Businesses, entrepreneurs, or working professionals, anyone with a website can not afford to overlook the importance of SEO to get more traffic on their website. The better you optimize for SEO, the more visitors you get for your business. For example, as an eCommerce merchant, the SEO performance of the site is an important determinant of your online store’s success.
Magento is a popular open-source eCommerce platform that helps you improve your online presence and get higher conversions. If you have a website built in Magento, understanding the nitty-gritty of SEO is something that you should focus on while framing your marketing strategy.
Those websites built on the Magento platform find it easy and quick to optimize for SEO. This is because the platform has some built-in innovative and customized features that help you leverage SEO practices and rank your site higher in search engines with just a few clicks. Magento SEO features include URL rewriting, image optimization, Google Sitemap, and many more.
SEO is not only about keywords, Magento SEO is also about writing useful content, checking the visitor’s duration on the site, fixing broken links, lowering bounce rates, enhancing site loading speed, and more. The basic idea behind optimizing your Magento SEO is improving the user experience on your website.
The technicals of Magento SEO are crucial to know of. Once you ace this part, it helps Google crawl and index your website easily. SEO is a crucial factor in deciding the future success of your online venture. Do not get overwhelmed by listening to the words SEO, even if you’re a complete beginner, it is not too difficult to increase your website’s search engine visibility.
Higher search engine rankings result from a combined effort of on-page, off-page, technical SEO and using the right extensions. Read this article further, as we talk about 10 simple SEO tips especially suited for sites built in Magento.
- Optimizing Meta Data And Alt Tags
Your metadata is an important factor that determines the success of your SEO. Do not commit the mistake of undermining it. Start your metadata optimization by doing keyword research. Choose 1 or 2 most appropriate keywords to target for each of your pages. Ensure that you use them wisely in your metadata to get the best results.
Meta title and meta description are the two important parts that one should focus on optimizing. The meta title is the backend text also known as the HTML code of the web page. Keep your title specific, it is one of the most crucial components of your page for SEO. The title should be within 50-60 characters and must contain your researched keywords. It is a simple process in Magento, if you leave your title empty, it will automatically pull through the category name and parent categories to optimize the title.
Meta descriptions aware the users of what your page is about on the search engines. Ensure that your Magento meta description includes your target keywords. Similarly, your Alt tags are the metadata for images. Those who are not able to see the images will know about what it is by reading the text. This helps Google determine the context of your image and helps rank your product pages better to drive more traffic.
- Simplifying Menu Navigation
In Magento, the menu navigation in standard form is simple and well designed for your ease. Using the features of the menu navigation, you can optimize your eCommerce platform for your users. The menu usually consists of categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories, the number is as per the requirement of the retailer.
Keeping in mind the high number of pages that an eCommerce store has due to the wide range of products, Magento has created two simple options to keep the menu simple and concise for the users.
- You can simplify the menu structure by keeping the category names that encompass more products into a single category. This will allow the menu size to decrease as the number of subcategories will reduce.
- To enhance the clutter tab, Magento allows you to use the mega-menu navigation. This depicts the menu in a more simple, neat, and compact manner. The idea is to create a menu that is easy to understand, search convenient, and good to follow.
- Have Search-Friendly URLs
It is always recommended to follow a user-friendly URL structure for your website. Each category, sub-category, or product page should have a unique and easy-to-follow URL. The user should be able to identify your URL structure. One of the most efficient strategies is to optimize each URL on your website for the target keyword on that page.
For example, an ideal URL structure for SEO of an eCommerce website’s product page could be – abc.com/category-sub-category/product-name/
As we know that each URL is unique, using this strategy makes a lot of sense for implementing your main keywords on each page. The end goal is to ensure that a user finds it easy to navigate through your website. This translates to a smooth customer experience and also makes your website SEO-friendly.
- Integrate social media into your pages
Having social media sharing buttons on your pages, especially product pages help increase brand awareness. This allows the users to share the products they like with their friends, family, and followers. It also lets Google know that people are liking and are trusting your site. Social sharing helps gain visibility and traffic for the website.
