In today’s digital era, Magento 2 SEO tips are one of the most vital marketing tools that bring more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. Without SEO, searches won’t be able to find your site, and all your hard work will be for nothing.
Although Magento 2 is already SEO-friendly when installed, there are several things that can still be improved. Here we list out 10 Magento SEO tips that can help you optimize your site for SEO and get a higher ranking.
READ NOW >>> Magento 2 SEO Guide – The All-In-One Definitive Guide to know more about SEO
1. Optimize Product Page URLs
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Magento 2 SEO tips can gain a better conversation rate for your website. The URL structure is extremely important for search engine optimization because it is often the first thing Google will see. SEO-friendly URLs help your website get a higher ranking and reach viewers more easily.
For search engines, a shorter URL with fewer directories is preferable. It can be a barrier to search engine crawlers if your vital material is tucked too deep behind multiple folders.
If you can make your structure as flat as feasible, search engines will see your vital content as much as possible.
Again, you must think about what is feasible for your website. Add no extraneous stages, subfolders, or length to your URLs, but don’t feel obligated to keep every page on one tier for ‘SEO’ purposes. You don’t want to make your URLs so short that they lose their significance, as this will detract from their clarity.
A Magento 2 store contains a significant amount of pages that your buyers navigate through. URLs that are clear and represent where the visitor is heading will help visitors navigate easily, and Google can crawl your website’s information.
Your Magento SEO URL needs to be unique, static and perfectly optimized according to SEO guidelines.
We should follow this Magento SEO URL structure for the category and product pages:
- For Category page: www.yourwebsite.com/category/
- For Sub-category page: www.yourwebsite.com/category/sub-category/
- For Product page: www.yourwebsite.com/category-sub-category/product-name/
***Note:
- Try to keep URLs as simple, short, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible
- Avoid using stop words such as and, or, of, but, a, an, the, etc
- URLs should be used hyphens to separate words (do not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters)
In Magento 2, store owners can enable search-friendly URLs that help you remove the file name “index.php” appearing in the URL after the root folder.
Let’s follow the steps below:
- Log in and go to Stores → Configuration → General → Web
- Click on Search Engine Optimization tab
- Select Use Web Server Rewrites to Yes.
- Click on the Save Config button and Flush cache
2. Optimize Site Speed
The next Magento 2 SEO tip is optimizing site speed. The page load speed not only impacts the customer experience of an eCommerce website, but it also is a signal for Google to determine Search engine rankings. Google likes websites with fast load speed and suggests them to customers. Therefore, the faster the page loading speed is, the better the rankings are.
The default Magento 2 store is robust and performs smoothly, therefore the speed is not slow. In fact, most issues with slow interfaces and long loading times are caused by negligence or a lack of expertise in website optimization. If you can’t meet the basic requirements for running a Magento store, such as not using the necessary extensions or not enabling the right plugins, your store’s speed will suffer.
You can learn how to track and better your pagespeed score here.
In Magento 2, there are many factors affecting site speed, such as caching, JS and CSS files, and Flat categories. Here we show you some ways to optimize your site speed:
- Enable all caching features: System → Cache Management and Flush cache
- Enable Flat Categories and Products: Stores → Catalog → Catalog → Scroll Set Yes for Use Flat Catalog Category and Use Flat Catalog Product → Save Config
- Merge your JavaScript and CSS files: Stores → Configuration → Advanced → Developer
- JavaScript Settings:
- Merge JavaScript Files: Yes
- Enable JavaScript Bundling: Yes
- Minify JavaScript Files: Yes
- CSS Settings:
- Merge CSS Files: Yes
- Minify CSS Files: Yes
***Note: To promptly detect and address the causes of the slow loading of your website, we would like to recommend you a solution called Speed-up Consulting package. We will check your site and come up with a full report to optimize your loading speed in under 3 seconds. This package includes application optimization, server optimization.
3. Optimize Images For Search
Many store owners usually forget to define names and alt tags for their images, this makes a negative impact on the search engine ranking.
Having a beautiful product image is great, but search engines can’t actually see them. You should make a habit of adding alt text when uploading images so that search engines can understand what your images present.
Here are some things to remember when optimizing images:
- Alt texts should be short and clear
- Alt text should be proper with the image
- Give your images informative filenames
4. Fill Out The Meta Title And Meta Description
Meta title and meta description are the most fundamental factors and have a big impact on your rankings.
