Magento Ecommerce SEO Best Practices

Running a business online? Well, I have come across many of you who bend back and forth trying to up their game by hiring a relevant Magento development company and further following the best SEO practices. Fortunately, we are living in an era where you can find a plethora of methods or ways to enhance their SEO procedures. The following post acts as a perfect guide that can assist you in enhancing your SEO tactics/strategies and help you to up your game.

Why is there a need for SEO for eCommerce? 1
How is SEO beneficial for your eCommerce Store? 2
#1 Generate Sustainable Traffic 2
#2 Drives Brand Awareness 3
#3 Amazing Customer Experience 3
#4 Free 3
#5 Capturing the Long Tail Keywords 4

Magento Ecommerce SEO Best Practices 4
#1 Duplicate Content 6
#2 Keeping your store Up-to-Date 7
#3 Enhance the Website Speed 7
#4 Check the Magento SEO URLs 8
#5 Optimize Product Images 9
Final Thoughts 9

Why is there a need for SEO for eCommerce?

Do you think that SEO is a mere method of producing a high amount of traffic? Well, to be precise SEO is way more than you think. Striving hard to compete in today’s insanely tricky and competitive world is a bit kind of a challenge, especially after the COVID pandemic. So what exactly is SEO? Well, it is short-term known for Search Engine Optimization. The process of increasing traffic visiting a website by gaining a higher position in comparison to the previous one. Originally, SEO was supposed to attract as many visitors as possible.

Now, whenever you try surfing the internet to look for specific information, I am sure you must come across several options, some of which are the best while others are not in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In other words, the high position of the website means more possibility of visitors visiting and becoming your regular customers. Further, I would like to mention the pros of considering SEO for your eCommerce store.

We are residing in an era where there’s a race for increasing visitors, traffic and revenue and an organic search can be pretty much of help here.

How is SEO beneficial for your eCommerce Store?

Even today, Search Engine Optimization is overlooked as a highly crucial aspect of eCommerce business marketing strategy. However, here below I would like to mention several benefits offered by SEO. Read Away!

#1 Generate Sustainable Traffic

One of the obvious benefits of considering SEO is generating a sustainable amount of traffic. There are several methods available such as paid social media, and search engine ads that can certainly assist in driving tons and tons of visitors in an extremely short span of time. You see, maintaining such an impressive amount of traffic is tricky and all the paid methods are pretty expensive. I mean here you have to keep paying the ad provider again and again. And over time, you might have to pay more to drive volume with the increase in competition.

In fact, hereby incorporating the best SEO strategies, you will be able to create a more sustainable level of traffic. You see, most SEO investments tend to happen right at the beginning of the process and can certainly offer long-lasting results. At the same time, it is extremely important to keep the content well up to date and the website keeps on running smoothly. Learn more regaring content marketing.

#2 Drives Brand Awareness

In today’s scenario, making people well-aware of your brand is very important and SEO offers a great amount of help in doing so. In fact, it turns out to be the sure-shot way for low-cost brand awareness. I mean if your website gets to appear on the very first page of Google, there is a 100% chance for people looking for a particular product ending up stumbling on your website and even buying the product.

Such kinds of rankings can also turn out to be endorsements which do visitors click on and keep the brand in mind while making the final decision. Without a doubt, top ranking is one of the most powerful positions to be in and unlike your competitors you aren’t falling short here.

#3 Amazing Customer Experience

When you end up ranking on the top of the SERPs, it becomes pretty easy for customers to visit your store. Also, this without a doubt increases the buying chances. In fact, according to several stats, almost all the users don’t even bother looking at the websites that are listed on the second page of Google. So ranking on the first page of Google turns out to be a must.

Now tell me something: do you remember URLs? Of course, not! What we generally do is we simply google things and then view websites or stores ranking on the first page of the search result. Not to mention if the website is already ranked on the first page it means that it is the best in terms of navigation, content quality, high-quality images, and whatnot! As a result, an amazing customer experience can be expected here.

#4 Free
The next advantage of considering SEO for your eCommerce store is that it is available for free. Unlike PPC ads or social ads or search engine ads, you don’t have to pay whether it might work wonders for you or not. All you have to do is follow some of the best SEO practices that earn you a great source of traffic without the requirement of paying any kind of upfront costs. Though you may not spend extravagantly on SEO, you can hire a team of SEO experts at a reasonable price who carry an immense amount of experience ranking eCommerce stores by boosting search engine rankings.

