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Starting a Magento store
You must have heard of opening an online eCommerce store and the profound benefits it brings when it comes to sale boosting. You’ve come to agree that selling your products online is a brilliant idea and you’ve decided that Magento – the leading eCommerce platform in the industry is the optimal answer to your question. After quite a while of getting used to the platform, you can finally begin the journey of reaping revenue.
But you realise that things do not go as you planned before even though you have all the essential conditions to become successful. You don’t think you lack what makes successful stores out there popular, then why can’t you be like them?
If you find yourself in this situation, or you just simply want to push your store even further and attain even more success, what you need right now is the appropriate digital marketing strategies, especially suitable Magento SEO tips to help you and your products rank higher on search engines and improve your website traffic and eventually, improve your sale.
Why do you need appropriate Magento SEO tips to improve your store’s SEO?
Basically, SEO is a marketing tactic which its original and upmost purpose is to help your site rank higher on the search engine. And ranking higher on the search engine in this era of increasing technological integration into daily life can significantly affect the sales as well as helping your business to take the lead and get the upper hand of your competitors. As the majority of online search carried out by Internet users nowadays happen on Google, most of the tips here are the Magento SEO tips optimized for Google
With the accurate SEO tips for Magento, you can:
- Reduce expense in ads but can still achieve desirable results: Google’s organic ranking based on what its algorithm decides to be the best answer for any given question by the Internet users. Therefore, once you can make your website rank high on Google, it means that you’ve successful in making Google thinks that your website is a reliable source for users and a trusted place to direct the users to. As a result, this will help you continue to get website traffic even after a long time publishing the content.
- Precede the competition: SEO is considered to be a norm nowadays to any business. For that reason, if you can make use of them, you have more chance of keeping up with your competitors and even get ahead of them.
- Get quality leads: Different from outbound marketing strategies such as cold calling, cold emails, interruptive ads, SEO is an inbound marketing tactic. And inbound marketing strategy means that the core of the strategy is the customers. While outbound marketing strategy can create annoyance and irritation to the customers, SEO focus on providing useful content and making those more easily to be accessed. In the end, you know what the customer will choose, the brand they see on TV through the ad that interrupts their favourite TV series, or the name of a brand they come across when searching for a specific answer to their problems.
Magento SEO tips that would find useful
1. The first SEO tip for Magento is about the fundamental importance of content.
There’s one famous saying in this field that you may have heard over and over again, which is “content is king”. “There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need words, articles, substance, keywords, and verbiage. I wince whenever I have to say it, because it’s so cliché, but it’s true: Content is king.” (Kissmetrics: Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing)
No matter how many techniques you know and apply to your store, if your content is not useful and informative then nothing will work. Investing in quality content is sustainable and no doubt the most effective way to improve your SEO ranking. Good and fresh content can help you incorporate a keyword, provide the place for you to generate backlink and provide the visitors to your website with brilliant experience.
However, producing quality content is not easy at all. There’re mainly two ways for you to do in this situation, the first is to do research and produce content on your own, and the second way is to hire a professional agency to do this for you. No matter what you choose to do, you won’t regret when investing in content.
2. You should avoid duplicate of content
Duplicate content (the situation in which multiple URLs all point to the same or similar content) is one of the most important problems when it comes to SEO that you should pay attention to avoid any type of possible search penalty. To solve this problem, you can use a Magento SEO tip that is to tell Google which URL is authoritative (canonical). If you don’t do this, Google will decide on its own or consider the entire URL is equally important, and this will lead to unexpected behaviours.
In Magento 2, you can use Canonical Tag for both Product and Category in default settings.
In order to enable Canonical Tag, you can go to:
Store => Configuration => Catalog => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization
and change
‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories’ to Yes as well as ‘’Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products’ to Yes.
3. Tips about keyword is also a useful Magento SEO tip.
Trying to improve the ranking of your website through keyword is something that we all know about since it helps the search engine to know clearer what your website is about. In addition to scattering keywords around your post under a moderate frequency (usually no more than 10% of the total word count of the content), adding keyword to meta title and meta description is also important since they will be the first the customer see when they search on Google.
It would be better if the main keyword can appear on both the title and the description. Regarding the title, keyword should appear near the beginning so that it would be easier for Google to recognise it. Description are also encouraged to contain keyword.
To change the meta title as well as description for product on your Magento store, you can go to Content => Design => Configuration.
For beginner store, there’s one factor that you should pay attention to when looking for a keyword to do SEO, which is the SEO Difficulty score (or SD in short). In order for your website to rank higher, you should choose the keyword that has a relatively low SD score. Low score means that the competition won’t be as tough as compared to keywords that have high SD score and you will have higher chance of ranking high on Google.
4. Modify robots.txt is also a helpful Magento SEO tip
robots.txt in general is a text file webmaster created to instruct search engine robots on how to crawl page on a website. You can use robots.txt when you don’t want specific pages or folders to be indexed by crawlers, or you want to keep the whole section in private because you and your team are still working and testing on it, etc.
In Magento 2 default setting, robots.txt setting is “INDEX – FOLLOW”. If you want to change, you can go to:
Content => Design => Configuration => Choose store view.
When you scroll down, you can find configuration at Search Engine Robot.
5. Another tip for SEO on Magento is about optimizing URLs.
URLs in general do not have that strong impact on page ranking like other factor in this list (they still do but only restrict to minor impact), but cleaning URL is still important since it will improve user experience. A clean URL without a long series of numbers and letter will not only give users but also search engine robot a better view about the website.
To clean the URLs, you can access:
Store => Configuration => General => Web => URL Options and then change Add Store Code to URL to “No”.
To get rid of the index.php, you can access Search Engine Optimization menu and turn Server URL Rewrites to “Yes”.
6. You can use generating sitemap as an effective Magento SEO tips to improve the rank of your website
Sitemap is of great importance to SEO because it’s the quickest, also the easiest way to index all the pages you want crawlers to crawl in order of priority and in the crawling frequency you want.
Magento provide you with both XML and HTML sitemap but on Magento 2, only XML sitemap setting is available. Therefore, if you want to generate HTML sitemap on Magento 2, you can think of using a Magento 2 extension.
For configuration purpose, you can go to:
Store => Configuration => Catalog => Catalog => XML sitemap.
If you want to generate XML sitemap, you can go to Marketing => Sitemap, add sitemap, name and path for the new sitemap and press Save & Generate.
7. The next Magento SEO tip is about building a comprehensive internal link network for your post.
When we talk about SEO, one thing that is definitely indispensable in getting high rank is internal links. Internal links help the search engine crawlers to know the relationship between all the pages and posts as well as contents on your website, and this will assist you tremendously in improve your page rank.
To build an internal link network, you can make use of the Related Products in default setting of Magento.
8. The final Magento SEO tip this article wants to mention is to optimize the product image.
You can start with naming the product file with something that actually have meaning rather than some meaningless letters and numbers. For example, if your product is a dress, you can try naming it “red-maxi-dress” instead of IMG776364784. The name of the product image will eventually become a part of the image’s URL; therefore by naming it clearly and expressively, you will make it easier for Google to recognise and understand your URL.
But how about when the image for some reason can’t be displayed?
In this situation, the alt text of the image will come into effect. When visitor to your Magento store can’t see the image, they will see this alt text. This text will describe the image so Google can understand what it is about, and you can also put your keyword in here, but in an appropriate amount.
Conclusion
This article has brought to you the most common Magento SEO tips and tactics that are frequently used by successful Magento vendors as well as big business around the globe. By following them, you can elevate and drive your business to another level and reap ample benefits.
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