Our retail clients are always looking for ways to optimize their Magneto stores and we're always looking for scalable ways to assist. Based on our most frequently asked Magento SEO questions, here's our list of 5 Easy Tricks to Quickly Optimize Your Magento Store!
When it comes to the Magento CMS, there are a lot of powerful features that set you up for search engine success. The biggest gap for most retailers is not knowing exactly what to focus on. When it comes to SEO, a few simple CMS tweaks can quickly improve your organic search traffic and lead to an increase in conversions.
Here’s a look at five things you can do today to improve your Magento SEO
Optimize Your Title Tags
Title tags are king when it comes to SEO. Make sure you’ve defining your title tags naming protocol and have assign these in product groups. Many ecommerce sites get overwhelmed thinking about optimizing their entire product catalog and end up not doing anything! Settling for the default title tags is a no-go. At the very least, you need to be creating a formula for title tag generation to keep it scalable while also unique and specific to each page.
Scrap Default Descriptions
While you're creating a naming convention for your title tags, you might as well whip one up for your meta description tags. Default meta description tags are rarely ever well optimized. Your meta description is the "page description" that shows up in the Google search results so you want to make sure yours are impactful and absolutely relevant to the product page that is ranking. Write compelling product descriptions with the keywords you want to rank for and enough information to entice people to click.
Don't Duplicate
When you're adding in products to your catalog, you're going to shortcut a few by copying existing products. This is a great way to carry over information that you've already developed and can save you time over starting from scratch for each product. However, it's really important that you continue to optimize and adjust your product info to make it unique to that product. Sometimes products really are basically the same thing and duplicate content on an ecommerce website is a very common issue. Take the extra few minutes to rework that product description, revise your meta tags, check the image also tag and assess any new internal link opportunities or social media assets that you can integrate.
Fewer Files of Folders
Any ecommerce CMS/database is going to have its nuances in URL generation. We've seen some unintentional dynamic URL generation for thumbnails and alternate product versions, intentional dynamic URLs for products based on users navigation, and URLs with so many parameters that they're likely to break when they're shared on social. A well thought out URL protocol should be established early on and revisited as needed. Monitoring your URLs on the regular will help you to identify when things are going awry.
Provide a Map
A sitemap, that is. If you have a large catalog there is a good chance that only part of your site is getting crawled. Content that is multiple folders deep or located in less-accessible sub-categories is likely to get skipped completed when crawl limits are reached. Good site architecture will help many crawling issues, but to ensure nothing gets skipped, give the crawlers an XML sitemap that is conveniently located at /sitemap.xml. You can also tell the crawlers where your sitemap is located by specifying your sitemap location in your Robots.txt file. If you have a really large catalog, break down your sitemap into bite sized pieces. If you take this approach, your Robots.txt file will identify the sitemap page and that sitemap page will be a sitemap of your sitemaps.
Pro tip: make sure your monitoring Google Search Console for errors in your sitemaps. This can alert you to all kinds of issues that are going on with your site.
Optimized title tags and meta descriptions, unique product descriptions, clean URLs and a sitemap to guide crawlers. These five SEO basics are key for optimizing your Magento store.
