The Complete Guide On Magento SEO

Magento SEO: The Complete Guide

Magento is today one of the essential CMS for e-Commerce sites and more particularly for those with a large catalog and a consequent traffic. Since version 2.0, there is a greater flexibility in the configuration of SEO elements with this new version. Nevertheless, like any website creation software, a configuration of the SEO fields and the addition of some modules are necessary to obtain a powerful sales tool in search engines.

The story of Magento

Born in 2007, created by an American web agency, Magento is one of the two most popular solutions to start an e-Commerce activity with Prestashop. Its first Open Source version was released in 2008 and in 2010, a commercial edition was released under the name Magento Enterprise Edition with more developed features than its free version. With the success of the solution, Ebay bought it to make it a brick of its service to Ebay Enterprise professionals. In 2015, the solution became again an independent entity under the name of Magento Commerce and launched version 2 of its software.

Worldwide, Magento’s market share is around 6%, ahead of Prestashop. In France, however, Magento CMS is used 10 times more than its counterpart Prestashop.

The strengths of Magento

• International: Under the same platform, you can manage an international activity by isolating the regions that your e-Commerce site targets and thus manage the different parameters specific to each country: languages, currencies, deliveries, taxes or means of payment for example. The management of your catalog in multilingual makes Magento a software adapted for sites that sell internationally.
• Autonomy and flexibility: Magento offers both a CMS that is easy to administer for a person who does not master the technique and, at the same time, gives great flexibility in the development of specificities according to these needs.

Magento SEO Tips

• Find & target relevant keywords to you niche
  
• Tap the Potential of Video
• Create Comprehensive, Authoritative, Evergreen Content
• Maximize User Engagement
• Optimize for Voice Search
• Focus on Mobile-First Indexing
• Increase Your Click-Through Rate with catchy description & SEO title
• Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Dwell Time
• Create an SEO-compatible URL structure.
• Use headers correctly.
• Guide search engines as they crawl and index your store.
• Optimize store speed (Compress CSS, JS & HTML)
  
• Internal linking & build authoritative backlinks
• Use product & relevant schema for your store

What we find in the Magento 2 version for SEO settings?

Magento natively integrates the SEO settings found on most of the newest versions of the most used CMS. Magento brings improvements in the optimization of its site for search engines. Nevertheless, there are still some shortcomings that modules will be able to complete.

Title and meta description tags for Magento SEO

The minimum to reference a web page is to fill in the Title tag, still used in the ranking algorithm and the meta description that will help the CTR (click rate) of the page. Thus, a novelty in Magento 2 appeared, allowing to fill templates for filling Titles, meta description tags and keywords (whose SEO uselessness is known to all). You can thus build your templates for “product” pages for example, by following the following path : Blinds -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Product Fields Auto-Generation.

 

However, there are some drawbacks that can be found in the automatism of SEO tags:

1. The models are applied to all products. So you can’t imagine different templates from one product category to another.
2. You can only use the following Placeholders: {{name}}, {{description}} and {{sku}}. (product code)… This limits the combinations of possibilities knowing that one could have liked to use the name of the parent category of the product – One can imagine a prefix as in the example above: “cheap”.
3. More annoying: Once the rule has been defined and published, if you want to change the models, there is no going back.
4. Finally, if you use the placeholder {{description}}, it means that you will use the description of your product, which is generally longer than the 160 recommended signs. This means that you risk having a meta description truncated by Google with invisible useful elements in the result pages.

This new feature since version 2 of Magento is still limited and quite basic.

The alternative on these fields is to create, by hand, the product pages and edit the fields by providing custom optimizations that will take precedence over the automatic rules Product -> Basic Settings -> Search Engine Optimization. But this optimization will be time-consuming for the most consequent catalogs!

Fortunately, there are modules that can bring flexibility in optimizations beyond what Magento 2 offers natively. They will be described in the second part of this article.

For the home page, it will have its own area in the CMS for SEO tags with the possibility to define a title for the page and a pattern for the URL (knowing that it is better not to put anything), and all the classic meta tags in a specific tab: Content -> Pages -> Home Page -> Page Information.

If you wish to define a prefix or suffix (to cite its brand for example) for all the Titles of your site, you can do it here : Blinds -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head.

Keyword Research

Magento Keyword Research is the way toward discovering search terms that Magento stores can use on their pages. It includes finding the correct watchwords to use in item portrayals. This makes it simpler for item pages to appear in indexed lists. For example, in the event that you ran a Magento store selling baseball shoes. You would need to utilize a watchword like “dark baseball shoes” in the item depiction. The best catchphrases are the ones that have the most traffic, least rivalry and are the most pertinent.
Improve your watchword investigate results — just as the time required — with the accompanying apparatuses:

• Ubersuggest
• Keywordtool.io
• Answer the Public

Utilize these online devices, and you can discover data on the hunt volume, rivalry, and cost-per-click (CPC) of catchphrases quick. A few, as Ubersuggest, will likewise share the quantity of results for that catchphrase and give you the choice to trade them to a CSV record.

