68 percent of online shoppers search for a product on Google before purchasing. That’s just one among a long list of statistics that highlight the importance of SEO for eCommerce.
Tapping into the billions of organic searches online shoppers perform is a great opportunity for your eCommerce brand. So, achieving the top spot in SERPs matters to your brand’s ROI.
So, what does it take to be at the top? It all starts with your eCommerce platform’s SEO capabilities which determine your success in search engine rankings.
If you are a store operating on Magento or considering Magento to build your eCommerce presence, this blog can help realize the SEO capabilities of the platform. Read on..
Is Magento good for SEO?
Magento (now Adobe Commerce) powers 28% of eCommerce stores across the internet and 16% of the top one million websites, according to Builtwith. The platform has been recognized as the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce for the 5th consecutive year.
Magento is one of the most preferred platforms not only for its customizability. The platform does continuous innovations all-round, and SEO capabilities are one among them.
Magento is loaded with features that, when leveraged well, can earn top search rankings for your eCommerce store. The most important factor that makes Magento the best platform for eCommerce SEO is it addresses areas like navigation, mobile experience, H1s, URLs, and more.
This blog will explain how crucial these factors can significantly improve your store’s SEO strength and Magento’s built-in SEO features help you achieve that.
Magento – SEO features and benefits
Customizable Anchor Text for Navigation Links
Navigation links represent your entire portfolio into categories, subcategories, and products. Navigation links serve as gateways for users to quickly jump into products they prefer.
Apart from users with a clear buying intent, the rest are most likely to depend on your website’s navigation links to narrow down their search. So, only a carefully done classification of your product range into several categories ensures your visitors continue shopping on your website.
Many eCommerce platforms auto-generate navigation links based on category or product name. An option to customize it may not be available or be difficult based on the platform your store is operating on.
With Magento’s SEO features, you’ll be able to provide the most appropriate anchor text for any navigation link providing an SEO advantage and better user convenience as well.
Customizable Page Titles
You might have seen text appearing in the browser tab when you open a page. These are page titles, and they appear in the search engine ranking pages as well. For eCommerce stores, Page titles primarily reflect the product name. It helps users in identifying the product in the SERPs and also bookmark favorite products for future purchases.
So, creating independent page titles becomes essential to gain an SEO advantage and achieve a better CTR (click-through rate). Magento facilitates store owners’ ability to develop independent page titles for product pages, unlike other platforms that auto-generate them based on category or product name.
Customizable H1 Tags
H1 tag grabs the attention of your users immediately after they enter a page. H1 tag is a marketer’s spearhead to optimize the page having users in mind. H1 tag provides the ability to focus only on users’ expectations and not search engine ranking pages.
Suppose your eCommerce platform doesn’t allow you to create custom H1 tags or makes it difficult to edit them it could be a great disadvantage. Magento backend can be configured to allow H1 tag customization allowing marketers to try different keyword combinations or synonymical keywords and attract users.
Canonical URLs to avoid content duplication
A product in your eCommerce store appearing in two or more categories or subcategories is a pretty common scenario. Such practice will be advantageous in making it accessible for users who search or look for products with different intents.
Though category-based URLs will be unique, the content remains the same. However, in terms of SEO technicalities, this might result in duplicate content. For example, a running shoe can feature in the ‘Sports’ and ‘Fitness’ categories under the particular brand name. This results in three different copies of the same content featuring in your online store.
Search engines like Google consider such pages as duplicate content and prevent either page from gaining search engine visibility. If the number of such duplicate content exceeds a limit, an eCommerce store could be penalized by Google.
Your SEO strategy should include proper usage of Canonical URLs to inform search engines which is the original content. Canonical URLs direct search engines to the pages you decide to be the best option to show your users.
Products with many attributes often result in more such duplicate contents. If your eCommerce platform isn’t providing the facility to set canonical URLs, your traffic could be split between the pages and eventually recognized as duplicate content.
With Magento, you can mention a canonical tag for category and product pages using the ‘Configuration’ setting in the admin panel. If you are using Magento 2, canonical tag will be automatically set for products that appear in several hierarchies.
Content management for organic link building and traffic
Backlinking is an integral part of an SEO strategy as the number of quality backlinks pointing towards your site contributes to better search engine ranking. Though your site will have enough content, most of it would be product descriptions and specifications. Most of the eCommerce websites use blogging to create enough room for organic link building. Blogs also help in search engine rankings.
But all of this depends on your platform’s content management system. Magento offers built-in CMS for store owners to create engaging and informative content that helps users make informed buying decisions.
Also, Magento’s accommodative build enables you to integrate any third-party CMS you prefer. You can leverage the combined benefit of a third-party system’s content management capabilities and Magento’s eCommerce abilities.
Page loading speed
Your eCommerce store’s loading speed matters when it comes to gaining SEO strength. According to Google, your website’s loading time is an essential factor for page rankings. Also, a slow site speed can affect conversions. A 1-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Magento is a platform that continuously keeps improving its performance-tweaking features. You can leverage the platform’s various caching, optimization and compression techniques to make website pages lighter. With JS and bundling, and CSS minification, you reduce page weight significantly. Using flat catalogs, you can reduce the number of SQL queries to cached storage.
The high-end variant of Magento, Adobe Commerce Cloud, provides advanced speed optimization tools like Fastly CDN for enterprise-grade websites and multi-vendor websites to stay on top of their performance.
Mobile-web advantage
Mobile experience matters for SEO. The rising prominence of mobile commerce in online shopping has made search engines like Google switch to mobile-first indexing since September 2020. Also, 50% of eCommerce sales by September 2022 will come from purchases made via smartphones, according to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index report.
Mobile is a great opportunity for you to bank on. Perfecting your mobile experience means removing the conversion killers that eat up half of your revenue.
Magento has a built-in solution for this – PWA (Progressive Web Apps). PWAs are advanced mobile websites that replicate a mobile app-like experience. – PWAs improve mobile conversions by 50% and page-level performance by 50%.
Google indexes PWAs as regular web pages, which eventually adds to better indexing, ranking, and online discoverability. You can check out Magento PWA Studio, the platform’s in-house SDK for building progressive web apps, to get started.
Final words
Magento is one of the best platforms for SEO because of its flexibility and 100% customizability. Apart from on-page SEO advantages, Magento is also built to complement your off-page SEO efforts. If you are choosing Magento as your eCommerce platform, have your development team configure Magento to facilitate marketers with SEO-friendly features right from the word go. If you like to get started right away but need help.
