Magento is definitely one of the most popular ecommerce platforms on the market. It brings certain features that can make your job easier, but there are always new ways of improving your ranking and driving more organic traffic to your online store.
That’s why we’re discussing Magento SEO tips today – to help you build a better marketing strategy and bring your business to a higher level.
Ready to check them out?
8 Tips for Optimizing Magento SEO
1. Optimize Product Descriptions and Images
Many ecommerce websites may offer similar products, but only a few know how to truly stand out. The first step is creating a well-set product description with all relevant keywords included. Avoid copying descriptions you got from the manufacturer since Google sees it as duplicate content with no extra value added – and doesn’t rank it well.
Equally important, create informative and relevant filenames for your product images as well. It may surprise you, but around 26.79% of online searches are directed to images – which is why red-women-coat.jpg is definitely better than just IMG00378.JPG. The name you choose will be a part of the image’s URL, so try to use plain English. That way, the search engine will be able to understand and navigate your file better.
2. Install The Latest Updates
New releases will often bring some improved features as well as updates for existing ones. For instance, in 2020, the platform got Magento 2, the upgraded version that brought certain improvements such as advanced built-in security options, better SEO features, bug fixes, increased speed, and some more.
3. Implement a Search-Friendly URL
URLs are supposed to be optimized for the primary keyword you use for your page. When you have a relevantly titled URL, Google knows what your page is about and marks it as a valuable source of helpful information.
Avoid using unwanted characters such as “< > # % { }”. Also, don’t go for some stop words like “but, the, of, and”, or some others. This is a simplified URL structure Magento recommends you to use: Website/Category/Sub-category/Product.
4. Build Better Internal Link And Backlink Structure
A blog is an excellent tool to strengthen your Magento SEO strategy by creating a good internal link network. For instance, if you write a post, back it up with links of your previous articles, pages, guest posts, or other types of content you have. That gives your consumers a better insight into the entire structure of your website and provides them with more useful sources of information. Other than that, it also helps the search engine to understand the hierarchical form of your site.
A backlink, on the other hand, is when someone links to your site.
5. Choose Relevant Keywords
When it comes to the title, put relevant keywords as close to the beginning of your title as possible – that way search engines can easily scan them. Keep your title around 50-60 characters long. Make sure to add proper keywords to your meta descriptions too; their optimal length is 50-160 characters. If you are about to add one or more secondary keywords, try not to stuff it and make it look too forced. Write it in a simple way, like something you would actually say in everyday life.
Bonus tip: go with low competitive keywords first. High SEO ranking requires lots of work that doesn’t necessarily give good results – especially if you’re going for highly competitive keywords from the very beginning. On the other hand, choosing “less popular” keywords has the potential to help you build a higher ranking, engage your target group, and improve search traffic. Keywords Explorer is a quite useful tool where you can see a score called “keyword difficulty” (KD) – that can help you figure out which keyword suits your needs the best.
6. Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool in charge of measuring your traffic and improving the organic presence in search engines. It allows you to control, maintain, and fix errors that may negatively impact your rankings.
On the other hand, Google Analytics is an excellent service that gives you valuable insights into the performance of your business strategy. It shows important data such as top-performing pages, specifics of your audience as well as their online habits, mobile traffic, etc.
7. Speed It Up
The loading speed is another important feature that can influence your ranking – not to tell most of the people expect modern sites to be very quick. As a matter of fact, research says 40% of consumers will leave a site if it doesn’t open within three seconds, while 47% of them expect it to load within 2 seconds.
There are a couple of ways to speed your site up, and the first one is switching hosting providers that can offer you a better service. There are numerous web hosts that can offer you a Magento hosting package suitable for your needs and optimized for the infrastructure of this particular platform.
A Content Delivery Network (or CDN) is another helpful solution and platform that reduces the physical distance between the user and the server. That minimizes delays in loading your website so the users around the globe can see the content of the same quality within the same loading time.
Use browser caching. It allows you to store static web content on the consumer’s device. This way, your users don’t need to download the same files every time when on your site.
Try to reduce the number of files your consumers need to request every time they want to visit one of your pages – the efficient way to do this is by merging and minifying CSS files and JavaScript.
8. Work On Top-notch Content
Search engines love fresh and high-quality content that keeps the target audience informed. If you’re consistent with creating content and updating your blog, you’re on a pretty good path to improve your visibility on SERPs ( Search Engine Results Pages).
Magento 2 also has an FAQ extension that allows your visitors to ask questions and get answers on time. This way your site remains regularly updated, active, and informative – which, in the end, results in better SEO performance.
Google algorithms go in the direction of “by users and for users”. The customer review section not only gets you a better ranking (especially with positive reviews), but also comes as a valuable source of relevant keywords your consumers mention while talking about your products.
Conclusion
Boosting the performance of your site is a never-ending process that simply requires you to always stay current with the newest SEO practices. Yet, it’s worth it; spending time and other resources to make your business unique and SEO-friendly will eventually get you closer to your target audience as well as bring loyal customers to your ecommerce website.
In the end, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here, but hopefully got to some fairly helpful information you can use to successfully maintain and improve your Magento SEO strategy.