In case you’re uncertain about where to begin your catchphrase examine, look to your intended interest group. Contingent upon your market, your crowd may have a functioning network on Reddit or may present inquiries related on your item on Quora.

Benefits of Keyword Research in Magento

1. It’s a chance to discover what individuals are searching for
   The incentive behind realizing what your clients’ interests are could be entirely important to your store. It could permit you to make an answers for their issues. Or on the other hand, permit your store to get found in the opportune spot at the perfect time. How about we take the baseball shoes model once more. In the event that search terms around the subject of cleaning baseball shoes turned out to be progressively broad, you could make content about it. This could be an article or even an item list with a determination of cleaning supplies for baseball shoes.
2. It can help with arrangements
   Query items are a decent marker of purchasing goal. There are many indexed lists like “purchase baseball shoes” and “get baseball shoes”. Its reasonable the individuals who search these need baseball shoes. Be that as it may, imagine a scenario in which I disclosed to you that these can be utilized to make expectations. In a device called Search Console, it mentions to you what watchword your store gets found from the most. Suppose you out of nowhere observed a monstrous increment in the measure of guests to your store from one watchword. Wouldn’t that imply that there’s an interest for the item being looked? In the event that this occurred, it would be a chance. For example, you could put away on additional stock to satisfy the need.

Page Speed Optimization

• 73% of versatile web clients state that they’ve experienced a site that was too delayed to even think about loading.
• 40% of individuals surrender a site that takes over 3 seconds to stack.
• The one-second postponement in page reaction can bring about a 7% decrease in changes.

Take a gander at the numbers, it doesn’t lie. Page speed is extremely essential to hold the guests on your site. Page Speed is the time a guest needs to hold up until your page is totally stacked. This time is generally determined when that it shows the full substance for a specific page or the first occasion when that the program you get from the web server.

How can the page speed be improved?

• Your host
  You ought to Invest in renowned and quality facilitating bundle. Since the host is the spot to store all the information, the substance of the site, so the substance transfer speed including content, pictures, video, and so forth, possibly quick when the host can meet the quickest transfer speed.
• Advance pictures
  Over 80% of sites have eased back down when stacking pages since pictures are not upgraded. The way that the pictures involve a ton of assets on the host and is very overwhelming for the site. Along these lines, to accelerate the heap for the web we have to improve all the pictures on the website with the help apparatuses. Be that as it may, they ought to be enhanced in a specific way in order to guarantee both speed and nature of the pictures.
• Reduce CSS, JavaScript and HTML
  CSS is the code that software engineers compose. There are a great many pieces of code in each website page, and each space, tab, character, line break builds the record size. In this manner, it is important to pack these records lightest to have the option to accelerate the site by expelling pointless characters, for example, line, space, and so on. Anyway the code after pressure is very hard to see, however it will spare 20-30% of the limit. Google prescribes utilizing YUI Compressor for both CSS and JavaScript.

• Minify diverts
  Page diverts make extra HTTP demands, which can set aside a lot of effort for Googlebot to creep and hinder the page load. Consequently, abstain from utilizing too many sidetracks at whatever point you are conceivable.
• Empower pressure
  Empowering Gzip on your server will lessen the size of any HTML, CSS, and so forth, which is sent to the guests.

Optimizing for Mobile

With the dispatch of Google AMP pages and Google declaring versatile invitingness as a positioning sign, I believe it’s sheltered to state that in the event that you’re not ready for portable advancement at this point, at that point you’ll be left on page 50 of Google’s query items. Furthermore, you’ve most likely seen a pattern on your site with portable driving more traffic to your site than different roads.

Yotpo gathered information from 65 million web based business arranges more than 120,000 online business stores in 2015 and found that search made up 34%. That is quite colossal!

In the event that you’re not versatile streamlined at this point, at that point follow these means:

Plan for versatile: This implies making invigorate fastens over the crease, making portable variants of your pages, making the catches greater, thus considerably more. This presently incorporates making Google AMP pages for your online journals or article pages.

Settle on portable setup: You can pick between a responsive structure, dynamic serving, or separate URLs.

Try not to square javascript, CSS, or pictures in your robots.txt. Make versatile well disposed pictures to speed up: Stick with picture records littler than 70 KB.

To verify whether your site is versatile upgraded, head over to Google’s portable inviting test.

Implementing Schema Markup

Wouldn’t life be extraordinary if Google illuminated our day by day “my site isn’t getting discovered” issue? All things considered, with rich bits or diagram markup, you’re ready to feature explicit snippets of data for Google and other web crawlers.

