How to Improve SEO of Magento eCommerce Website

What will be your take if you want to start off your first/next online venture/ business? What will be your criteria for choosing the best eCommerce development solution? Of course, you need a flexible, customizable and dynamic solution that can help you create beautiful online store quite easily. Magento is one of the ideal content management platforms on the web that offers out of the box solutions to help you build a customized web-store the way you always wanted.

 Running an eCommerce store on Magento is not a chickenfeed for everyone. As a Magento store owner, you may face tenacious keyword competition because similar products are on sale on high traffic eCommerce sites, attaining Domain Authority (DA) or Page Authority (PA) for the product keywords – which is a slow process. So, if you want to improve the overall performance of your online store, you need to get higher ranking on widely-used search engines, like Google.

 In simple terms, you need to optimize your Magento online store for search engines, in turn, you will get more web traffic as well as increased conversion rate.

Magento and Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Magento is considered to be the most powerful option. In fact, the latest version of Magento, Magento 2 has been updated and revamped to boost the default SEO capabilities to help you get the most of it without making much effort.

 In this post, we will go through some of the proven on-page and on-site SEO tactics to help you get better ranking on Google and other search engines and also help you generate quality leads for your Magento eCommerce store.

1. Enable Search engines to index your Magento web store

If you want to drive more web customers, you need to allow search engines to index your online store. This informs the search engine bots which content to be indexed for enhancing the visibility of the e-store on web.

 Fortunately, Magento 2 makes it super-easy for you to tweak the robots.txt file directly from the admin area. You just need to go to the System > Configuration > Design > HTML Heads. Here, you will see the basic fallback settings that you can adjust for SEO purposes. Now you can change the “Default Robots” setting to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

 2. Create XML Sitemap

Creating XML Sitemap can help search engine crawlers to index your site quickly and easily. An XML sitemap allows website owners to tell search engines about all the pages of your site – this enhances your online visibility and helps you generate more leads.

 The best part is that there have been tons of modifications and enhancements in XML Sitemap feature in the latest version of Magento, i.e., Magento 2. You can now set the frequency and priority for Product, Category. CMS and other web pages. Besides this, Magento 2 also offers the addition of XML Sitemap to a robots.txt file automatically.

 Note: You can access this feature in Store > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > XML Sitemap.

 3. Optimize your Product Page

Most of the Magento store owners overlook the optimization of their Product Pages and then keep on losing their potential web customers. If you want to boost your SEO ranking, you need to optimize each product page for search engines.

 Since every product page has the meta tag settings with the potential to set up standard tags such as meta title, description, and keywords, this can play a key factor in improving the ranking of your online store.

 Although Google has depreciated the importance of meta data to some extent, still it portrays a crucial role when it comes to the unique meta-product descriptions and meta keywords. Fortunately, Magento 2 has come up with some of the advanced features, including:

·  Product Field Auto Generation

This particular feature generates a product meta-text based on the product attributes. Since it uses only one template, the meta-text for all products get revamped automatically.

You can get the Auto-Generation feature under Stores >Configuration>Catalog

·  Product Image Labels

Product Image Labels has the ability to use product labels that can help you grab a customer’s attention and also boost the SEO by applying labels to the products, without even using the third-party extension.

 4. Rich Snippets

Magento 2 offers the Rich Snippets feature that will help you display structured markup data from online stores in Google results.

 These snippets let you make your pages look amazing in search results. It simply shows attributes such as price, rating stars, currency, and the product image to improves both SEO and CTR of your Magento eCommerce store.

 5. Delete Duplicate Content

Original and quality content is the key for effective Search engine optimization. So, make sure that your online store doesn’t contain duplicate content. Magento enables you to classify and navigate them all to categories.

 If you want to delete duplications in URLs, then click System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization, and set “No” for “Use Categories Path for Product URLs”. In case, you products display in multiple categories, set “Yes to both “Canonical Link Meta Tag” boxes.

 Note: Google never prefers websites that contain duplicate contents. If you want to get a higher ranking, then delete them from your online store.

 6. Google Analytics Integration

Google Analytics integration allows you to get in-depth information about the action of your real-time visitor, keywords and traffic source. You can also the performance of your products and pages to get a better understanding of your marketing strategy.

 To integrate Google Analytics into your Magento store, you need to click via System > Configuration > Google API, and set “Yes” for “Enable Option, and submit your Account Number.

 7. Google Tag Manager

Along with Google Analytics integration, you should also integrate Google Tag Manager. This will help you create and update tags for Magento 2 whenever you needed the most. Although, this particular feature is available only in the Enterprise Edition.

 Conclusion

Magento is SEO-friendly by default and offers some of the best SEO capabilities in its most recent version. With the help of SEO functionality improvements, you can optimize your online store for search engines and increase its conversion rate.

 These tips will improve the online presence of your Magento eCommerce store and help you generate more revenues.

About the Author:

Linda Wester is a Magento customization and development expert building highly custom Magento websites for all kind of businesses. Her main passion revolves around Magento and front-end development technologies.