Is Magento an inherently difficult platform to optimize for SEO? It’s a question that has been asked ad infinitum, and it doesn’t have an easy answer.
On some levels, Magento can be considered difficult to optimize, as not keeping up to date with patches and website updates can compromise a website’s security, speed, and user experience, among other things.
The flexibility of this open-source platform is both a blessing and a curse, as well. It allows experienced developers to create hyper-optimized websites, but it also means that less experienced eCommerce merchants may overlook errors that compromise website performance or optimization.
So, with that said, here are some of the things that digital marketing companies that offer Magento SEO services often optimize for online stores built on Magento.
1.Configuring the robots.txt file.
The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs to crawl and which URLs not to crawl. Oftentimes, the vast number of pages on a website, specifically Magento eCommerce websites with thousands if not tens of thousands of pages can sap up a crawl budget pretty quickly.
Magento SEO services providers will often adjust the settings of the robots.txt file to prevent “pointless,” un-optimized pages from being crawled – such as login pages, company-internal pages, or randomly assorted pages created from faceted search options.
2.Optimizing the website’s structure
While Magento 2 enables an XML sitemap to be automatically generated, it does not guarantee a logical, SEO-friendly website structure. Magento SEO services providers can help adjust the structure of a website to make a Magento store search engine optimization appropriate.
3.Optimizing page-level factors
Page-level factors cannot be “automatically” optimized by a platform since so many of them rely on keyword research as a prerequisite to uncovering potential opportunities.
After an SEO agency has identified the keywords that your website should be targeting, it can improve your search engine rankings by optimizing your page’s URLs, meta tags, title tags, and on-page content with the appropriate keywords and content.
4.Removing duplicate content
Duplicate content can harm any website, and not just a Magento website. Duplicate pages, faceted search results, and “copying” manufacturer content can also create duplicate content that can potentially incur penalties. Luckily, most Magento SEO companies can easily scan for and remove duplicate content.
5.Implementing structured data
Structured data is code that can be added to a website to give search engines a better “understanding” of the purpose of a given page. Adding it to a Magento site can give that website a little boost to SEO that may improve search engine results.
6.Setting product and category canonical tags
Canonical tags are one technical SEO element that help prevent duplicate content issues, but Magento does not automatically create canonical tags for both product and category pages.
Consequently, it’s important for large Magento websites with thousands of pages to have their canonical tags set appropriately. It’s also easy for most Magento SEO services providers to accomplish – simply setting “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories,” as “Yes” in Magento will configure the tags properly.
7.Creating custom redirects
One good thing about Magento – that is perhaps unexpected from an open-source platform – is that it automatically generates redirects. However, if you don’t like the new URL that gets the redirect, you can create custom redirects that make more sense, both in terms of a UX and from the perspective of one trying to execute a long-term SEO strategy.
Looking for More In-Depth Information About Magento SEO Services?
We got all of the information in this article from Genius eCommerce, which has been providing custom Magento SEO services to clients in a variety of industries for nearly ten years.
If you want to learn more about how you can optimize a Magento website to attract more substantial, long-term organic traffic, visit their website at GeniusEcommerce.com. It’s ripe with nuggets of digital marketing gold.