There are two kinds of composition markup you’re going to need to add to your web based business site. Each of these has their properties.

1. Item mapping markup: This requires the item name and cost. There are likewise other cool highlights you can include, for example, picture, depiction, URL, and brand name.

2. Audit blueprint markup: This requires two sorts of markup – 1.) total appraisals and 2.) singular survey.
To execute total, you’ll need: Overall rating esteem, rating tally, best evaluating, and most noticeably awful appraising. To actualize the individual survey, you’ll need: Reviewer, audit date, survey esteem, best appraising, most noticeably awful evaluating, and audit body.

Web-based social networking Share Buttons

We as a whole realize you should be dynamic via web-based networking media for your business. Be that as it may, do you need online life share fastens on your item pages? The short answer: Yes. Internet based life share catches give you the potential with the expectation of complimentary advancement on social channels. What’s more, while online networking doesn’t straightforwardly influence your rankings in the web crawlers, having an item that is frequently shared and a connecting with page helps your rankings.

An investigation from ShareThis demonstrated that millennial customers are twice as liable to purchase an item they’ve by and by shared via web-based networking media. It merits incorporating.

Here are a few hints for consolidating online networking share catches:

Expel the offer counter from the catches.

• A/B test various kinds of catches.
• Utilize littler fastens so as not to occupy from changes.
• Add web-based social networking share catches to the registration page.

URL rewriting

No novelty between version 1 and 2 of Magento regarding the rewriting of URLs since they will be built using the SKU of the product with the option to add the terms guaranteeing a SEO friendly URL. Remember that keywords in urls are not used by Google’s algorithm for page ranking. Only interest, the CTR… You can find the URL rewriting settings for products here : Product -> Basic Settings -> Search Engine Optimization.

For the meta tags as well as for the URL rewriting of “category” pages, this is done at the “Store” category level: Blinds -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head. This allows you to optimize the URL rewriting as you wish here: Products -> Categories -> General Information.

Image optimization

The integration of your images is often strategic for an e-Commerce site that may have a significant traffic from Google Images. On the “Samsung galaxy s7” query, which has a search volume of 150,000 queries per month, the images that emerge capture a significant share of traffic for an e-merchant.

Thus, for the integration of our images within an e-commerce site, the two main points of attention are as follows:

The quality of the image for an efficient weight and the name of the image (attribute ALT) which will have to take up the description of the image. Here again, Magento did not fully meet our expectations since we have a space to put the images by integrating an Alt: Blinds -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head -> Header: but no native image compression solution. We will see in the second part of the article, image compression solutions to add in the Magento back office. Also think about external solutions like http://jpegclub.org/ or http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ to download an already light image.

The canonical beacon

Concerning the canonical tags specifying to Google the source URL of a content (the canonical content), you have the possibility to configure it there too in Magento: Blinds -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization .

This configuration was already present in version 1, but in version 2, it also applies to display modes: filtered and sorted. In the case of sorted pages, we generally prefer to unindex them with a noindex robot tag, follow but Magento does not allow us natively to block the indexing of these pages.

On the other hand, for filtered (faceted) pages, there are opportunities to use them to create new landing pages that will respond to middle tail requests. Magento 2 does not natively offer to control the opening of these pages and the use of a specific module will be required to open these pages to SEO. Ex: Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2. The presentation and configuration of this plugin will be discussed in the second part of this article.

Finally, you should also know that if you set the canonical tag on the category pages, it will also be applied on the pagination of these pages with a link to the category (without the pagination). This replication should be avoided since we would prefer the rel=next/prev attributes to the canonical tag.

For the canonical tags on the product pages they refer to the screenshot above, you can indicate the canonical URL of the product page. On the other hand, in the case of a positioning of your product in several categories (multi-categorization), it is not possible to use the canonical attribute to avoid duplication by placing the same URL for this single product page. We are here on automation and not on customizable fields. An external module will be the only solution.

The attachment category in your product URLs

You also have the possibility to indicate the category in your product URLs here : Blinds -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization. It can be interesting to add it to get a richer URL for the CTR or to help in the categorization of your urls during a log analysis or in Analytics.

On the other hand, it can also be a source of duplication of your content, for example if you have to make a multi-categorization of content or if you want to highlight products in a category “novelty” or “sales”. The solution would then be not to add a category in your URLs or to use a canonical tag with the help of a module.

Magento SEO – In conclusion

Magento 2 has made improvements in the customization parameters for SEO. Not everything is perfect and additional modules will have to be installed to take advantage of the SEO potential of your site.

Beware, changes made to your site are not without consequences and must be controlled, especially if you do not do it at launch. For example, a change in the URL rewriting should include a redirection from the old format to the new format or else you will lose your positions.