#5 Capturing the Long Tail Keywords

Another crucial advantage of considering SEO for your eCommerce store is that it captures the long-tail keyword. You see 15% of search engine queries are new and unique and a long tail keyword strategy is the implication of these queries within the content and presents it seamlessly that it successfully covers at a higher rate.

Although, eCommerce sites are typically well-structured in such a way that they do end up targeting those long-term searches. For example, first, you look for clothing rather than women’s clothing, then dresses, jumpsuits, pants, jeans, tops, t-shirts, shirts and whatnot! Similarly, an eCommerce store follows the same path, so if you have the keyword “women dresses” Jeans for Women” then the end user can directly land up on your site. Here all you have to do is opt for a robust and scalable SEO strategy.

I can simply go on and on when it comes to the benefits of eCommerce SEO such as building trust, increasing sales, expanding remarketing audiences, increasing site usability, fast loading speed, etc. eCommerce SEO is a growing trend and not making the most of it means you might have a lot to lose. Further, I would like to mention some of the best Magento eCommerce SEO practices to take into account.

Magento Ecommerce SEO Best Practices

When we use the word eCommerce, Magento is something that automatically comes to your mind. Why so? Because Magento and eCommerce are like chocolate and peanut butter, they can make incredible taste when merged. In fact, there are a plethora of reasons such as power, security and customizability why Magento is a go-to platform for retailers planning to strengthen their online presence. Now I am sure you must have come across the term Magento SEO. Well, it is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique and never heard of before. In fact, Magento turns out to be more like a blessing in disguise for SEO as it incorporates some of the most amazing features such as robots.txt file, sitemap.xml, etc.

To come up with a strong technical foundation you need:
● Great URL Structure
● Meta information
● Headings
● Faceted Navigation
● Crawling and Indexing
● Site Speed
● HTTPS

In order to rank your Magento store well, especially through the organic search results, there are certain aspects you must take into consideration. Yes, I am talking about the three pillars:

1. Technology – A strong technical foundation of the website can certainly assist search engines in finding and understanding your site as soon and as effectively as possible.
2. Relevance – Is your content relevant to the search query? For that, you have to make sure that you end up creating content that’s useful and satisfying for the end users.
3. Authority – Try to build trust by adding as many links as you can to your website.

It may quite interest you to know that doing SEO for a typical website is far easier than doing that of an eCommerce store featuring hundreds and thousands of page listings or product listings. Fret not, here down below I would like to mention some of the most intimidating SEO tips that must be taken into account for the betterment of your eCommerce store.

#1 Duplicate Content

What exactly is duplicate content? Now I am sure you must have seen similar content over the internet. I mean two websites having the same heading, title, paras, images basically everything seems to be extremely identical. Can you spot which one is original and which one is copied? Now what happens is when multiple versions are similar to each other, it becomes way difficult for search engines to distinguish between the two. And that’s the reason why search engines rarely tend to display the duplicate pages in the search engine rankings. You must be wondering whether the duplication can harm SEO. Well, of course, it does and in many ways!

One of the obvious ways is that duplicate content can result in high penalties leading to harming your page rankings and organic traffic. You see search engines in such cases tend to determine which version is more relatable to the query of the audience and then give a specific rank. Though there is no denying the fact that duplicate content can severely dilute link equity and credibility.

I have come across many of you who have this question, can this be visible to the naked eyes? Well, not really because duplication is hidden in the code of the site so you need software to check things precisely. Best practices to combat duplicate content are:

● 301 redirect
● Make use of Meta Robot Tags
● Make relevant changes in Meta Title Tags
● Use Canonical tag
● Eliminate pages

Mainly duplicate content issues occur in pages such as product filtering, product sorting, pagination, the same product in different categories, variation of a similar product and so forth.

#2 Keeping your store Up-to-Date

Another crucial tip to take into account is keeping your Magento store up to date. Now since you have already developed an intimidating Magento store but not keeping it up-to-date means you won’t get desired results and keep your customers hooked for a long period of time. Of course, Magento development is very crucial but what’s more crucial is to maintain the website. Here’s how!

