The Magento CMS is a well-known reference in the world of e-commerce. However, it suffers from optimization flaws in its basic version 2.0 which slow down its SEO performance on search engines. From the moment you know about them, you can fix them and improve the natural referencing of your most profitable web pages. NaddraBlog, a netlinking agency, advises you to work on optimizing and indexing your e-commerce content. Combined with a netlinking strategy, this will allow you to benefit from better positioning on Google, outperform your competitors and increase your turnover.
Magento 2 CMS Overview
With 4% of the e-commerce market share in some countries, nearly 250,000 online stores use the Magento CMS. Reputedly complex to configure with thousands of parameters, Magento offered itself a version 2.0 thanks to its acquisition by Adobe, making it much more accessible and even more powerful. Magento is one of the few CMS to offer such a large amount of optimizations for SEO , which highlights the importance of SEO for an e-commerce. Fewer extended menus, easier to integrate Google APIs, better metadata management... Magento 2's MVC architecture has remained the same as in its previous version, which still offers as many freedoms to developers,
How Magento works
The concept of Magento is based on open source, which offers great flexibility and leaves full control to the informed user over his e-commerce site.
The advantages of Magento
The first advantage of Magento is the possibility of creating huge product catalogs and managing a large volume of traffic. Its very advanced backoffice also offers a very precise configuration of its store, including a particularly interesting multilingual management.
A free solution, Magento can be customized at will as long as you have the right web development skills. For others, many extensions created by the community will allow you to add features to obtain a 100% tailor-made store.
The disadvantages of Magento
If there is a big flaw in Magento, it is the complexity of its backoffice and its non-canonical URLs by default which make it an obstacle to SEO. The work carried out by Adobe on version 2.0 of Magento has already made it possible to refine the numerous functionalities a little and to make browsing more ergonomic. On the other hand, to take full advantage of Magento's potential, it is better to have strong web skills.
Magento SEO: 11 tips for optimized SEO
Here are some tips to improve the natural referencing of your product pages under Magento.
1. Get the latest Magento update
A site that is not updated is vulnerable to attacks. In addition to putting your customers' data, including their payment data, at risk, you risk having your e-commerce site and related banking connections hacked.
Google values sites that offer a secure environment to Internet users. To make sure to close the security flaws in your e-commerce, you must therefore keep your store up to date as soon as possible. Software updates contain corrective patches for critical bugs and serious flaws, improvements, and sometimes emergency patches in the event of a wave of attacks targeting an identified vulnerability.
2. Opt for a secure connection
Switching to HTTPS is a guarantee of security and trust for your customers, which is even more important when managing an e-commerce. The lack of a secure connection can scare away your customers, which will consequently affect the quality signals you send, and therefore, your SEO.
To obtain a valid certificate helping to switch to HTTPS, you must request it from the host of your e-commerce. It's (normally) free. HTTPS will protect the client interface and all the public pages of your online store, you can see its activation by the presence of a padlock in the URL bar of your browser. Be aware that traffic may drop temporarily after the implementation of HTTPS, but this secure protocol is on the way to becoming the new standard. So we'll have to get there sooner or later.
3. Optimize the internal and external linking of your site
Magento has some optimization issues with internal links, especially in the mega menu, the cross selling functions and the footer. This creates a phenomenon of dispersion of the SEO juice, which makes it a major obstacle to the good referencing of your site.
An effective internal link allows a better distribution of SEO juice, and therefore boosts the effectiveness of link campaigns. If you buy backlinks while your internal mesh is not optimized, your netlinking campaigns will be less effective and you will probably have to buy more than necessary, or for longer. NaddraBlog offers to rationalize your link purchases by working your external mesh so as not to waste the link juice.
With Magento, there is only one solution to optimize internal linking: white hat cloaking . The purpose of this dynamic link hiding is to guide Google's crawl bots directly to the pages of interest for your SEO. There is a free cloaking framework for Magento, but it's complicated to install and optimize. Installing a dedicated module will be more interesting.
4. Simplify the indexing of your online store
The sitemap.xml file contains information for Google bots. It lists the relevant links and facilitates the indexing of good pages on the search engine. Please note, this is not the sitemap.html of the Magento front office! The sitemap.xml document can be found in settings > configuration > catalog. As often with automatically generated sitemaps , those of Magento are not optimized. Once your online store is populated, generate the file and then check the list to check if the pointed URLs are really relevant for you.
If you manage a multilingual or multi-store site, you can create several sitemap.xml and an index of sitemaps, which you will then list in the robots.txt file .
5. Improve the loading speed of your pages
Magento 1 has long been recognized for being excessively slow, a consequence of its complexity. The software has evolved well and its basic speed is already more appreciable. On the other hand, it still requires a dedicated server to run an online store! Regardless of the CMS you use, the page load by the user has an impact on your SEO. Internet users are not patient, and even less so when shopping on their mobile. A page that is too slow to load scares away customers, and your SEO will suffer.
