You’ve built your eCommerce store. What next? You expect your store to gain traction through traffic and start converting it into eCommerce dollars. SEO is at the forefront of your eCommerce success.

Importance of SEO for eCommerce:

• 68% of online shoppers search for a product on Google before purchasing.
• Google’s first-page results captured 92% of online search traffic in recent years – Forbes.
• 81% of people perform some online research before making a large purchase.
• 60% of consumers start their research with a search engine before heading to a specific website.

Business benefits of SEO for eCommerce:

• Reduced marketing spend
• Better credibility
• Higher conversions
• Enhanced brand awareness
• Expansion of remarketing funnel

Understanding Magento’s SEO Features

Overview of Magento’s built-in SEO tools

Magento offers several SEO features. By default, Magento SEO features allow you to create custom URLs and metadata, generate XML sitemaps, configure URL rewrite and redirect, add canonical URLs, mention robots.txt pages for search engines, and so on.

How Magento compares to other eCommerce platforms in SEO

Magento offers all the SEO elements essential to turn your store search engine-friendly. Certain Magento SEO features, which are available out of the box for both open source and premium version users, can be integrated only with the help of extensions in platforms like WooCommerce, OpenCart, etc.

Magento On-Page SEO Best Practices

XML Sitemap – XML Sitemap indicates the entire list of pages in your store so that search engines can crawl every page regularly. Magento enables its users to configure XML sitemap. To configure XML Sitemap – Go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap.

Robots.txt – Your Magento store will have thousands of pages. Search engines need not crawl all your pages. Using Robots.txt, you can restrict indexers from crawling certain pages. For example, search result pages, customer profiles, cart, and checkout pages, which the search engines need not rank, can be explicitly mentioned under Robots.txt to prevent indexing.

Meta Tags – Meta tags are a crucial source of information that informs search engines about the content and hierarchy of a web page in your store. Magento allows you to add meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for products, categories, and CMS pages, which helps your store show up in Google search results. If your store has thousands of products, leverage the meta tag auto-generation option. To enable it, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Product Fields Auto-Generation.

Rich Snippets – Rich Snippets provides potential buyers with a comprehensive picture of a product with all the relevant information they are looking for. Using Rich Snippets, you can provide users with details like product name, price, reviews, and ratings in SERPs, driving them to take action.

URLs – Turn your URLs seo-friendly using Magento’s provisions to add keywords. Magento has a mechanism to add prefixes and suffixes to URLs. You can add company name to URLs allowing customers to associate your brand name with products.

URL Redirects – With changing SEO practices and expanding product portfolio, pages for which you’ve once created URLs might require change. In such cases, Magento’s URL redirects ensure users land on a product page’s latest or corrected version to avoid a 404 error (broken/page not found). Magento allows you to create redirects automatically and manually.

Technical SEO for Magento

Technical SEO for Magento involves leveraging Magento’s SEO-friendly settings and configurations to earn online visibility and search engine rankings. The following are the technical SEO best practices for Magento:

• Defining URL structure
• Defining meta title and description
• Defining a metadata syntax for product and category pages
• Optimal use of heading tags
• Enabling canonical URLs for product pages and categories
• Applying robots.txt
• Defining XML sitemaps

Magento SEO Extensions and Tools

Recommended SEO extensions for Magento

With a vast developer community and solution partners, Magento offers a lot of free and premium SEO extensions in its marketplace. The price of Magento SEO extensions differs based on the customizability, integration compatibility, and advanced features on offer. Also, check if an extension is built exclusively for Magento. Here are some of the Magento SEO extensions worth considering:

• SEO Toolkit (Amasty)
• SEO Optimization (AheadWorks)
• SEO Suite (Webkul)
• SEO Meta Templates (Mageplaza)
• SEO Extension (BSS Commerce)
• SEO Suite Ultimate (Mageworx)

Tools to monitor and enhance SEO

Your on-page and off-page SEO monitoring demands a combination of tools. Google Analytics is the go-to tool to get comprehensive insights across all your SEO campaigns. Apart from Google Analytics, there are some worthy options you can consider, like SEMrush, Spyfu, and Moz Pro.

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.

Technical SEO for Magento

Slow loading times

Site speed optimization is a factor that translates your marketing and development efforts into conversions. Aside from being a customer experience factor, your Magento store’s speed is also essential to gain SEO strength.

Google’s core web vitals emphasize the following three factors:

1. Loading Time – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
2. Responsiveness – Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
3. Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Optimizing site loading time is important to achieve the above factors.

Site speed optimization includes practices like Gzip compression, CSS minification, JS bundling, image optimization, third-party extension audit, Varnish cache, database caching, etc. Check out our Magento performance optimization blog to get started with speed optimization.

Complex navigation

Complex navigation can often frustrate customers. To simplify navigation through search and menus, you can adopt a faceted navigation approach. Filters based on brand name, price, colors, budget range, or any key attribute (screen size) help customers narrow their search and find products faster.

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.

ECommerce is mostly visual, and any product detail page can’t do without images. As your portfolio and SKUs expand, heavy images can eventually pose additional stress on the servers bringing the loading time down.