Many people think that an online store is easy. It does not need an office, many employees, or a warehouse. But, if we talk about serious development, then there are much more difficulties than expected. Finding a product and setting up logistics is one half of the job, and the other half is more difficult — finding buyers. Otherwise, everything else won’t matter. Buyers can only be attracted by the right strategy for finding target customers — promotion. Creating a turnkey online store implies that this process will be handled by professionals. Not only the final success of the site depends on the competence of the company that will develop the online store for you, but also on the personal success of your company in many ways.
After the online store is created and designed, it’s time for search engine optimization. SEO is the most affordable and popular marketing channel that brings lasting results. While Magento is one of the most user-friendly e-commerce platforms out there, that doesn’t mean search engines should neglect SEO. The Magento market is booming and thousands of stores are trying to lure customers with creative design, interesting content, and quality products or services. This is not only because the Magento platform has many built-in SEO features, but also because the best Magento stores know how to apply them with the best SEO practices for Magento.
If you carry out SEO optimization by taking into account all the current requirements of the search engine, you will get a high-quality Internet resource as a result. It will be able not only to surpass the closest competitors but also to take first place in the search results. But how to achieve such success? What should you pay attention to during SEO optimization and how to track its effectiveness? Why is it so important to entrust the creation of a turnkey online store to Magento 2 SEO professionals and what results should we expect in the end? If you’re new to SEO or trying to improve your site’s SEO, then you’ll be interested in learning about the best Magento SEO features and tips to help you improve your rankings and achieve better results. We will talk about this in this article, let’s get started!
What Is SEO in simple words?
SEO website promotion, what is it? The acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. In simple words, SEO is a set of actions for internal and external optimization aimed at increasing the position of the site in search results. High-quality professional SEO is not just building links or creating useful content. Website promotion requires work on it in a complex.
Like SEO in general, Magento 2 SEO is a set of guidelines for Magento 2 stores to follow to get better rankings, traffic, and conversions. The Magento platform has SEO features such as robots.txt, meta robots, sitemap, canonical tag, and others. The site is meaningless without its promotion. Without optimization, the traffic of the resource will be very low or even zero, unless other methods of attracting traffic are used.
SEO guide for optimizing your platform
So, now that you know that Magento SEO is one of the main strategies you should invest your time in, let’s take a look at the best practices for your Magento 2 store.
Keep your Magento store up-to-date
Check if your store is running on the latest version of Magento. Magento updates usually come with improved features and enhanced security that help improve the SEO optimization of your Magento 2 store. This is very common advice, but it will be extremely effective in showing your store in search engines. First of all, because in older versions, SEO functions can simply cease to be supported, not to mention the fact that in the latest versions of SEO, optimization works much more efficiently. You can do the update yourself or contact a professional developer to help with this.
Improve your website speed
The page load speed should be less than 3 seconds. You should reduce it as much as possible. Website loading speed is an official Google ranking factor. Moreover, according to the results of numerous studies, the speed of an online store affects the bounce rate and the desire of customers to return to this site in the future. Users have long been accustomed to fast sites and are not ready to wait until the page becomes available for interaction, so every extra second of page load reduces your profit.
This parameter is slightly different for the user and search robots. The thing is that for users and potential buyers, site loading is one indicator measured in seconds between clicking on a link to a specific site and its complete loading. Search engines, in turn, allocate several different indicators at once, which in general fit the description of the “site loading speed” indicator. The result of these indicators has a direct impact on the success of the SEO optimization of your Magento online store.
Rewrite your Magento SEO URLs to be SEO-friendly
A high ranking in search results leads to more interested customers coming to your online store, which ultimately leads to higher conversion rates. For this reason, search engine-friendly URLs in your Magento store are essential to the success of your online marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at what you can do about it:
- URL rewriting provides a convenient and safe way to make existing URLs SEO friendly and human-readable. Magento is designed to regularly use URL rewrites to eliminate the value of the “index.php” file that is present in existing URLs right after the root folder;
- Each URL must be unique, static, and perfectly optimized according to SEO guidelines;
- The category URL key can help search engines find the product page for queries related to that category. Add keywords to the URL;
- The SID or session ID in the Magento web interface URL. It generates different URLs for the same page, which Google ends up interpreting as duplicate content. It is better to remove the SID from the URL;
- Make an automatic redirect to the base URL. Create a permanent redirect for old URLs if the URL key has changed;
- The suffix is the part of the URL after the URL key. It is part of .htm or .html. SEO recommends excluding the suffix from the URL.
Optimize your products’ images
In the process of work on SEO optimization, very rarely it comes to optimizing pictures and images. There is an opinion that working with graphic elements does not bring much benefit while taking a lot of time for both the optimizer and the customer, who needs to find unique photos for his resource. However, the facts speak to the contrary.
Although there are no strict restrictions, no one will click on a low-quality photo, which means it will disappear from the search results very quickly. What you need to know and remember:
- Proportions and image quality. Any photographs must be of good quality, without pixels, without deformation and all kinds of compressions that distort the image;
- The naturalness of photo content. Photo processing and various filters make it better, but it’s important not to overdo it;
- File extension. It is recommended to use not only .jpeg and .png formats, but also Webp, as it does not distort images and has a little weight.
