Magento SEO: Eight Important Considerations
Magento is a powerful, open-source platform that can be used to build very successful eCommerce websites. It offers a lot of options for customizability to its users, but to get the most success from the platform, it requires an in-depth knowledge of how it operates. When you’re running a business online, you have plenty on your plate as it is. If you need to ramp up your traffic and get your website in front of the eyes of more customers, you might want to consider a Magento SEO campaign, and here are some very important things to consider.
Focus On Keywords And Key Phrases
There are so many different factors at play during a professionally crafted Magento SEO campaign that it can be very difficult to focus on just one. However, perhaps nothing is as important to the success of a campaign at the keyword research that precedes it and the keyword strategy that defines it. Almost all of the following advice we offer would be impossible to use or ineffective without a keyword strategy to guide it.
A keyword strategy will help define all of the content you produce, both in the form of short and long-form consumables as part of your marketing efforts and as descriptions on your pages, page titles and more.
A Magento SEO campaign will need to begin with keyword research to understand what words consumers are using in their searches and why; what information and content they find valuable; what sites get traffic, and what keywords they are using for success.
When you have identified a list of keywords and key phrases that you will use as the foundation of much of your search engine optimization initiatives you can then progress into content product and optimizing much of the rest of your Magento website.
Create An Optimized URL Structure
One of the most basic improvements you can make to your Magento website to increase its search engine optimization is to clean up the URL structure of your site. Once you have developed a keyword strategy, developing a simple and effective URL structure can become much easier.
In practice, a team of skilled developers and designers can take a look at the overall structure of your site and help you identify areas for improvement. Generally, optimized URLs contain the right mix of keywords that are relevant to the page itself and are as short as practical. Long URLs with lots of nonsense letters and numbers tend to generate their own issues. Where they can be avoided, they should be. There’s no sense in letting something as simple as a URL hurt your Magento SEO.
Creating an effective URL structure won’t just make it easier for search engine algorithms to recognize and rank your site, but they’ll offer value to visitors as well. A URL structure that contains basic information on the contents of the page will help search engines put those pages in front of the people searching for those words in the first place. The effect is twofold.
Use The Right Default Titles: Optimize Titles And Meta Descriptions
This is another really simple way that a Magento website can miss out on a lot of potential. When something as simple as meta tags for categories or something like a title tag is hurting the optimization of your website, it’s time to fix it.
As with URL optimization, optimizing your meta titles and meta descriptions starts with the foundation of a solid keyword strategy. With respect to your titles, they should be specific, make sense, be easy to read and be relevant to the page. They should also be short – in fact, they should be as short as is practical. This will once again prove value to the search engine evaluating it and any customers that happen to read it.
Focusing on and optimizing the meta descriptions of your pages provides plenty of opportunities to offer value to your potential customers and improve your click-through rate. Provide relevant information in the meta description for what is contained on the page into which you want the viewer to click through. It should be short, but it should also be enriched with keywords, provide some insight into the page and where possible include some sort of call to action or incentive. Once again, this is valuable to search engines that view it as well as any human eyes that read it. Don’t miss a chance to optimize these portions of your web pages.
Add A Blog Page To Your eCommerce Platform
Adding a blog page is an excellent way to provide value to your customers and to increase your Magento SEO. Make no mistake about it, if you don’t have a blog page to organize your written content and you aren’t regularly publishing, you are not giving it your all to drive visitors to your site.
As with the opportunities we’ve explored so far, regularly publishing a variety of content to a blog page on your website will offer value to visitors to your site as well as provide additional positive metrics by which search engines will rank it.
It is essential to provide written content intended for your visitors to consume for a variety of reasons. First, it gives visitors something to read that will provide relevant value and insight into the products or services you sell. The higher the quality of the content, the more likely you will be to have repeat visitors. Sessions on your pages will be longer as visitors consume your written content, which is another thing that search engines look out for and use to evaluate your site. In addition, high-quality valuable content is likely to be shared by readers, which will build backlinks to your site – another critically important process that will improve your SEO and alert search engines to your website as an authoritative source that customers trust.
Search engines will evaluate your site based on how customers interact with it, and if they are spending plenty of time reading what you have to say and sharing your links, they will rank you more highly. There are a few components to this, but the two most important are the subjective quality of the content from the perspective of a reader, and the objective value of your content based on its keyword density. Again, this goes back to the keyword strategy, but it also requires skilled and informative content production. That is another component of what goes into making a Magento SEO campaign effective.