The easiest way to do enable this option for users is by including automatic social media share buttons to various famous platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, and more. You can even include sites like Amazon, Flipkart, Reddit, etc. The idea is to give the user more options of social group sharing, as it gives them a choice to repost on multiple platforms, and allows you to build your brand on various platforms too. Ensure that you only enable those platforms which are relevant places for your brand to be.
- Ensure Good Website Speed
In this fast-paced world, it is found that 40% of visitors leave the website if it does not load within three seconds. A staggering 80% will not stay on your website if the speed does not match their perceptions and standards. Apart from this, search engines also consider speed as a factor while ranking websites.
For optimizing the speed of your website, ensure that you keep the following points in your mind:
- Keep your Magento updated as it helps lighten the database read speed.
- Enable Flat Catalog in Magento to reduce the MySQL query complexity.
- Have a decent amount of storage for your website in your core system.
- Use Magento catching features.
- Merge CSS and JS files.
- Decrease the number of downloadable external files from your server.
No compromises should be made in terms of speed as it is a key determining factor for your website’s success.
- Make your Site Mobile Friendly
Mobile internet users make up for around 56% of the global online traffic and this ratio is increasing with each passing day. In an increasingly mobile-centric world, you need to ensure that your website functions as smoothly as your desktop version, even on a smartphone. Starting from website navigation to images or buttons, ensure a smooth ride for the smartphone user. You may use the following tips to make your website mobile-friendly:
- Create a sleek and optimal design.
- Use short and catchy URLs, descriptions, headings, etc.
- Optimize images to ensure good quality without compromising on speed.
- Make large-sized buttons to ensure hassle-free navigation.
- Add Schema Markup
For the purpose of information organization for search engines, microdata like schema markup is important to be added. With schema markup added you can display more data about your products in the search engine results like availability, pricing, reviews, images, etc.
Implementing schema markup will increase your website’s visibility in search engine results and hence get more click-through rates. Using the extensions mentioned in the next point, it will be easier for you to implement the schema markup in Magento.
- Use the Best Magento Extensions
In Magento, there are sites that are created by using individual extensions. Hence, the right extension will surely determine the success of your business. Extensions can help increase performance and usability, and decrease the time and cost of the website development. Apart from that, it can also help you maintain productivity and gain a competitive advantage.
These are the few Magento extensions that one can consider using to optimize their website for SEO.
- SEO Content Optimisation by ReloadSEO
- Free Magento SEO Extension by Creare
- Ultimate SEO Suite by AheadWorks
- SEO Toolkit by Amasty
- Magento 2 SEO Extension by Mageplaza
- Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit
These high-quality extensions will surely aid you in improving your site’s SEO. Magento platform’s extensions are easy to incorporate. Having them helps to fulfill business requirements according to the needs.
- Generate a SiteMap
A sitemap is essential for SEO as is something that you should not miss at any cost. A sitemap allows the crawler to follow the links to all your website pages and then crawl it back or the search engine. The idea of a sitemap basically is to help the crawler scan through all the content pages on your website.
In Magento 1, you can generate both XML and HTML sitemaps. However, in Magento 2, only an XML sitemap can be generated. For generating an HTML sitemap you can customize or use extensions like Dynamic HTML Sitemap for Magento 2 to create one. Once you generate it, ensure that you configure it to know what all is included and to check how frequently it is being updated.
- Create Internal Linking Structure
Building internal links helps get better SEO results. An internal linking structure helps the crawlers to know the relationship between your pages, and other content on the website. It also helps the user navigate through the website easily as it points to different pages available on your website.
In Magento, you can find a related product feature that will help you build a strong internal linking structure. You can go to ‘Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells’ and easily add a link to a related product on the page. Once it is added, you will be able to easily show related products on the particular page.
With consistent efforts and patience, it is possible to optimize your Magento website for SEO. Before you delve into the technical SEO subject, ensure that you get the basic on-page and off-page SEO right. Improving your site’s rankings in the search engine’s result pages (SERPs) is essential for long-term success.
