Magento SEO checklist: What’s important for Google (2022 update)
If you are a Magento store owner, you would want your store to rank in the top positions in the SERP. Magento offers many built-in SEO features but you should know how to apply them.
If you have the best products and compelling website designs you still need sales and traffic. Finding an Magento SEO Expert to help you improve your position in the SERPs and boost visibility and website traffic is critical.
These are the SEO tips you can follow to make your website better:
1. One of the top built-in features of Magento is generating the XML sitemap. An XML sitemap provides a roadmap for the search engine crawlers of all the pages of your website. A sitemap helps them to better understand what your website is about and check it for new content.
2. Create a robot.txt file to define to the search engine crawlers which of the pages to index and which not to. You can block pages like customer accounts, search and checkout from being indexed as you need not rank for them.
3. Include metadata in the code of your website as it appears in the search listings. it is visible to search crawlers and lets them know what your website is about. You should include your keywords in both meta titles and meta descriptions.
4. The home page is the most visited page of your website. To improve your Magento SEO you should change the default title. By default, it says ‘Homepage’. You should use a title that describes your store the best and also include your important keyword.
5. Every product, category and CMS page has an SEO section in Magento. You can set your meta titles and meta descriptions using this feature. If you have thousands of products then you can use the feature - Product Field Auto-Generation.
6. Magento has the Rich-Snippets feature which covers all the necessary information about the products like price, rating, reviews, name and more. The only drawback is that the Magento feature does not cover the ‘Availability’ tag.
7. You can add your company name to your website to improve brand awareness and to make your name more recognised. You can do this by setting a suffix in the HTML head configuration. You should not add anything at the beginning of the page title so you should keep the prefix field empty.
8. URLs can also impact your SEO so you should use concise, short and informative URLs. You should use keywords in them and avoid using stop words (eg. the, is) in them.
Magento adds the ‘.html’ suffix to all the product and category URLs. It is redundant and also makes the links longer therefore you should remove them. This will make them cleaner and it will be easier to migrate to other platforms.
If you are not managing a multi-language Magento store there is no need to add the store codes to your website URL.
One more option to improve your Magento store URLs is the ‘Serve URL Rewrites’ option. This option helps to remove the index.php from the links and makes them ‘Cleaner’.
As the SEO-friendly URLs are concise you should not add the category paths to product URLs.
When you create new URLs for existing pages you should create redirects as well. This will ensure that the customers land on the right version of the page. Magento allows you to create redirects manually and automatically and it is very simple.
9. Duplicate content should be avoided otherwise each of the pages will compete for the search engine’s attention. Use canonical tags to solve such issues.
10. All your SEO efforts will go in vain if the website loads slowly. One of the best ways to improve SEO is to speed up your Magento store.
11. Images help you to create rich content but they slow down your website. You should optimise all your images and use the Alt-text tag for all of them.
12. Posting blogs regularly on your Magento store is also a great way to drive revant traffic and improve relevance.
13. The number of mobile users is increasing and therefore you should make your Magento store mobile-friendly.
14. Your Magento store should be secure and for this, you should use SSL protocol. Make sure your website uses the latest version and keep your website safe.
15. Google uses internal links to move through your Magento store and identify what products you are selling. Build internal links in Magento using the feature - Related Products.
In order to completely optimize the Magento platform, you can approach us for Magento SEO service. Our SEO experts can help you identify tech issues and completely optimize your magento website.
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