Magento has become one of the most popular and fast-growing e-commerce platforms on earth. The extensive and innovative customized features of Magento have made it favored by the e-commerce owners.
If you’re a Magento user, you might like to boost your shop’s visibility. You know the importance of organic traffic to your site as your customers start with a search while purchasing a product or service. So, Magento search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for your online success.
This article covers the killer Magento SEO tips to improve your search engine rankings. Read on the whole to generate more organic traffic to your site and to improve its search ranking.
Top 12 Magento SEO Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
1. Go for User-Friendly URL Structure
A URL is a web address that indicates the location of a page on the web. According to Magento’s requirement, your URL structure should be user-friendly whether it is for a product page, category, or sub-category page. For a large product catalog, use a flat URL structure instead.
Don’t have any idea how could it be done? Well, click on stores, go to the configuration, tap catalog, and select search engine optimization and settings. Select “NO” to categories path for product URL and “Yes” to Canonical Link, Meta Tag, and for categories.
Although the expert Magento SEO will help you index bloat to make product pages be accessed by a single URL, you should use optimal URL structure to follow search engine optimization
2. Maintain current XML sitemap
Search engines rely on XML sitemaps to crawl your site efficiently. So your sitemap should be updated. Magento 2 comes with a built-in XML sitemap generation tool. Enable it from the store setting menu.
3. Avoid Boring Product Description
Creating unique product descriptions is equally important for your Magento e-commerce site. Your product descriptions should be excellent, creative, and informative at the same time. The descriptions you’ll be creating should be able to fetch more customers to your site.
Most e-commerce businesses don’t manufacture the products that they sell. They gather the supplies from manufacturers or a wholesaler that comes with the manufacturer-created product descriptions. Most reputed e-commerce businesses create their product descriptions instead of staying stick to what comes with the products.
Your product pages should include valuable little content that can be found anywhere. If you want to rank better on SERPs, there’s no alternative to excellent and unique product descriptions.
4. Opt for Optimized Meta Tags
No way to deny that the meta tags including meta title and meta description play an important role in the click-through rate as well as search engine ranking. So, if you want to rank higher in the search results, optimizing meta tags is equally important.
According to the SEO experts, 60 or less is the ideal character length of an SEO-friendly meta title. Do not forget to include the focus keyword into your meta title. Talking about the SEO descriptions, the ideal length is up to 160 characters. Include your focus keyword as well as your secondary keywords you like to target.
Including more than one secondary keyword is recommended but be careful about keyword stuffing. Also, your SEO descriptions should be unique
5. Optimize Images
Google image search has become almost 27% of total online searches. Customers are now conducting image searches to discover products from a site. So, it’s a must to optimize your images for more organic traffic.
Image optimization is the biggest headache among marketers as they should consider a few couples of aspects of effective image optimization.
Have a look at the quick checklist-
· Alt Tags: Alternative text is an attribute used to define the name of an image and the date it was created. Alt texts are great for supporting visually impaired visitors taking the help of a screen reader. Also, the search engine requires alt texts to align with other image content and pages.
· Image Description: Image descriptions are used for more details on alt texts to help readers learn more about what in the image. Alt text provides important information while image description provides more details.
· Compress Image: You may like to host and display tons of images on your site that can slower your website’s speed. So you should compress their size to improve visitor’s browsing experience. There are a few couples of image optimizer tools are available to help you out.
· Use Informative Image File Name: The search engine determines the subject of an image from its file name first. So, the findability of an image depends on a descriptive image file name.
6. Improve Internal Linking Structure
Internal links link to different pages on your site pointing to the evergreen content. This is helpful for your visitors to find educational or entertaining content that they might share with their friends.
Internal links help search engines to crawl your site easily and to determine the significance and popularity of your content. The more backlink you have in your content the better you rank on SERP. So, the long-term contents can be the trump cards here.
7. Go with Schema Markup
Schema markup is the next to go with. It’s a kind of microdata that helps search engines to organize information in a great way. So, implementing schema markup including product reviews, availability, and pricing is recommended for the best results.
This is how not only you can increase your brand’s visibility but it will also play an important role in the click-through rates. SEO extensions like Reload SEO and SEO toolkit can help you implement schema markup.
8. Use Robot.txt
What can be the biggest challenge to Magento? Duplicate content. Right? The default configuration of Magento can create unnecessary URLs for the same product which is harmful to your portal when google crawls its pages and notices identicality.
So, for avoiding duplicate content build one main link for all the other links. The main link is also called a canonical link that is an HTML element. It looks different and references a similar page. These canonical links help search engines to avoid negative effects by distinguishing duplicate content.
9. Speed up Your Site
The speed of your site matters and the fact can’t be ignored. You might like to develop a website that looks stylish and loads faster. Your site’s bounce rate can increase up to 40% if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, google takes the page speed as a ranking factor for mobile devices.
So, how to boost a website’s speed? Follow the ways below
· Utilize browser caching: Browsing caching will help you collect static website content through the user’s device. This will help you eliminate the visitor’s requirement by downloading the same file they explore. So, eliminate the total amount of visitors to help your load speed out.
· Switch hosting providers: If you’re not satisfied with your page load speeds with your current hosting provider, consider switching your provider for incredible performance. Opt for one of the highly optimized Magento hosting packages.
· Opt for a CDN: A content delivery network imparts content right from servers close to visitor’s locations to speed up your site. Choose one between free and paid CDN options to cater to your content and to boost the load speed.
10. Add social media Sharing Buttons
Promote your high-quality content on multiple digital marketing channels via social media. Also, google defines your page’s relevance by using social media sharing data.
So, add social media sharing buttons to your Magento store so that the customers can share the content they are interested in. These buttons will boost the engagement rate, increase visibility, and will drive more traffic to your site.
11. Add a blog page
You can’t deny the effectiveness of a blog page for your e-commerce website. Besides product pages, if you want to expand your keyword strategy, starting a blog page is recommended. You may wonder knowing that the e-commerce sites with a blog have 434% more indexed pages.
Get several pages with unique URLs and include keywords that you don’t use in product selling. This is how you can drive maximum exposure for your site. You can help your audience with the lessons like what products they should have and how to do a process to make them purchase from your shop.
12. Stay updated with the Magento version
Team Magento introduces its platform updates every 60 days and the major updates thrice a year. Keep pace with the features like SEO supports, performance, security, code enhancements, bug fixes and others by upgrading the platform regularly.
Conclusion
If you’re surviving to gain a higher rank on search engines, all these Magento SEO tips will help you improve your search rankings. Among many other factors that you should take into consideration, all the tips given above are the most important ones that you should primarily focus on.
Being overwhelmed about where to start? Fret not! Hire a professional team of SEO experts to make your site SEO-friendly.