Magento is an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform for any online store.
But is Magento good for SEO?
In short: Yes
There are tons of great SEO features that you can use to:
In this blog, I will teach you everything you need to know about Magento SEO to generate more organic traffic to your online store.
What Will I Learn?
SEO is important for ecommerce growth in any niche if you want serious results. Magento has lots of great SEO features – you just need to know how to take advantage of them.
So, if you are ready to drive more organic traffic to your online store, pay close attention to these 10 Magento SEO tips.
A good heading structure gets visitors clicking onto your site and keeps them scrolling through the page.
But headings also help search engines understand what your page is about which is important if you ever want your site to get found.
Two things affect your headings in Magento:
You need to make sure that your headings help search engines understand your content easily while providing a good user experience for your customers.
Do this effectively and your SEO game will be strong and your pages should convert well.
Here’s what you should focus on with headings:
Ensure your headings create a natural structure down the page. This helps visitors and search engines understand your content better.
Good title tags drive visitors from the SERPs while still being optimised for search engines.
This can be a tricky balance to get right.
Your title tag must:
Title tags for product pages should almost always contain the product name. If the product name is different from the target keyword you will need to get creative.
Use this formula: [product name] – [target keyword]
For example: Asics Gel Kayano – Best Men’s Running Shoe
Check out these SEO copywriting hacks / SEO writing tips to get a better idea of writing headings and title tags that are optimised for search engines and people.
URLs are the address at the end of a domain.
For example – yoursite.com/unique-url
With Magento, you can easily create optimised URLs. Magento has a URL rewrite tool that lets you change any URL for:
You can also edit URLs manually page by page.
Anytime you rewrite a URL within Magento, any links pointing at the old URL are automatically redirected to the new address.
Pretty easy, right?
By default, the structure that Magento has in place for URLs should be SEO-friendly. The rest is up to you to take care of.
Your URLs should be:
…but check out my tips to create the best permalink structure for your site.
To edit your store’s URL settings go to:
Stores > Configuration (under Settings) > General > Web.
Here you can customise the structure of URLs across your entire store.
Nofollow tags are essential for good Magento SEO.
Why? All ecommerce stores have pages that you don’t want to be indexed.
These pages usually include:
You don’t want anyone to find these pages through Google search results. This helps ensure that only the right people find and use these pages at the right time.
Magento allows you to easily set rules about which pages you want to no index.
On the Admin sidebar, go to Content > Design > Configuration > Edit.
Scroll down and expand the search engine robots section.
Here you can set rules and manually add the URLs that you don’t want to be indexed.
Caution: Double check that you have only no indexed the right URLs before clicking save.
Messing up no index can significantly affect your organic traffic – be very careful.
Duplicate content is when you have content on the same domain that either:
Google doesn’t like duplicate content.
You need to make sure that every page has completely unique content. Even if your products are similar you need to write new descriptions for each one.
What if you have a product with variations? (colours, size, etc).
Some Magento store owners create a different product page for each variation of their product. This will create duplicate content errors within your site.
So don’t do it.
Create one product page and list variations of the product within that one page. Magento makes this really easy to do.
Also, be aware that:
…Content from other sites can also create duplicate content errors.
Google will often penalise websites for doing this so avoid it at all costs.
Some duplicate content errors have to be dealt with by using canonical tags.
What is a canonical tag?
In some cases, websites will create multiple pages of the same page that have different URLs. Because they are the same page with different URLs – it creates a duplicate content error.
That’s where canonical tags come in – Canonical tags tell Google which of the pages is the master copy of all the duplicate pages.
In other words, you are grouping those pages together and simply asking Google to only regard the master copy of the page as the one to index.
Magento by default won’t add self-referencing canonical URLs for your homepage and CMS pages.
This means you could be at risk of duplicate content and need to take care of it.
Here’s how you do it:
Magento has built a canonical tool within the platform. First, you need to turn on canonical URLs for products and categories.
Go to Stores > Configuration (Under Settings) > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization.
Scroll down to the canonical section and change the following to Yes
Now product and category pages will have canonical URLs. This should significantly help to prevent duplicate content amongst these pages.
Here’s the truth:
Most ecommerce store owners don’t spend enough time writing compelling product descriptions. They simply-
Don’t get caught in this trap.