● Analyze website performance – You have to keep examining the overall performance of the website day in and day out. Fortunately, there are a wide range of magento tools available that may assist you well in analyzing the website. So that you can beware of negative clicks, visits, bounce rate, search queries and whatnot!

● Website speed – With an increasingly short attention span of users, website owners these days must keep severe track of the speed of the website. If the website doesn’t load within three seconds then your customers are more likely to shift to your competitors.

● Regular updates – Fresh and relevant information are favored by all and your end users are certainly not an exception here. So try rewriting your website at regular intervals to keep your users stay relevant and on top of Google.

Here you do have a choice. You can either update things manually through a system upgrade or else seek assistance from a relevant Magento development company which offers seamless maintenance.

#3 Enhance the Website Speed

The next step that needs to be taken into consideration is enhancing the website speed. The slow loading speed can be quite discouraging and tiresome. Now, first of all, let us understand why this happens in the first place. One of the obvious reasons for slow loading speed include not meeting the system requirements, making use of inappropriate extensions, MySQL, NGINX, and PHP configurations not optimized, disabling caching, use of slow hardware and whatnot!

Further, I would like to mention a few ways through which you can speed up your Magento store.

● Update regularly – When a different version is released then you need to know that it is astronomical. And the same goes for every other technology available. You see developers in the Magento community tend to strive extremely hard to make the latest version secure, robust and scalable to a great extent. So don’t miss out on the big update, you never know it can be way more useful.
● Optimize your database – Databases tend to store data in one location. Now what happens when the data is poorly optimized, it takes way longer to server requests. As a result, this surely reflects in performance.
● Enable Magento Cache Management – Now let’s take a situation where you are sending an invite to around 1000 people. Now when you do it manually, it takes a hell lot of time and effort. How about sending bulk emails too?
○ Create a copy of your site in the local cache
○ Magento returns the copy instead of recreating a new site

Also, make this a regular habit of the site audit. Right from adding the relevant amount of pages to getting notified if the website speed gets slow make use of the website audit tool to identify relevant issues such as broken links, SSL errors, lack of mobile optimization and whatnot!

#4 Check the Magento SEO URLs

Another interesting tip to take into account is keeping tabs on Magento SEO URLs and seeing whether they are SEO-friendly or not. One of the most amazing features offered by Magento was that it enabled the end users to edit their product URLs freely. Yes, in other words, it is extremely easy to make relevant changes to all the links, especially the ones which are in regard to the product categories, and CMS pages. In other words, you no longer have to worry about 440 errors or missing content here.

Some of the best and most common examples to consider:
● website.com/category/
● website.com/category/sub-category/
● website.com/category-sub-category/product-name/

#5 Optimize Product Images

Another crucial step to take into account is to optimize product images. By doing so you can conduct better search rankings. Now you must be wondering what image optimization is. Well, it is all about reducing the file size of your image and all this happens without sacrificing quality. Here’s how you can do so!

● Name image descriptively – You will be listing hundreds and thousands of products so don’t keep the default names given by the camera. Try to incorporate relevant keywords so that when the crawler goes through your file names, it finds them relevant. Take a deep look at the website analytics and relevant keyword patterns and then make crucial decisions here.

● Choosing image dimensions – Now since you are creating an eCommerce store, of course, you have to show the product from different angles. For example, the back, the front, the interiors, engines and whatnot! In addition, do not forget to add a relevant description so that potential users end up landing on your website.

● Reduce the file size – As mentioned earlier, the attention span is pretty much less and your eCommerce store not loading in a span of 3 seconds means you are losing out on your potential customers. It may also interest you to know that Google uses page load time as one of the crucial ranking factors.

And that’s all for now!

Final Thoughts

Though SEO is one of the most conventional and traditional approaches, there are numerous new and quick options such as paid ads, social media ads, and emails, that can offer immediate returns. However, on the contrary, investing or hiring a reliable SEO agency might not provide immediate returns but it certainly can be a slow yet sustainable path to achieve growth in the long run. Take certain aspects such as keyword selection, content creation, and tech SEO in mind and do try investing in opportunities that are within your reach.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a techie or a non-techie, but you have to be realistic knowing that SEO strategy won’t be an overnight success – it may take weeks, months and even a year but have faith that one day your eCommerce store will be found on the top search rankings. Stay motivated, and keep going because that’s the only way we move forward.

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