Magento is one of the most dependable content management systems for online retailers, with a wealth of features and customization choices. Magento is the e-commerce platform of choice for over 250,000 retailers globally. Furthermore, studies show that Magento users grow three times quicker than non-Magento users. One of the key reasons why most merchants and entrepreneurs use Magento to build their online businesses is because of this. Many global brands, including American Express, Ford, Coca-Cola, and many others, use Magento to run their businesses. If you consult a web development company, chances are that they will advise you to opt for a Magento store.
As you can see, Magento is an excellent platform for launching a successful e-commerce venture. However, if you decide to use Magento for your online business, you’ll need to understand how to use Magento SEO. Fortunately, this platform provides a number of ready-to-use ranking options.
This tutorial examines important ranking indicators for e-commerce websites and offers tried-and-true advice and strategies for improving Magento SEO.
Keeping Default Homepage Title and Description
The homepage, as you may know, is the most powerful page in terms of link equity and the page that can rank the most important keywords. As a result, if you want people to know what your website is about, you shouldn’t keep the title of the store as “home page.” Instead, you should focus on high-volume keywords that are relevant to the things you sell. As a result, if you require SEO for your online store, it will have a significant impact. As a result, instead of a title that just says “home,” make sure your store’s title refers to the products you sell. Starting with the name of the homepage, enrich your content!
Slow Page Speed
Page speed is the time it takes for a page to fully show its content and has been utilized by Google’s algorithm to rank pages. A common Magento SEO issue is slow page speed or load speed.
According to research, when Google evaluates page speed, it may explicitly consider the time to the first byte. Furthermore, a slow page speed means that search engines can only scan a limited number of pages with their crawl budget, which might have a negative impact on your indexation. Slow page speed, on the other hand, has a negative impact on the user experience. When a page loads slowly, it’s more likely to have a high bounce rate and a short stay on the webpage. Finally, all of these factors may have a negative impact on your conversion rate.
Images Not SEO Optimized
Image optimization is a multi-headed beast, in the sense that it has various characteristics that affect SEO. Here’s a quick checklist of things to consider for each image on your site that search engines will take into account in their ranking algorithms.
- Make use of ALT tags. The alternate or ALT text attribute is defined when the image name and description properties are created. The ALT text is mostly used by screen readers to assist visually impaired people who are browsing a website. Furthermore, search engines want to make sure that the alt text matches the rest of the page and image content.
- Make use of image captions. An image description provides more information than alt text and allows people to discover more about what’s in a picture that isn’t included in the alt text. The most crucial information is provided by the alt text, while image captions provide more detail.
- Use descriptive file names for your images. The image name is used by search engines as the first clue regarding the image’s subject. The image’s name influences how ‘findable’ it is in a search engine’s image search and how well it supports the page’s content.
- Reduce the size of the image (i.e. resolution and bit depth). Image loading time is reduced when the weight is reduced, which enhances page loading and perception of website performance. Google and other search engines look for image sizes and total page weights that are acceptable for the type of device being targeted, in addition to the human experience.
There are a number of plugins that can assist you with image optimization for your Magento 2 site. In addition to the native fields offered by Magento, below is a list of current Magento 2 Image Optimizer plugins to consider.
Having Duplicate Content
Duplicate content, as we all know, can have a negative impact on search engine rankings since it makes it difficult for search engines to determine which version of the information is more relevant to submitted search queries.
Search engines are unsure whether to include or reject certain versions from their indexes. Furthermore, they are unsure whether to direct link metrics such as trust, authority, link equity, and so on to a certain page and divide it into different copies.
Duplicate content might diminish link equity for store owners. Internal links that point to several duplicate pieces of content distribute link equity among the duplicates.
Missing Robots.txt Files
Although a robot.txt file isn’t essential for a website, it’s highly recommended. If you don’t have a robot.txt file on your website, the search engine bot will index all of your pages. And such an operation may cause the Google Web crawler to overburden the server with requests.
However, if you want more control over which pages are crawled, you may use a robot.txt file to exclude low-priority URLs from indexing. Magento gives you control over your website’s robots.txt file. Go to Content> Design> Configuration on the admin dashboard. Select the Store you’d want to change and then click Edit. Add custom instructions to the robots.txt File box and expand the Search Engine Robots list.