Meta title shows the main subject of the paragraph and search engines will display it when appearing a relevant query. A great title is easy to read, contains important keywords, has a CTA (call to action) and has a length between 50 and 60 characters respective.
Meta Description provides users and search engines with a summary of the content of your page. On the search results page, it plays a role as a short advertising paragraph to attract users to click on it. A good description should be accurate, contain about 100-160 characters and include keywords.
5. Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a common and serious issue that has a negative impact on the SEO of Magento websites. If there are multiple pages on a website with the same content, Google will decide not to rank all pages for the same query.
In order to avoid duplicate content, you should build one canonical link for all the other links. The canonical link is an HTML element slipped into the code of a web page to indicate that another page should consider the origin of the information when the search engine displays the findings to the user.
To turn on canonical URLs in Magento 2, let’s follow the steps below:
- Go to Stores → Configuration → Catalog
- Expand Catalog section → Search Engine Optimization
- Set Canonical Link Meta Tags for Categories and Products to Yes
6. Make Website Mobile-Friendly
As of July 1, 2019, Google announced that mobile-first indexing will now be the default for all new web domains. It means that having a mobile-friendly website is not only important in terms of traffic but also for good search engine rankings.
Today, many people are not only browsing websites but also making purchases through mobile devices. Therefore, creating a mobile-friendly is also the key to success for SEO.
With the advent of responsive website design, you can create a site so that it works on any device (desktop, tablet, mobile phone). It helps you improve the mobile user experience.
7. Use Rich Snippets
Rich Snippet is a term used to describe a type of structured data markup that you can add to the current HTML of your Magento 2 site. This is one of the effective Magento SEO tips that enables the search engine to show special features on the search result pages such as product rating, review, social links, logo, and address. Such information can enhance the trustworthiness of your website and increase the click-through rate.
8. Set Up XML Sitemap
One of the best Magento SEO tips is to set up an XML sitemap for your Magento 2 website. The XML sitemap is a file that contains all the pages of the website. For SEO, XML sitemaps serve as an invitation to crawl a URL.
To enable XML sitemap in Magento 2 store, please do the following steps:
- Navigate to Stores → Configuration → Catalog → XML Sitemap
- By default, the options for categories, products, and CMS pages are configured correctly. Therefore, there is no need to change anything there
- In Generation Settings: Enable: Yes
- Start Time: set the time for the XML sitemap to be updated
- Frequency: set the frequency of updating the sitemap. There are three available options: Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.
- Error Email Recipient: fill in the email you want to receive a notification email in case of an error happening during an update
- Error Email Sender: set Error Email Sender to the store contact who will be displayed as the sender of the error email
- Error Email Template: set the template used for the email
- Finally, on Search Engine Submission Settings set Enable Submission to Robots.txt to Yes and save changes.
9. Optimize HTML Sitemap
If your website has no HTML sitemap, you will miss the chance of indexing it more carefully by Google. Besides, the HTML sitemap also helps visitors search for products on your website.
But there is a problem that Magento 2 does not support the auto-creation of HTML Sitemap by default. Here we introduce to you Magento 2 SEO extension that helps you generate an HTML sitemap containing products, categories, CMS pages, and additional links.
READ NOW >>> 27+ Magento 2 SEO Checklists – Search Engine Optimization A To Z
10. Integrate Social Media
Social media is an extremely effective marketing tool that helps get the word out and generates brand awareness. Social signal is an important aspect of Google’s SEO, and your Magento 2 store should definitely allow for quick and easy sharing if you want to get high ranks.
When you integrate social sharing buttons, your consumers can share their views on their social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. It can increase the visibility and referral traffic on your Magento 2 website.
Magento 2 does not support social sharing, but you can install a module for integrating this feature. Or, if you are using a paid or custom theme, they are likely to have content blocks or widgets integrated, which allow social sharing in the templates.
These Magento 2 SEO tips are so helpful.
Summary
In this article, I have covered 10 different Magento 2 SEO tips for your website to gain higher rankings. When SEO is done right, you will see an increase in quality traffic and conversion rate.
Besides, you can refer to our Magento 2 SEO extension that offers you a comprehensive solution to make your site more SEO-friendly.
READ NOW >>> SEO For Ecommerce: A Savvy, Effective And Optimized Guideline
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