Magento 2 SEO Tips for eCommerce: advantages and common issues
Nowadays Magento is the most popular ecommerce CMS in the world. The Magento popularity is growing fast.
It’s an open-source PHP platform that provides a lot of benefits to its users. You’ll get a flexible and scalable store, moreover, you’ll get full control over the content, functionality, and resource appearance.
Another advantage of Magento is a system of modules that you can combine according to your specific needs.
According to Magento Connect, there are more than 9700 Magento extensions. It should be mentioned that not every developer uploads their extensions on Magento Connect.
Even among free extensions, you can find a different way to solve the problem. The possibility of paid extensions are unlimited, everything depends on the budget of each project
But even the best website will not be found without competent searching engine optimization. We’ll tell about Magento SEO advantages and issues which you will face during the optimization of the Magento site.
Easy steps to improve your SEO
When you optimize your website you start from competitor analysis. You look through the top 10 and differentiate the advantages of websites. Then you try to implement this solution on your resource.
There are some points that you should check and do first of all. It’s easy to do all priority items on Magento.
Meta-tags
Control on your website is the best thing about Magento Seo. CMS provides the possibility to edit meta-tags on a huge amount of pages.
You can change the category title on every category page.
There is a functionality of prefixes and suffixes which helps to manage tags on whole categories.
You can add Brand Name or any typical information automatically.
Sitemap
There is a built-in function to create a sitemap in Magento. So you can easily generate XML files without using external extensions.
Go to Marketing→ Site map and click Add Sitemap button. Go to Stores->Configuration->Catalog->XML SiteMap and configure the XML file.
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You can check your sitemap in the URL http://domen.com/folder/sitemap.xml
Google Analytics
To install Google Analytics on web site go to Stores-> Settings-> Sales -> Google API and add the code of analytics counter and pick the “yes” options from the Enable menu.
After that the Analytics code added to your site
Redirects
There is no need to edit the htaccess file, you can make rewrite rules from Admin Panel. Go to Marketing→ URL Rewrite Management. Here you fill the form, choose the old URL and the new URL, indicate the type 301 or 302. Your redirect is ready. It’s an easy way to save all SEO indicators if your site structure has been changed.
Main issues of Magento CMS
Except for certain advantages, there are some typical issues that webmasters will face during Magento store optimization.
Loading Speed
Default Magento stores are really slow. Low download speed causes the searching engine positions. Page Speed is an important Ranking Factor. Also, it impacts customer experience and user behavior factors.
So for successful position raise in Google, you should speed up your website.
Pay attention to the following items:
- Use browser caching
- Use images compression (for example Image Optimization Extension)
- Optimize JavaScripts
- Decrease HTML and CSS
- Decrease Server response time
Use Google PageSpeed tools to check the issues are to improve.
Duplicates
The nightmare of every webmaster is a duplicatе page. Magento creates dynamic variants of category and product pages. If these pages get to the index it can cause main pages ranking. There are two ways to solve the duplicate problems
- You can disallow these pages in robots.txt file
- Put a canonical tag on the main pages of your site. Put yes in Options Use Canonical link Meta for Categories/Product. So you can solve the most problems with duplicate content.
Headlines
If we look at the BM25F formula we’ll see that h1 like titles have a huge influence on Google to understand the text relevance. Magento use the logo on the page as an default h1. Also, you can see the breaking of the headlines hierarchy. Check the headlines on your website. Category name should be in h1 of category pages, and Product name for product pages.
As a conclusion
Magento is not a cheat, it’s a possibility for successful searching optimization.
It has everything to raise your website to the next level of eCommerce. By using all the built-in instruments and additional extensions skilled webmaster will promote your site in any searching engine.
