If you’re reading this page, you understand the importance of SEO. You don’t exist for your customers unless your store is not on the first page of Google. By and large, customers have no idea what brand to choose when shopping online; they Google an item and see the stores that come up on the first page of SERP. But how do you get there? The answer is: technical SEO.

With Magento, search engine optimization becomes easy. Magento’s latest incarnation is known as “Magento 2”, launched in 2015. The updated shopping cart platform boasts improved SEO features, such as integrated image optimization, URL rewriting, and better tools for managing and creating an XML sitemap.

Below, we’ve shared some of the best Magento SEO tips from our 10+ years of experience working with the Magento platform!

What Is SEO?

SEO is the process of ranking web pages organically on Google’s search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices to help Google and other search engines crawl and index your website faster.
Technical SEO stands for behind-the-scenes optimizations, including website architecture, page load speed, data markups, etc. But you can do a lot of it on your own. Magento offers quite a few settings to create SEO-friendly URLs, build robots.txt sitemap, use headings on a webpage correctly, etc.

How Important Is SEO for a Magento Store?

Forbes reports that the first page of Google captures 71 percent of search traffic clicks, while second-page results get less than 6 percent of all website clicks.

Here’s what you get if you follow Magento SEO best practices:

• Your brand will be more discoverable because you’ll rank higher on Google.
• Your product pages will perform better and drive more conversions since the products in your catalog will correspond to a users’ search intent.
• You build authority in the eyes of search engines and potential customers.
• On top of that, you’ll see the growth of organic traffic to your website. And that means you’ll spend less on paid advertising (the dream of all online entrepreneurs!).

In a nutshell, SEO is super important for an ecommerce store. Let’s see how to do SEO on Magento and secure your #1 spot on Google.

1. Update The Latest Version Of Magento Platform

Magento SEO tip number one is to always update your Magento latest version. New releases will have the best Magento SEO features support updated. This is the thing you want to have if you want to get a high rank in search engines.
Other than that, upgrade to the latest version contains a lot of enhancements include Magento SEO performance enhancements and most importantly to strengthen the security. Staying updated will also help protect your site from bugs, since Magento patches known security loopholes periodically.

2. Create Quality Content

If you’ve been studying the world of online eCommerce marketing for any time at all you’ll be quite aware that content really does matter today. Gone are the days of ranking at the top of search results from 300 to 500-word articles filled with your keyword phrase. Google is in the business of providing high-quality search results to its audience. If this isn’t what you are delivering you will have a very difficult time climbing to the top of the organic search rankings.

3. Optimize Meta Tags

Meta tags, such as title and meta description tags, have an impact on both your search engine rankings and the click-through rate you’re going to get on search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, it’s crucial you optimize meta tags to ensure you have the best chance of ranking high in search engine results.
When it comes to creating SEO-friendly page titles, you should strive to keep them between 50 to 60 characters in length while making sure they include the main keyword you’re targeting with a particular page. As for meta descriptions, these should be between 50 to 160 characters in length, include your main keyword and, if possible, a secondary keyword you’d like to target as well.

4. Implement an SEO-Friendly URL Structure

If you search for how to do SEO on Magento, every article mentions that you need to create the Magento SEO URL keys for the web pages. It is better if URLs of your website do not have any codes.
Magento recommends using the following URL structure for your pages:

Product page: website.com/category-sub-category/product-name/
Category page: website.com/category/
Sub-category page: website.com/category/sub-category/

In terms of Magento SEO features, you can follow these steps to clean URLs:
Store => Configuration => General => Web => URL Options, and then set Add Store Code to URL to “No”.

5. Product Image Optimization

Optimizing your eCommerce site’s product images is essential on any platform, especially Magento. Follow these best practices to ensure your images are well optimized, which should help the product page rank, but also helps these images show up in Google image searches which can be an additional source of traffic:
•Use file names that describe the image and product, instead of random numbers or letters.
•Use alt text to describe the image thoroughly, using target keywords in your description.
•You can find these settings under Catalog > Products. In “Configurable Products,” double click on the thumbnail. Then click “Go To Details Page.” From there, you can see image size, resolution, and add alt text, etc.

6. Duplicate Content & Canonical tags

Having unique content is one of the key factors in Magento SEO tip. Search engine crawlers take it low on-site with duplicate content (multiple URLs pointing to the same or similar content).
Duplicate content is an issue that plagues thousands of Magento eCommerce sites. Whether from paginated category pages or pages with very similar content, you can solve this problem using canonical tags. Canonical tags essentially tell Google the “actual” location of the true page, so if you have ten pages of duplicate content based on one crucial page, you set the canonical of those ten pages to the crucial page’s URL.

Common Causes of Duplicate Content on Magento:
• Pagination (mostly on category pages with more products than can fit on one page)
• Product filtering/sorting
• Same product accessible in multiple categories
• Variations of products with minor differences. For example, if you have the same T-shirt available in different sizes with dedicated URLs as opposed to the size being a selectable attribute on one product page.

7. Speed Up Your Site

How many pages will a search engine spider on store each day? It depends on your website speed. To speed up Magento you should follow these:

•Use a Fast Web Host
•Keep Magento, Plugins, and Themes Up to date
•Lower the number of Queries
•Enable Caching
•Use a Good Quality CDN
•Choose Managed Magento Hosting

8.Make Your Store Mobile-Friendly

More than 50% of traffic is via a mobile device, so it is important to have a mobile-friendly website nowadays. Any theme which is compatible with any screen regardless of the size of the screen is a responsive theme. Having a responsive theme is an important part of Magento SEO strategy as there are many devices of various sizes.
Search engines have started penalizing the websites that are not mobile-friendly. This implies these sites are probably going to be pushed further down in search engine ranking. The easiest way to avoid penalization is to have a mobile-friendly website and have a Progressive Web Application (PWA).

Concluding Thoughts

Applying these Magento SEO best practices above is completely free, easy to do but still can bring a lot better organic traffic for your site, increase site rankings, and search engine visibility.

We at Agilis World Inc. hope with these tips, you can know how to do SEO for Magento Ecommerce and get some ideas to improve your website SEO ranking and enhance Magento SEO performance.