There are many reasons why you opted to build your website with Magento. It’s user-friendly, easy to manage, scalable, and widely regarded as one of the premier eCommerce platforms today.
Still, is Magento good for SEO? Is it the right platform from a digital marketing perspective? If you have been struggling to make your mark on the search engine results pages, these are questions you have probably been asking.
We have the answers.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to do SEO on Magento successfully, highlighting various tips that will start driving more traffic to your website.
Is Magento SEO Friendly?
Before getting to the meat of this guide, let’s answer this pressing question: is Magento good for SEO? The answer: Yes. Actually, that’s underselling it – it’s a big fat ‘yes’.
Magento is known as one of the most SEO-friendly website-building platforms. It offers a range of tools that can assist your SEO efforts, all of which are user-friendly – even for newcomers to the world of digital marketing.
Now, is Magento SEO friendly for those who like additional control over their marketing tactics? The answer is also a positive one due to the open-source nature of Magento; you have full control over elements like XML, sitemap, robots.txt, metadata, and so much more.
So, the answer to the ‘is Magento good for SEO’ question is a firm yes. Now that’s out of the way, let’s delve into how you can improve your site’s search visibility.
Use the Right URL Structure
When learning how to do SEO for Magento website domains, it’s important to get the technical side of things right. One area to start with is the URL structure.
The default Magento URL structure features superfluous elements – aka elements that will only harm your SEO strategy. Fortunately, it doesn’t require too much cleaning to produce simple, attractive, and consistent URLs that are easy for both search engines and humans to read.
To clean up your URLs, go to the “Configuration” section of Magento. Next, click General > Web > URL Options.
With the “Add Store Code to URL” option, select “No”. This will stop product/category codes from being unnecessarily added to your URLs. For further cleaning, go to the “Search Engine Optimisation” menu, click “Yes” on “Server URL Rewrites”, and this will remove the “index.php” from the URL.
In general, you want a short and concise URL that looks something like this for a product page as an example:
YourWebsite.com/product-name/
YourWebsite.com/category/product-name/
Optimise your Images
With an eCommerce store, images are the key to selling your products. You probably know that already. However, it’s still possible to overlook just how important images are for your marketing efforts.
How do you go about optimising your images? One big step to take is to add ALT attributes. With these ALT attributes – which allow you to add text to your images – you can incorporate your keywords in a savvy way.
Another tip is to ensure your images are not simply given a generic filename. Instead of something like ‘18825.jpg’, incorporate the main keyword you want to be associated with the image. For instance, if it’s an image of a dog teddy, go with dog-teddy.jpg as the filename.
Furthermore, a large image file can hamper the speed of your website – which Google will penalise you for. So compress your images as much as possible without being too detrimental to the overall picture quality.
Boost Site Speed
Speaking of compressing images, this isn’t the only way to boost the speed of your website. When learning how to do SEO on Magento, speed matters. It’s one of the most important ranking factors that determine if your site has the potential to hit the first page of Google results – or if it will sit in the doldrums.
There are numerous ways to improve the speed of your Magento site. Here are some tips:
- Pick the right hosting provider: Selecting the right web host is essential for your site. Magento requires ample processing power, so your provider needs to be capable of handling the platform’s minimum specifications.
- Audit any third-party extensions: Third-party extensions are excellent for adding extra features to your website. However, adding too many extensions can harm your site’s performance. Therefore, ensure you audit your website’s performance each time you add an extension.
- Shorten the code: Often, the JavaScript and CSS code in Magento can be longer than what’s required. If you’re confident to dive into this code, minify it when possible to improve site speeds.
- Improve caching: Magento features caching solutions out-of-the-box – but they are largely basic. It makes sense to level up this caching. This can be done for static pages with Varnish, while dynamic pages can be cached with Redis.
Update to the Latest Version of Magento
When learning how to do SEO for Magento website domains, you’ll discover it’s not always about completing technical, time-consuming tasks. In fact, it can be as simple as using the latest version of Magento.
Staying up-to-date is beneficial for security purposes and fixing any issues that may exist in an older version of Magento. It also means you won’t miss out on new features that could benefit the customer experience – and by extension, your SEO efforts.
Quality Content
High-quality content is essential for reaching Google’s first page, and that’s no different with Magento.
The production of search-optimised content also doesn’t change on the platform; you still have to follow the same rules as normal. That means producing attention-grabbing headlines, in-depth and well-researched content, keyword research and implementation, and so on.
For more information on this topic, we have produced a guide on how to produce effective blog content.
Conclusion
Is Magento SEO friendly? Yes. Does Magento provide you with the foundation to top the search engine rankings? Absolutely. Yet, for the latter to become a reality, you have to improve your optimisation strategy – and the above tips will help you achieve that goal.
Need Help?
If you’re a beginner to Magento or simply don’t have the time to optmise your site, our experts can do it all for you. As one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies operating worldwide, our SEO gurus can optimise your website and help it soar up the SERPs.
If that sounds tempting, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team today. We’ll show you exactly why we have a 97% client retention rate!