You will need to lighten your Magento product pages as much as possible by getting rid of unnecessary and too heavy plugins, external font calls, JQuery scripts, etc. Images and videos will also need to be optimized.
6. Optimize your e-commerce URL structure
To be well referenced, a URL must be short, clear and coherent, with your main keyword and without special characters. Before putting your store online, you can already easily remove the ".html" at the end of all your URLs and the category of your choice. Magento natively offers to remove categories in your URLs .
To stay up-to-date, remember to check the SEO terms most searched by people on your store. You will be able to create synonyms and URL redirects. Magento offers these basic options in its admin interface.
7. Avoid Duplicate Content with Canonical URL
One of the biggest obstacles to Magento SEO is the involuntary duplicate content due to its filtered navigation. By default, the canonical URL of product pages and category pages is not activated on Magento, but this can be done in a few clicks via the backoffice, in the HEAD field. Remember to list the URLs that you will define as canonical to avoid duplicate content and therefore the inevitable penalty from Google for plagiarism.
8. Take care of your metadata
Magento 2.0 has greatly improved its metadata section. The meta title, meta description and ALT fields are now easier to find, which avoids forgetting to fill them in, including for images and videos (yes, Magento allows you to add a video description!). For better SEO, the H1 titles of all your pages should be unique, short and contain your main keyword. Be careful, if you don't fill in the meta title tag , Google will take your H1 instead or force a default title. So remember to fill in these tags, which have a dual SEO and marketing function!
9. Manage your image optimization for SEO
Google is able to reference images and videos in search results ( SERP ). The potential for product sheets is enormous: the Internet user will look for the image that will stand out visually and no longer the first result of the list. Avoid reusing supplier images, take your own good quality photos and optimize their weight.
Optimizing the description of your product photos is therefore a very important SEO lever in e-commerce. Magento 2.0 now helps to easily fill metadata and ALT fields for each image and video, so enjoy!
10. Include optimized content in your categories
Too often, the content of categories (filters) and e-shop product sheets is copied and pasted from the supplier catalog, including images. In a sector where you have to stand out and inspire confidence, this is counterproductive. In addition, duplicate content ( internal or external duplicate content ) is an obstacle to SEO, while conversely, optimized content facilitates the good referencing of the product.
In addition, optimizing its content maximizes the effects of the natural link strategy . NaddraBlog strongly advises you to rewrite all your texts for SEO and to systematically enrich all your product/filter content with a semantic writing tool. This SEO effort will have to be all the more important as your e-commerce sector is competitive.
11. Promote the appearance of Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are excerpts chosen by Google, which it will highlight on its search results page. You don't have control over whether it will choose this or that snippet, but showing up in Google snippets brings a higher click-through rate. A higher CTR improves the qualified traffic of your e-commerce, and therefore, the number of sales (depending on your conversion rate). It is therefore interesting to seek to cause the appearance of these enriched extracts by favoring in particular the highlighting of customer reviews (to be activated in the Magento backoffice), promotions, product sizes, prices, etc. So you have to work on your SEO.
4 Essential Magento SEO Plugins
To help you implement the advice given by NaddraBlog and improve the SEO of your Magento store, here are 4 very useful modules.
Jirafe
This plug-in offers an analytics dashboard, essential for obtaining a detailed analysis of your sales data over a specific period. The native Magento is indeed quite poor in data at this level, whereas it is an essential tool in e-commerce. Plus, it's free!
SEOGento
Here is a plug-in that will help you overcome Magento's shortcomings in terms of SEO. This module will help you rewrite your URLs, optimize your titles in bulk, manage your 301 redirects, get rid of duplicate content... Essential!
Wyomind Simple Google Shopping for Magento 2
This paid module makes it easy to transfer your product sheets to Google Shopping. This Google interface helps you access thousands of potential leads!
ReloadSEO
This all-inclusive SEO packaging optimizes Magento's key features. Paid, it helps track keywords, find new keywords and analyze your backlinks.
Conclusion
Magento is a particularly powerful CMS for e-commerce, but difficult to learn. Its complexity makes it difficult to access for the user, and above all, it causes native SEO brakes that must absolutely be resolved to improve the visibility of your online store. Version 2 of Magento already solves some ergonomic and cumbersome problems upstream, but the problems of duplicate content and slow loading remain your responsibility.
NaddraBlog has selected a few add-ons to overcome the native flaws of Magento and help you unlock its full potential. Improving technical SEO and optimizing the content of your e-commerce will also allow you to remove the brakes on your netlinking campaigns. With a better referencing of your key pages, you will ensure a constant flow of qualified traffic, and therefore, more sales!
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