SEO can be an intimidating word for a lot of site owners. The potential gains when done right are huge, but so are the potential losses if done wrong. With so many moving pieces, it can be hard to decide where to start and what to do when you get there.
Take a deep breath and have no fear. Google and other search engines lay out the guidelines and best practices for technical set-up pretty clearly; all you have to do is follow along for a strong foundation and then expand from there. Here are some tips to get you started on a path towards better SEO for your Magento store:
1. Strategic user-generated content (UGC).
Use the space on your product pages and in your emails effectively. User-generated content is some of the most trusted content, so it’s worth having product reviews on your page. Include reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc. anywhere you can to help establish rapport and build trust with your visitors. Not only can user-generated content help improve conversion rates and click-through rates, they also are a great way to add more relevant, valuable, and unique content to your pages.
2. Build a better site structure.
Once you have a strong foundation for your primary queries, start focusing on secondary queries as well and build out high quality pages for those too. With a refresh on keyword research and some analysis on visibility and engagement metrics of pages (landing pages too), you can identify what pages you have, which ones could use a makeover, and the pages you’re missing.
Once you know the pages you’re lacking, you can get to work on creating new pages centered on those secondary queries – just make sure you add content. Otherwise you’re just adding a bunch of thin pages, which will not help you. As you’re creating pages, keep in mind that your content needs to be useful, valuable, and relevant to your customers. If it solves a problem for them, that’s even better.
3. Watch out for duplicate content.
Duplicate content is usually a big problem for ecommerce sites. If you have a single product feed for your site, your resellers, and your affiliates, you’re at risk for some big duplicate content issues. You want your product pages to have unique content, tailored specifically to engage and convert your visitors. A lot of the time, this means trying to avoid using supplier copy or manufacturers’ descriptions.
Also, do not let your affiliates and resellers use your review content – that is user-generated content that should live on your site; duplicate reviews diminish trust and authority. Also, in terms of your product URLs, use the canonical tag for close variants of your products, both for configurable and individual variants. All of these things will help you cut down on duplicate content.
4. Take a cautious approach with robots.txt.
Your robots.txt file is helps the search engine crawlers navigate and index your site. It’s easy to take a sample robots.txt file that is featured in a blog post somewhere and run with it, but you need to be careful. An incorrect directive or two can lead to blocking products hidden behind merchandised products, blocking entire sections of your site, or even the entire thing. Aside from avoiding the standard robots.txt that appears in a lot of blog posts, avoid blocking your dynamic pages, CSS, and JS files as well. This will help ensure all the content you want to be seen has a chance to be seen.
5. Use rich snippets.
Not enough ecommerce sites are using rich snippets. Both your customers and the search engines will love you for using these. Rich snippets make your search result “sexier” by adding important information to the listing, which increases click-throughs over listings without rich snippets. When implementing rich snippets for ecommerce, price, rating, and search are a minimum. Other than that, see what’s available for your business, use them to make your listings stand out, and capture this easy opportunity to generate more clicks and engagement from existing visibility.
6. Go canonical.
When you’re dealing with variants of a URL (a common occurrence in ecommerce), the canonical tag is one of the best ways to avoid duplicate content. A canonical tag indicates to search engines that, though a page has the same content with a variant URL, it is not a brand new page to be treated separately from the original – simply that it is a variation of the original with the canonical tag identifying and attributing credit to the original page. Canonical tags are more like suggestions to search engines, but when implemented correctly, it eliminates the duplicate content issues you would have had otherwise.
Canonical tags should be on every page, except the CMS pages and homepage. A canonical tag can be considered like an absolute reference, so make sure you’re not “absolute referencing” things like tracking URLs. Also, keep in mind that canonical tags will only work for close variants. If your URLs are vastly different and you still have duplicate content, something else will need to be done to rectify that.
7. Beware of URL rewrites.
Updates and automatic rewrites can cause frequent URL changes, especially on products; this usually occurs by appending numbers onto the URL. But, it can get out of control and cause redirect loops and crawlability issues on your site. Sometimes older /catalog/ URLs can get indexed due to rewrite issues and csv uploads can over-ride the URL key. These are just things to be aware of and to look out for as you’re making tweaks to your site.
8. Consider splitting out your xml sitemaps.
This tends to be more necessary for larger websites as you shouldn’t have more than 500 pages in a sitemap. By splitting them out, you can gain more visibility over issues and insights for different types of pages. For example, you could have a sitemap for products and one for category pages, it just depends on whether you need to split out your sitemaps and, if so, how you would prefer to segment your site.
9. Think internationally (if you’re international).
Global commerce is here to stay and if you’re international, there are some best practices you should know follow when going international with Magento, like:
- Use the hreflang tag for language and regional URLs
- Create separate Webmaster Tools accounts
- Localize your content where possible
- Avoid using IP redirects (they still cause issues)
10. Proactive review is always a good idea.
When it comes to doing SEO better for your site, being proactive is definitely a good idea. Performance and engagement on your site does matter, so be proactive and invest in performance. Dive in to your analytics and pay attention to metrics like bounce rate, time on site, number of pages visited, etc. These can alert you to potential problem areas on your site for user experience. You have to think ahead and plan for mobile, even if you’re already responsive. Also, crawl your site regularly, particularly after releases to gain a better understanding of what’s going on and to catch technical hiccups before they become issues.
And, don’t forget about links. You need to be proactive with link cleanup; you should not just be waiting to act as a reaction to a penalty – at that point it’s too late and your bottom line will end up suffering for it. If you know there are poor links, remove or disavow them. If links are like hieroglyphics to you and disavowing them is a foreign concept, then your proactive next step is to contact an expert (our number is 717-431-3330, if you’d like to start here).
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully you now have a few creative ideas on how to improve your Magento site in the present and to keep improving for the future. Sometimes, small changes can have big results - why wait?