If you don’t have compelling and unique product descriptions for each of your products they won’t sell.
It’s as simple as that.
But there’s also another consideration. Your product descriptions have to be optimised for search engines otherwise you won’t get any organic traffic.
Finding that balance is what generates results.
This is a good example from MANSCAPED. Their immediate above-the-fold description highlights the important features of the products.
As you scroll down the page they have written engaging content that highlights the:
Ready to write your own?
Here are some tips to write product descriptions that are compelling and optimised for search engines:
PRO TIP: Use reviews of other similar products to get information about why customers are buying the product.
This is the best way to get inside your ideal customer’s head and write copy that compels them to buy.
Go to amazon.com and search for a competitors product.
Scroll down and read through each of the reviews – positive and negative ones.
Now open a Google doc and record reviews where people talk about ‘why’ they chose to buy. You need to find out:
If you’re armed with this information, you will be able to write compelling product descriptions that speak directly to your ideal customers.
This will also send the right signals to Google when it comes to ranking your product pages in the search engines.
People often use Google images to find products.
This is why you must take your image optimisation seriously.
Aside from this, online shopping doesn’t allow the customer to physically examine a product before buying. And if they aren’t confident in what it looks like – they won’t buy.
You need to include high-quality images and videos in every product listing.
Whenever possible take your own media so that it’s completely unique to your store.
Google can’t (yet) understand what images are. That’s why most image SEO is about helping Google understand each image so they can categorise it correctly in their index.
Start off by making each image file name fit the product name. Instead of having an image name like IMG089353.jpg, you can either use:
Your image file names should use hyphens to separate each word.
For example:
apple-airpods-pro.jpg
contigo-1-litre-aluminium-water-bottle.jpg
This will help search engines understand your images better.
Got tons of images?
You will need to change each file name to make it unique. You can do this by adding LSI keywords such as:
product-name-features.jpg
product-name-benefits.jpg
After optimizing each file name you need to add “ALT text”.
ALT text tells search engines what the image is.
Apply the same principle for ALT text as you did for your file names by adding LSI keywords. Use variations of your target keywords and product names.
Lastly, optimise the size of each image. The smaller the image the faster it will load on the site and the better it is for SEO.
You don’t have to do this manually. Use the Image Optimizer extension to:
What is your store’s primary target keyword?
You need to make sure that you include:
…In the title of your homepage.
Indeed, your goal is to make sure that Google finds your website relevant to your target keyword and store name.
Titles are one of the best SEO signals you can use to draw relevance between the target keyword and your website.
Include both the keyword and the store name in your title.
Magento will automatically fill each page’s meta description with snippets of content from the page based on preset templates.
While this ensures every page has a meta description – they won’t be optimised for search engines and personalised for potential customers.
When people see your website in the Google search results, the meta description will be the reason they click through (or don’t).
Think of your meta descriptions like an advertisement in the search results.
They should:
Good meta descriptions will help you rank higher in the search results and improve your click-thru rates.
Here are some important meta-descriptions tips:
Meta descriptions that include these elements will be optimised for search engines and get more clicks from humans.
Search engines are pretty good at finding each page on your website…
…But they aren’t perfect.
That’s where sitemaps come in – Sitemaps help search engines easily find each URL that you want to be indexed in your site.
XML sitemaps are the most efficient sitemaps and essential for good Magento SEO.
Magento has an excellent feature to create XML sitemaps that update automatically.
For large ecommerce stores with lots of pages, this will ensure all of your pages are discovered by Google.
The more pages that are indexed by Google the more potential keywords you can rank for.
To access your sitemap settings within Magento navigate to Stores > Settings > Configuration and expand Catalog, then click on XML Sitemap.
By default, the XML sitemap settings should be pretty good.
Check to make sure of the following:
Google isn’t concerned with priority and frequency settings so you can leave these with the default values.
Lastly you need to automatically submit URLs to Google by submitting your entire sitemap in Google Search Console.
The first thing you need to do is copy your sitemap.
To find your sitemap URL just add /sitemap.xml to your website domain.
For example:
yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Now head over to GSC and click “Sitemaps” and paste your sitemap URL.
Then click on “Submit”.
If the sitemap was submitted correctly, you’ll see a “Success” message.
