When developing an effective eCommerce website, SEO should always be one of your top priorities. When it comes to Magento SEO in particular, you need to be aware of how you can customize the user experience in order to both rank higher and increase conversions. By implementing specific SEO best practices, you can ensure that your website performs well and that your business grows accordingly.
Magento as an eCommerce platform provides ample speed, customization options, and a variety of built-in features that go a long way toward improving the overall functionality of your online store. However, there is no quick fix or substitute for SEO, which is why it’s crucial that you perform a comprehensive audit on your website and take stock of what needs to be done in order to optimize it for the search engines. Magento SEO, when properly implemented, can give your business the edge it needs to succeed.
While there are many facets to SEO and it only gets more complicated with every passing year, there are a few core principles that remain the same and are a good foundation, to begin with, if you are curious as to what you need to tackle first. Remember, your site should be designed with the user in mind. This alone is one of the most important aspects of SEO that goes far beyond simple concepts such as title tags and meta descriptions.
The user should not have any problem finding what they need on your website and should feel safe and secure when making a purchase. Keeping the user’s needs in mind when crafting your eCommerce website is becoming more important as the requirements for ranking shift in this direction. Google is emphasizing that user experience and highly authoritative content is a massive ranking factor, so use that point as a guiding metric in your SEO endeavors.
Keyword Research is Critical
When beginning any SEO campaign, whether for eCommerce or otherwise, you need to perform extensive keyword research. Understanding what keywords you rank for, and which ones you would like to rank for, is the backbone of SEO.
You want to be thorough here. Your keyword research should cover general terms in your industry as well as precise long-tail keywords and product-based keywords that you want to go after. Certain keywords are harder to rank for than others based on a variety of conditions, such as the size of your niche, your direct competitors, and how well their SEO is optimized, and how much authority your website has.
Magento can act as powerful leverage in this area because of how fast and powerful a platform it is. This is only a part of what it takes to rank well, however. You need to know how to research the proper keywords and utilize them properly in a variety of engaging content, such as product page copy, FAQs, and attention-grabbing blogs.
Focus on Optimizing Your Navigation
Navigation used to be an afterthought for most websites, but these days it is used not only to make it effortless for users to find what they are looking for, but also as a ranking factor for Google to pick up on. Properly constructed navigation can be a useful way to tell the crawlers where everything important on your site is located.
When it comes to eCommerce, you should strive to have a powerful mega-menu that displays hot products as well as your most popular categories. Magento gives you this ability, which is another major benefit of choosing such a powerful eCommerce platform. By focusing on your navigation, it shows the user that you are a professional business that values high-quality website functionality.
Make Your Product Pages Informative and Engaging
Always strive to make sure your product pages look incredible. Each one should act as its own sales page for the product in question. It’s not recommended to rely on basic product page templates to get the job done here. Not only does this look cheap and unprofessional, these often lack certain features that make them better for users and therefore for SEO.
Regardless of the overall template or design you choose for your product pages, it’s also essential that they provide plenty of information and can be relied upon to accurately display the product and describe its specifications. Even if your store has hundreds of products, each one should have a highly detailed and optimized description, as well as supporting media.
Pay Attention to Your URLs
One last essential point to consider for your Magento SEO is the use of attractive URLs with proper keywords that describe the product. Take note of your URLs and try to trim the fat by cutting out random numbers and letters, words like “and,” as well as superfluous data that is better left for the product description.
It can certainly be an undertaking to take care of all of the different aspects of SEO alone, which is why you should trust in a knowledgeable agency that can do all the work for you, leaving you to focus on your business. We here at Genius eCommerce know the Magento platform inside and out and develop an SEO strategy for your online store that will generate powerful results.