Magento is complex enough at the technical point of views even for Magento developers with fewer experiences. It doesn’t mean it is tough to use for Magento merchants. It is tough in several aspects, and technical SEO is one of those.
Unfortunately, search engine algorithms and the best practices also are changing with the pace of time because search engines are behaving like humans in many ways.
Similarly, the Magento platform itself is evolving with advancements of technologies, expectations of online businesses, and online shoppers in ever-changing scenarios.
For instance, before a few years mobiles were nowhere, now smartphones and tablets are dominating the shopping search and shopping itself. Today AI (Artificial Intelligence) engines are easing the entire shopping process along with LBS (Location-based Services).
AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are making product presentation awesome. IoT and Wearable Devices are opening unimaginable doors of opportunity for ecommerce.
In such a dynamic and flowing, market Magento platform also tries to withstand by offering advanced features and functionality by revamping the entire platform form Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x.
Therefore, Magento 2.x is more challenging to SEO professional and particularly for Magento developers who are dealing with technical aspects of SEO and Internet marketing. In due course, I would like to give a brief technical guide to common Magento 2 SEO issues to ease the life of the majority of Magento 2 merchants and developers.
Addressing Mobile-Friendly Website Issues in Magento 2 Website:
Whatever route a Magento development company take to make ecommerce website mobile-friendly following suggestions are helpful.
- Select completely responsive web design themes or approaches to creating a perfect mobile-friendly website.
- Select appropriate hosting solution according to your ecommerce type and size. Today, VPS, Dedicated Server, and Cloud hosting are best for any size of ecommerce site to get secure yet best performing online solution.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) is an excellent choice to speed up content delivery, and CloudFlare is a good choice for it.
- To speed up loading, Magento merchants/developers should disable the default Magento 2 log setting and enable log cleaning features.
- A lot of and powerful image compression tools are available to speed up image loading without degrading image quality.
Look for Title, Description, and Header Tags Optimization SEO Issues in Magento 2 Platform:
In Magento 2, the default title tags and descriptions are not much SEO-friendly. At other hands, assigning titles, descriptions, and heading tags to tons of ecommerce product pages by manual methods is not a viable option at all.
Therefore, creating a template for products using product variables for a large number of products is the best way of addressing less significant pages. Thus, you can leave a few important pages for manual optimization.
Similarly, rules for header tags must follow in template-based as well as manual optimization and give H1 to one or two tiles, H2 to two or three titles, and rests of titles must have H3 and onwards heading tags. So far these are the best heading tag practices.
For homepage, finding setting is a bit difficult so go to-
| Content > Design > Configuration > Edit (Main Website Store) > HTML Head > Default Title/Description/Keywords |
For the rests of products, categories, and content pages, the setting is available in backend modules of the respective pages.
Eliminating Duplication Content SEO Issues in Magento 2 Storefront:
Magento is a dynamic ecommerce platform, so it generates dynamic pages with dynamic URLs and creates duplicate content issues. For instance, if you use faceted or filter search, the different combination of search parameters will generate different pages with dynamic URLs, but page content would be the same.
When you combined a shirt color parameter with shirt sizes, the resulting pages have only size parameters content differs while rests of parameter content would be the same.
There is a way in Magento 2 backend setting to eliminate the duplicate content issue. You can turn canonical ON in the Magento 2 admin panel using following settings for products and categories.
| Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products/Categories” |
It will give canonical tags to the dynamically generated pages, which are pointing duplicate content pages to the primary/main version of products or category pages automatically.
URLs Optimization for Products, Categories, & Other Pages in Magento 2 Ecommerce:
We know the dynamic URL of an ecommerce page of any type is a big NO at SEO perspective. Fortunately, Magento 2 has URL re-write features built-in, and it can generate SEF URLs (Search Engine Friendly URLs) automatically for products, categories, and other content pages.
For manual addition or editing of SEF URL, Magento 2 merchants can go to admin panel and tweak the following settings.
| To add new product:
Products > Catalog > Add Product (top-right of the screen) > Search Engine Optimization > URL Key |
| To edit existing product:
Products > Catalog > Edit (under Action for the product you want) > Search Engine Optimization > URL Key |
By default, Magento takes the name of product or category in URL, and you can change it through given customized ways.