Note: Submitting your sitemap/URLs to Google is free and easy, so don’t get caught in the trap of SEO submission software. They just are a waste of money.
The ecommerce space is very competitive, to say the least.
You are likely competing for the top SEO rankings with hundreds of other online stores. These same stores are also focused on SEO and claiming the top spots.
So how do you get an edge?
Three words: Ecommerce link building.
Link building is one of the best ways to get higher rankings and increase search traffic.
You will need to consistently build high-quality links to your website every month to really see the SEO benefits that link building brings.
Use any of these 15 link building strategies to build quality links to your website that improve your store’s rankings.
Link building for ecommerce stores isn’t a walk in the park.
It’s hard work. Even SEO professionals struggle to build high-quality links for ecommerce stores.
If you are struggling to build high-quality links consistently I recommend outsourcing to reputable link building services.
If you’re looking for a ecommerce link building service that you can trust, check out:
They both deliver great links that help you increase search rankings and generate more organic traffic.
Interested in the ecommerce industry? Check out these ecommerce statistics.
Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform, but it isn’t for everyone.
If you are deciding whether Magento is right for your site I have put together some pros and cons to help you decide.
There are lots of reasons to use Magento as your complete ecommerce solution.
Here are some of the top ones.
Having a development team help build a platform is one thing – but open source puts the power back in your hands.
Magento Open Source software offers the basic ecommerce capabilities that you need for your store. You can then take this and build a completely unique online store from the ground up – just the way you want.
Love customisation?
Magento has been built to offer the most customisation possible.
You can use a base theme or start from a blank page and develop your own so that your store looks and feels exactly the way you want it to.
What makes Magento different is the ability to build out a powerful ecommerce store that can scale as you grow.
It has tons of great features that take care of the difficult parts of ecommerce leaving you with a complete solution ready to use immediately.
One of the most important aspects of ecommerce is conversion.
Magento has lots of great:
…To build conversion-focused stores that help increase sales (and profits).
It also has the ecommerce tools needed to scale so the platform grows with you.
Magento is one of the most sales-driven ecommerce platforms available and allows you to create a seamless sales process for your customers.
Regardless of the size of your store Magento offers all the tools you need to optimise it for search engines and ultimately help you rank high in the search results.
Magento is one of the best ecommerce platforms available for SEO.
There are over 270,000+ that use Magento. This means it powers about 12% of all online stores in the world.
The platform has a large dedicated user base that continues to grow.
They have also invested a lot into:
On top of that, if you ever have any questions you can connect with the community on Magento forums to help you solve them.
While there is a lot to love about Magento there are a few things you should consider before jumping in.
To take advantage of Magento you will need good development skills.
If you don’t have those development skills you will definitely need to hire:
… To do it for you. This can be pretty expensive, so if you’re just starting out – Magento may not be a good fit for you.
Magento doesn’t offer set pricing plans.
That should tell you everything you need to know. To get a quote you will need to contact support and they will offer you a custom plan.
They base all of their pricing plans on average order value and expected year revenue.
Although pricing will be different for everyone, pricing plans typically start at $2,000/month.
You are required to host your own Magento online store. That means…
This is different from other popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce that come with hosting.
The benefit is that you get to choose the hosting company you want and aren’t stuck with the default one that comes with the plan.
Unfortunately, Magento’s support team doesn’t have a great reputation:
This is especially true if you have technical issues.
This certainly isn’t a deal-breaker for most store owners but it just means you will need to be able to do a lot of the development yourself – without support from Magento.
Now you know how to do effective Magento SEO.
SEO is important for all ecommerce stores in any niche. I would go as far as saying that SEO should be the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Magento has been designed with SEO in mind and provides you with lots of native tools to optimise your website for search engines.
Follow the tips above to:
Still not getting the results you want with SEO?
I recommend you hire a Magento SEO service such as Search Logistics.
They understand that ecommerce SEO needs are different and have a reputation for delivering quality ecommerce SEO services that generate results.
You can check their ecommerce SEO case studies to see what kind of results you can expect from their services.
Don’t need full SEO services but need some help with link building?
Check out LinksThatRank and Ecommerce Link Builders.
They build the highest quality links available for ecommerce stores and help improve your rankings in the search results.
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