Magento 2 SEO Guide: Setting, Tips & Best Practices

One of the most popular platforms for e-commerce websites, Magento has more than 250,000 stores on the internet. With the USA being number one with more than 75000 websites on Magento, we can understand the popularity of this platform. The platform is owned by Adobe, helps its users use various features and sell their products easily. Thus, SEO for Magento Websites is as important as any other website.

So, how do we create websites on Magento and how is it different from others? And is it possible to get your Magento website on top of the SERP.

If you also have all these questions, keep reading this article, as we have covered everything you can think of.

What is Magento?

Owned by Adobe, Magento helps build multi-channel platforms for both B2C and B2B customers for a smooth user experience. From page builder, payment fulfillment, inventory and order management, customer account management, it has everything an e-commerce store should have.

Why is Magento better than any other platform?

There are various reasons one should consider Magento over any other platform to build their e-commerce store. Let’s discuss a few here:

Security:

Every customer is concerned about the security of its payment method. Magento not only provides secure transactions, but also it complies with PA-DSS. This indicates that Magento adheres not only to globally accepted security standards, but also to the 14 critical protection criteria. It is good for businesses that are providing international services to their customers.

Various Hosting:

Unlike any other platform, Magento does not force its platform users to have only hosting that comes with it. People can choose any hosting as per their requirements and choices. 

Regional Language and Currencies:

Magento is offering a service that many big players in the industry do not provide. As they allow selling internationally. They allow you to make payment in multiple currencies and they have supported in many languages.

Mobile Friendly:

People who have a negative experience in your mobile store are 62% less likely to purchase from you in the future (Google) and this is why having a website which is mobile-friendly can increase your sales. Magento allows websites to have a responsive design in order to provide a consistent user experience across multiple screens. Magento’s cross-platform compatibility, cross-browser compatibility, and device form agnostic capabilities make it suitable for the modern era.

Fast Load:

 1 second delay in website load can reduce customer satisfaction by 16%. Hence, website speed is important. Magento with its heavy duty platform allows users to have their web pages load faster. 

Advance SEO:

 Every website owner wants his website to show not only on Search Result pages, but also to be on top, so whenever people search for a product they are offering their website should be the first one people see. This is possible with SEO. This is why Magento has provided advanced SEO options like setting up URL and snippets, creating sitemap,  and robots.txt, canonical tags, image SEO and more. 

Why is SEO important for Magento Store?

There are more than 2,50,000 Magento stores on the internet today. That means a large chunk of users will be visiting these sites and your competitor might have the website on the same platform. So, why do you need to do SEO for your Magento platform? The answer is simple, to bring the users to your platform.

The reason you have created a website on a Platform like Magento is to get visitors and sales eventually. What if someone searches for the clothes you sell on your website and does not appear on SERP, they will visit your competitor’s website, right!
So, Search Engine Optimization is important for all. 

How to do Magento SEO?

The Magento market has grown in popularity and thousands of stores are focusing a lot on customer satisfaction. Only people that serve customers’ search intent are rewarded with the highest position in SERP rankings.

Magento2 SEO was causing the problem in its early phases. Magento is well equipped with SEO features because the most popular stores know how to implement the best Magento SEO strategies. Here is the list of factors and activities that are useful for Magento SEO

Sitemap

 Sitemap gives a clear direction to search engines to crawl your website. It indicates what and how your content should be crawled. Magento allows you to generate both HTMl and XML Sitemap. For instance, you do not want a few pages to be crawled like Checkout pages, you simply do not include those in your Sitemap. 

Robots.txt

When your XML sitemap is complete, it is stored in robot.txt files. These files are in charge of informing Google, which pages of your website to crawl (or not to crawl). As a result, if your eCommerce store has low-performing products, you can use Magento 2 settings to place the noindex, nofollow tag on product pages that you don’t want to be ranked for.

Internal Links

Internal Linking is a great way to tell search engines about your products and new pages and content. For example, google lands on a blog about summer collection and on that blog post you link to cotton dresses product page, and as google follows that link, it will know that you are selling summer wear. 

Magento Meta Keywords

Meta Title and Description are the main factors why people click on your website as this is the first content they see on your website on Search Engine Result Pages. Magento allows you to write Meta Title and Description. The only things they do not have functionality to write the  meta title and description for categories and product pages. For this, you can use custom code meta settings.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can cause your website ranking. As there can be scenarios that one product comes under two categories. You can use the canonical tag provided in Magento to avoid duplication of the content. 

Web Performance

Page Experience is now a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop. Website performance is in terms of time loading, proper navigation and readable font size. All these factors are parts of web performance. And how we can forget Core Web Vitals that include LCP(Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), HTTPS, Mobile Friendliness. You can check all these factors on PageSpeed insights and GTmetrix and many other tools. And once you find these issues, resolve all to provide a better user experience for your users.

Mobile First Indexing

From July 2019, Google has enabled mobile first indexing for new websites, and for all websites they have gradually shifted them to mobile first indexing. As more and more users make searches on Mobile than tables or desktops, it is essential to make gaziantep rus escort sure that our website does not have any issues that can prevent Google or any other search engines from crawling. So, keep in mind that our content should be the same for both mobile and desktop. If any URL is different for mobile, make sure that it is not blocked from crawling. Use same meta robots for desktop and mobile.

Last Words: 

After completing all the above tasks, you are ready to take your SEO process to a different level that is link building. Link building is a part of off-page SEO. Through various sources, you can generate backlinks. The only thing you need to understand is the links should be relevant and of good quality