Bringing Faster Performance in Magento 2 Online Shop:
Faster loading and interactions in Magento 2 ecommerce website is one of the prominent SEO issues. It is not one tweak solution, but many and some are:
- Server configuration
- Code cleaning using the best coding practices to create clean, compact, and comprehensive code
- Compact CSS and JavaScript like scripting
- Server cache and browser cache optimization
- Using image, videos, and other multimedia content optimization tools and techniques
- Use of CDN technologies to cut burden over the server
Facing Magento 2 Faceted Navigation Links Issues:
We know layered navigation or faceted search features can create multiple SEO issues. Those are mostly pertaining to navigation links issues like duplicate content, URL, and Meta Data.
The following resolutions can work in the most cases.
- Preventing search engines from crawling and indexing pages using robots.txt provisions including no follow links.
- By using no index but follow tag so that it will allow crawling the faceted navigation and other problematic pages but prevent indexing hence appearance in SERPs.
- By implementing AJAX navigation because AJAX technology enables dynamic updates of page content without changing the page URL at all.
- By handling search and site parameters in Google Webmaster Tools.
Magento 2 Store Sitemap Issues:
The XML sitemap is crucial for search engines to know what to crawl or index and what not beforehand jumping on crawling. Magento 2 has enough provision to automatically update the XML sitemap and configure as per bespoke needs.
If you don’t deal with it and configure it, you will have many pages included in the sitemap, which are useless for ranking the store and waste your crawling budget allocated by bots.
Therefore, you must look at the sitemap using the following path-
Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map
You can create a fresh/new sitemap using the following path-
Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map > Add Sitemap > Put the details > Save & Generate
There are many options in the configuration module of sitemap in the backend of Magento 2. For example products options, category options, CMS page options, general settings, setting file limits, search engine submission setting options, and so on.
Thus, you can set frequency, priority, and number of URLs per file, file size, and enabling submission to Robots.txt.
Duplicates Caused By SSL in Magento 2 Ecommerce:
Today the majority of search engines prefer secure URL using the SSL layer. It needs changes in the domain URL from http:// to https:// for the entire Magento site. Magento 2 has a simple setting for it, and the following three steps are enough.
| 1 | Please set up your domain at: Store > Configuration > Web > Unsecure > Base URL , Now, change ‘Base URL’ to ‘Base Link URL.’ |
| 2 | On the same page, tick ‘Yes’ to ‘Use Web Server Rewrites’ under ‘Search Engine Optimization.’ |
| 3 | Under the ‘URL Option’ select ‘Yes’ option for ‘Auto-redirect to Base URL.’ |
Similarly, you have to make essential changes to hosting server configuration based on the server types like Apache server, Windows server, Nginx serve, and so on.
Magento 2 Structure Data or OOTB Issues:
Structure data use the most in producing reviews and ratings on SERPs as well as publish on the products and other pages wherever those are with relevancy. In due course, Magento 2 has Out-of-Box review functionality based on structural data tagged in the code using Schema.org coding.
These are a good feature at UX perspective that can help woo shoppers to establish trust. Unfortunately, at tech SEO point of view, it creates an issue like duplicate content when published on more than one page or displaying on dynamically generated pages.
The best solution is to have an aggregated page for these reviews you can use OOTB implementation such as Yotpo, Power Reviews, BazaarVoice, and so on.
Indexed Search Result Pages Issues in Magento 2:
In the medium to large size Magento ecommerce store, catalog pages go in thousands in number and allowing them for crawling, and indexing can cause multiple issues for search engine optimization.
There are ways to give Meta Robot Tags to those pages and disallowing search engines, but using Robots.txt route is a more viable option when crawl budget.
Final words for SEO qualities in magneto 2 online store:
Ecommerce websites have a very prominent goal, and it is top ranking in SERPs to get maximum out of it. Therefore, SEO aspects in magneto 2 storefront are vital to sustain and grow in the highly competitive market.
We have noted in the post that a few SEO issues those a tech-savvy Magento merchant can solve, but a majority of issues demand intervention or active involvement of seasoned Magento developers.
If you look for an impeccable and passionate team of Magento developers to manage your SEO issue right from the beginning of Magento 2 Ecommerce Development and afterward throughout store lifecycle, I recommend Perception System, San Jose, the USA for it.
Let’s start a thread of discussion on your bespoken Magento 2 technical SEO issues and get a comprehensive solution quickly.
