. Refer to this post for more information on how to do this effectively. For E-commerce, keyword research is all the more important in ensuring customers find and buy what they are looking for, aiding the conversion rate. These keywords will be incorporated into your blog posts, meta descriptions, title tags, home page content and image tags.
As with any E-Commerce site, it is crucial that high quality images are used. This will help to build trust with your product and will better inform customers of the item they are purchasing. When adding titles for your images, it is important to label them accurately. Simply cramming in bulky keywords will not aid the images visibility online.
Another very important step is ensuring that your site loads quickly. Many users will exit your site if it takes even 3 seconds to load. By removing slider images, unfriendly website fonts, unnecessary content and by using smaller images, sites will load much quicker. Find out more about image load times here. To test your sites speed you can use Pingdom Speed test.
Keep your site fresh by adding Blog content regularly. This will help you rank for a wider range of keywords by answering customer queries. Adding content will also keep users on your site longer which is an important metric used by Google to determine the ranking of your site.
Implementing these Magento SEO tactics cannot be overlooked when trying to improve your sites organic ranking. However, if these steps are sounding a bit scary, SEO Melbourne can help. SEO Melbourne are experts in ensuring your E-Commerce site is primed for SEO. Find out more about our strategy or get a quote by contacting us now!
