If you are managing a Magento 2 website, you have to dig into SEO to get traffic to it. SEO is important because it helps to improve the online presence, traffic, and conversion for a website. Have you heard about a tool called Yoast SEO? If not, let’s explore it as it may help you make your SEO efforts become easier.
Yoast SEO has long been no stranger to users of the WordPress platform, but it seems to be quite new to Magento users. Yoast SEO Magento 2 is a powerful tool that makes your site meet the high technical SEO standards. However, it still has many limitations.
In this article, we will give you some useful information about Yoast SEO and recommend some features that should be added to Magento 2.
TAKE A LOOK at Magento 2 SEO Extension to optimize your SEO effectively and promptly.
Key Features of Yoast SEO Magento 2
Table of Contents
Yoast SEO Magento 2 analyzes your content on two important characteristics. It helps you increase the readability of your content and gives you SEO advice based on a focus keyword that you set for each product and page. Let’s go into details of each feature below.
Readability Analysis
We all know that content is one of the most important factors of SEO. A content that is easy-to-read, easy-to-understand and interesting will definitely score with readers. Yoast SEO will work as an analyst to help you check the readability of your content.
The content analysis functionality in Yoast SEO Magento works the same as the one in Yoast SEO for WordPress. After you’re done your content, just click on the overview tab in the Search Engine Optimization by Yoast section and you’ll see your scores for certain criteria called “readability”.
The green bullets mean that you met the criteria, red bullets mean there are some significant problems and yellow/orange bullets mean there are a few things for improvement.
Keyword Optimization
The ultimate purpose of SEO is to make sure visitors can find your content. Therefore, it is important to optimize your keywords to get a higher ranking and more traffic. Yoast SEO will help you to do it!
It will give you SEO advice based on a focus keyword that you set for each product and page. You just need to type your keyword and it will analyze your content.
For example, if you enter “Magento 2 extension” as your focus keyword, Yoast SEO Magento will check if it’s likely that your content will rank in search engines for this focus keyword. What is more, it will give you tips on how to improve that.
Yoast SEO also shows you the density of your keyword. You can rely on that and make adjustments accordingly, but keep in mind that the keyword density is too high maybe not good for SEO.
Redirect manager
Normally a product URL will generate a 404 page as soon as you delete the product. 404 errors can be frustrating for users and have a significant impact on SEO. Therefore, it is better to redirect to another page.
With Yoast SEO Magento 2, you can choose between redirecting to the product’s category page, a fixed category page or a CMS page of your choice.
Social Sharing
Social media is becoming increasingly popular and it is considered as one of the effective SEO tools that bring a lot of traffic to websites. It is great that the Yoast SEO Magento has the built-in ability to share certain information with social media.
You can easily add different imagery or create specific descriptions for your posts on Facebook and Twitter. It is maybe a good chance for you to attract more visitors and improve the ranking for your post.
No duplicate content
Your content can be shown on various URLs, this is called a duplicate content issue. This might make Google confused when crawling and has a great impact on SEO. Yoast SEO can thoroughly solve this by providing canonical tags to help indicate the main content you want the site to rank for.
Recommended features for Magento 2 Yoast SEO
Besides the useful features, Yoast SEO for Magento 2 still has some limitations. Here we list out 4 features that we think should be added to Yoast SEO Magento. Let’s see!
Generates XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps allow search engines to crawl and index a website sufficiently, and allowing all search engines to be notified of the site map by inserting it into the robots.txt file. It helps enhance the ranking of a website in search engine results, thus boosting the SEO efforts.
In Yoast SEO for WordPress, you can manage sitemaps very easily. When you enable XML sitemap functionality, Yoast SEO will automatically generate a sitemap and updates it as you add new content. Besides, you have the chance to determine whether or not you want things such as specific types of posts or post categories included in your sitemap.
It would be great if Yoast SEO Magento 2 has this function like Yoast SEO for WordPress.
Bulk Edit Titles/Descriptions
Let’s imagine that you have hundreds of content with no meta title and meta description. Now you want to add them to your page/post as a part of your SEO strategy, but you don’t know where to start. Going in and editing one by one? No, it wastes too much time.
In WordPress, Yoast SEO offers a bulk title editor and a bulk description editor. It allows you to mass-edit titles and descriptions of your older posts and pages with ease. Thanks to this feature, you can save a lot of time for other important tasks. Unfortunately, this feature is not currently available in Yoast SEO Magento.
Internal link suggestion
Internal linking is extremely important for SEO because it helps search engines to understand your site structure. However, adding links by hand may be slow and downright annoying if your post has too many words.
If Yoast SEO Magento has the internal link suggestion feature, it will be very convenient and might save a lot of your time. This feature may record data of your old post, analyze your text of the post you are writing and suggests links to related posts. You do not need to find the link of the related article manually and insert it into the post anymore.
Related keyword optimization
In Yoast SEO Magento 2, you can only add one focus keyword or key phrase to optimize for. However, a post can have one, two or more related keywords. It means that Yoast SEO can not completely optimize your content. If it has the ability to do this, users will have more chances to reach a broader audience.
Alternative SEO solution
Although Yoast SEO Magento brings a lot of awesome features, it still has many limitations. Therefore, it is essential to add an SEO extension to boost your website. Here we want to come up with Magento 2 SEO Extension by BSSCommerce that might provide you many effective features that Yoast SEO doesn’t have.
Now let’s take a look at some of the key features of this extension!
- Auto Generate Meta Tags
With Meta tags template, you can save tons of time as it will automatically add meta description, meta title, meta keywords and description for product pages and categories.
What is more, the extension allows you to create an ALT tag template to apply for all product images on the website. This feature helps Google crawlers better understand your images and give your site a higher ranking.
- Display various Rich Snippets
The extension allows you to add Rich Snippets such as breadcrumbs, rating, price, review other information in search result pages. These rich snippets will give buyers an overview of the product and trigger them to click in.
- Auto-generate HTML and XML sitemaps
The extension drives your UX higher with HTML and XML sitemaps. While HTML sitemap helps customers easily navigate through your site as well as web crawlers to understand your site better, XML sitemaps will help you to boost up crawling by search engines.
- SEO Report and Audit
The extension makes an SEO audit of your content and displays results related to metadata, main keyword, description & outbound links. Besides, it also shows SEO Reports to help you check the current SEO situation of your page on the backend.
Besides the main features that I have listed above, Magento 2 SEO extension still has a lot of other useful features. It is developed to cope with the SEO needs of any Magento 2 stores. It was developed to meet the SEO needs of any Magento 2 store. All it does is to simplify and save your time on everyday SEO tasks.
Wrapping Up
As I mentioned above, Yoast SEO is really very helpful and worth a try. It’s undeniable that its features have greatly impacted on SEO and brought the convenience for users. However, it still needs further improvement to bring breakthrough changes to SEO.
If you’re currently looking for a more comprehensive Magento 2 SEO solution, check on our SEO extension. We are committed to providing you with a great experience because your satisfaction is our pleasure.
Also please CHECK OUT our Magento Website Development services to build up your ideal store!