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Speaking of creating a blog and regularly publishing high-quality content brings up the importance of eliminating duplicate content on your website. Duplicate content can take many forms and isn’t limited to anything in your blog posts, so it’s worth exploring what this means and why it’s important to get rid of it.
Duplicate content is just what it sounds like. Any content, in basically any form, that appears on your website and appears somewhere else in the exact same for. That means on and off your website. Allow us to explain.
First, you’ll want to eliminate duplicate content that appears on your website. It will make your site more navigable and won’t confuse search engines, or readers for that matter. You don’t want blog articles that say exactly the same thing, but you also don’t want to use the same image file multiple times or the same page titles, for that matter. It’s damaging to your user experience and your optimization.
But there’s more. It’s an unfortunately common practice for site operators to find information on other sites and publish it to their own, either because they appreciated the content or couldn’t come up with their own. Don’t ever do this. Not only is it plagiarism, but search engines will recognize it as duplicate content and will penalize your rankings as a result.
Along with the other benefits that an experienced team of technical experts can provide, they can make it easier for you to eliminate any duplicate content that exists on your site as well as providing you with fresh, engaging content to post.
Optimize The Internal Linking Structure Of Your Site
An optimized internal linking structure is not only critical to the manner in which visitors interact with your website and navigate it. It will also affect the rankings that search engines give to your website. Just like everything else investigated so far, the value of a well designed internal linking structure is multifaceted.
A well developed internal linking structure makes it easy for visitors to your site to find what they came for. Generally, it should only take a couple of clicks for visitors to find the product pages they came looking for in the first place. This is valuable because it will minimize the risk of users becoming frustrated or “lost” on your website. As we’ve explained previously, a website that is difficult to navigate offers a poor user experience and damages your chances at repeat visits – and your conversion rate.
At the same time that a well developed internal linking structure provides value to visitors, it also enables search engines to crawl your site structure more readily. The more logically your site progresses, the more highly search engines will rank your site. Therefore, by creating an optimized structure, you can generate higher organic traffic to your site, which has its own benefits.
External Link Building Is Important
While you don’t necessarily directly build external links, they are an important part of a Magento SEO campaign. External link building will start to develop naturally if your website offers fresh, original, informative and engaging content. As users interact with your site and consume your content, they will share it on social media or elsewhere. Any links they post that direct traffic back to your site are called backlinks and they are an invaluable resource for convincing search engines that your site is an authoritative source and most importantly, a source trusted by visitors.
Backlinks to your website are an invaluable component of an SEO campaign and are another indispensable in driving traffic to your site. Nothing says that your site is trustworthy like a reader who asks other readers to take a look at what they found on your site. Understandably, the quality of your content and the success of your content marketing will have a great impact on the backlinks you are able to generate, so that is just another way that all of these components of a Magento SEO campaign are intertwined.
Optimize Your Site For Speed
Here’s another component of an SEO campaign that sometimes takes an unfortunate backseat. Your website should be optimized for speed. As with some of the other considerations to account for during an SEO campaign, a site optimized for speed will have a few effects on the success of the initiative.
The first is that the process of optimizing your site for speed will have a positive effect on the structure of your site and eliminate any fluff that might be present on your website. Streamlining your site design for speed will make it easier for search engines to crawl your pages and analyze the navigational flow and hierarchy of your web store. The first effect here is that it will make it much easier for search engines to recognize your site as a trustworthy source and afford it the rankings you want.
The second effect that will result from optimizing your website to make it faster is that you will improve your user experience significantly. All of the changes you may have made to make your website faster will probably make it much easier for users to navigate your site and find what they were looking for. Even if the changes you made were invisible from a user level, the fact that your pages will load faster cannot be underscored enough. Most users will bounce off of a page if the load time is over three seconds. In other words, online shoppers have no tolerance for web pages that load too slowly. Optimize your site for speed and you can prevent these unfortunate circumstances.
It’s time for you to optimize your eCommerce store, and here’s why. With a free SEO audit by Genius eCommerce, you can see where your web store stands. If it’s healthy, you have nothing to lose. If you could make any improvement, any changes you make today to improve the visibility of your website online and increase its rankings will pay you back in the long term.
And not only can you get a free SEO audit from Genius eCommerce, but we can handle your entire SEO campaign as well. We have years of experience streamlining clients’ websites to help them generate more traffic and boost sales. There’s no need to wait – give us a call today at 888-982-8269 or contact us at info@geniusecommerce.com.
