Magento SEO

When it comes to e-commerce platforms, Magento is one of the most powerful. Magento is still the go-to e-commerce platform for retailers due to its power and customizability. This is particularly true in the case of enterprise retailers. Many enterprise websites, like American Express, Ford, Puma, Xerox, and others, use Magento. If you operate as an SEO in the e-commerce industry, you’ll need to know how to work with Magento SEO. Fortunately, Magento does several amazing things right out of the box when it comes to SEO. With every Magento site, though, there are a few issues to keep in mind.

What is Magento SEO?

Magento SEO refers to a collection of SEO tweaks specific to the Magento platform. Magento includes SEO-friendly features such as a robots.txt file, sitemap.xml, and several page redirection options. Duplicate material from the faceted navigation, incorrect canonical tags, and a lack of blogging functionality are all Magento SEO concerns.

Some suggestions for enhancing SEO on the Magento platform are listed below:

1. Crawling & indexing

Duplicate content & faceted navigation

Faceted navigation is likely to be one of the most significant SEO difficulties with any Magento site. Because faceted navigations drastically increase the number of sites that may be crawled, they cause major crawling and indexing challenges. Because faceted navigation sites may only filter or narrow existing products, they create redundant and related material. When you consider that each combination of parameters might be regarded as a separate page, the number of pages created using faceted navigation can be vast.

You’ll probably need to take efforts to control the crawl if your Magento store uses faceted navigation. Here are the steps you can take to control crawl:

Check the faceted navigation for low-quality, indexed sites. Determine what steps should be taken to remove them from the index
Look through the site’s log files to see whether any low-quality pages are being crawled.
Use the robots.txt file to prevent any low-value parameters from crawling.
Consider only indexing pages that have a high search potential.

Of course, depending on the site, the steps will differ significantly. Overall, if you use faceted navigation on your Magento site, one of the most essential things you’ll need to do is analyse how Google is crawling and indexing the pages that are being generated, and then take steps to remove the indexation and then prevent the crawl of low-quality or duplicate sites.

Product & category page canonical tags

Canonical tags for both product and category pages are not set by default on Magento sites. This isn’t ideal, because it’s better to have self-referential canonical tags on product and category pages. This signals search engines that these are the pages that should be high in the rankings.

Fortunately, in vanilla Magento, you can change this:

Select Store > Configuration.
Select “Catalog” from the dropdown menu.
Click on “Search Engine Optimization” in the menu that appears.
Make sure “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products” are both checked.
Click “Save Config” to save your settings.

Changing these settings should result in self-referential canonical tags being added to all of the site’s product and category pages.

2. JavaScript rendering

On Magento sites, you’ll also want to be aware of any content loaded via JavaScript. JavaScript is commonly used by Magento to load important store content. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for SEO, it’s something you’ll want to keep an eye on.

If JavaScript is necessary to load crucial content on a page, Google will have to undertake a two-step indexing procedure, first processing the HTML and then returning to the site to render any JavaScript-loaded content. The second stage of the indexing process is where SEOs must check to confirm that Google was able to identify all of the content on the page. It’s worth examining whether any elements loaded via JavaScript are indexed.

The majority of that information, however, relies on JavaScript to load. Most of those items do not render when using the Web Developer plugin for Chrome to disable JavaScript. We’ll want to make sure that JavaScript is correctly indexed because it’s used to load a lot of the content on the website. Fortunately, tools like The Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool and The Rich Results Test can help us figure out what Googlebot can render on the page.

3. URL paths

By default, Magento appends the “.html” URL extension to product and category URLs. While this isn’t exactly “bad” for SEO, it can lead to lengthier URLs that are harder for users to read. Users will be able to understand URLs without the “.html” extension.

The .html extension can be removed from URLs by following these steps:

Go to Store > Configuration
Select “Catalog” from the dropdown menu.
Click on “Search Engine Optimization” in the menu that appears.
In the “Product URL Suffix” and “Category URL Suffix”, change “.html” to “/”.
Select “Save Config”.

As a result, your store’s URLs will be cleaner and easier to understand.

Please keep in mind that this is best done on a completely new Magento site. All URLs on your Magento store will be automatically updated as a result of this modification. If your store has been around for a while, updating this field without sufficient migration planning could result in a reduction in rankings. As a result, tores that have been around for a while may choose to keep the “.html” extension.

Furthermore, without the “.html” extension, the old URL routes will not immediately redirect to the new URLs. This may necessitate the implementation of global redirect rules to ensure that both visitors and search engines are directed to the new pages.

4. On-page content

Title tags & meta descriptions

Do you want to customise the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for each of your products? No worries, Magento comes with this SEO tool pre-installed.

Simply scroll down to the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown on any individual product or category page. In the “Meta Title” field, type your title tag, and in the “Meta Description” field, type your meta description.

Related products

“Related Products” is another fantastic Magento feature that you can use. This is something you can control on individual product pages. Adding “Related Products” to all of your product pages is a great method to improve your site’s SEO in multiple ways:

By displaying users additional goods that are comparable to the one they’re on, this can assist enhance overall UX and engagement.
By providing consumers with upsell options, can result in more income.
Internal links from these products can assist Google in locating and allocating link equity to them.

You can manually set “Related Products” for a specific product on Magento product pages. To do so, go to the product’s page and search for “Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells.” After that, go to “Add Related Products” and add any other SKUs that users might be interested in. These internal links should now appear at the bottom of your product page!

5. Blogging functionality

One of Magento’s biggest SEO flaws is that it doesn’t come with blogging functionality out of the box. While the category and product pages of an e-commerce site are the most essential in terms of revenue, blogs can still be highly important for e-commerce businesses.

In recent years, there has been a clear movement toward more informational content ranking for keywords where a category or product page would normally rank. We can see that Google is increasingly prioritising content like guides, affiliate sites, and “how-to” articles over product and category pages. This means that Magento stores’ SEO success may be limited if they don’t have a space for informational content.

A blog provides a natural space for your informational content. Magento retailers may not be able to rank for some of their target keywords if they solely use product and category pages without informational content.

Fortunately, there are extensions available, such as the Magefan Magento 2 Blog Extension. You might also want to consider building a WordPress blog and a subdomain for your Magento store (blog.example.com). Setting up one of these solutions to allow your site to host informational content is strongly recommended.

Conclusion

Overall, Magento store owners should be pleased to learn that the platform is well-suited to SEO. Store owners have a lot of control over SEO aspects such as robots.txt, sitemap.xml, redirects, metadata, and more because it’s open-source. Yes, there are a few SEO challenges that store owners may encounter, such as duplicate content due to the faceted navigation and the lack of a blog, but Magento has the tools available with which they can resolve these issues.

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