“How do I get my website on the first page of Google?” If you’re thinking – Google ads, we hate to break it to you, but that won't do much to drum up business.
People absolutely hate ads on SERPs. 96% of users breeze past them, heading straight to organic results, even though paid ads occupy the top three slots. SEO will always reign supreme.
With that in mind, this article takes a deep dive into the top Magento SEO strategies you can implement to put your business directly in front of customers looking for it.
Why SEO Matters for Your Magento Store
The life and death of your eCommerce business relies entirely on its ability to attract new customers. Here’s why SEO is important for your Magento Store.
To Drive Brand Awareness
Most online stores rely on search engine optimization as a low-cost alternative for brand awareness. Your business’s appearance on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) or in Google's Answer Box might be the first time a prospective shopper stumbles upon your website. It might also trigger them to remember a previous visit or interaction with your brand.
Either way, most online users view ranking high on search engines as a stamp of approval that they’re dealing with a legitimate business, increasing their likelihood of clicking on your site.
To Fill the Marketing Funnel
The traditional marketing funnel comprises four distinct stages – awareness, interest, desire, and action. These all work collectively to generate a steady stream of new customers. The major role SEO plays in the marketing funnel revolves around driving low-cost, top-of-the-funnel traffic at the first stage – awareness.
However, that's not the only role SEO plays in the marketing funnel. As each shopper proceeds from awareness to interest, interest to desire, and desire to action, the search intent revealed in their choice of keywords transitions from informational to transactional. In other words, the phrases they use during the interest (research) phase morph into different ones in the action (purchase) phase.
To increase the likelihood of conversion, the keywords you use must target the correct customer intent at various points in your website as shoppers move through each funnel phase.
To Elevate Your Content
If you’re placing Google ads, it only makes sense to target keywords with high transaction intent. In other words, keywords that point to a higher likelihood of a user taking a very specific business action, in most cases, one that results in a transaction. That said, the value of other content on your eCommerce website, such as buyer's guides, how-to articles, blog posts, etc., might not be realized immediately.
That’s where SEO comes in.
Optimizing these types of content can yield significant results from increased traffic at little to no cost. Simply understand your target customer, research the keywords they’re using when searching for your products, and optimize your content so your target users can access it.
To Expand Your Remarketing Audiences
Suppose a shopper lands on your website through an organic search on Google, Bing, Instagram, Facebook, or any other channel. You can place cookies on their browser so that any paid ads you place on Google can be displayed to that same shopper after they leave your online store and continue along their journey.
It goes without saying that the more people you drive to your site organically through SEO, the bigger your remarketing audiences will be. This particular Magento SEO service approach works even better considering the number of visits prospective customers make at the top of the funnel. That way, every time a shopper traverses the internet, even on an unrelated site, they can passively be reminded that your brand exists and has previously delivered value to them.
To Capture Long-Tail Keywords
According to Google, 15% of all the daily search queries are new – meaning Google has never seen them before. More often than not, these “new” search queries consist of long, obscure phrases that make up long-tail keywords that, on their own, may drive some searches but cumulatively consist of no more than 40% of the total queries.
What’s even more interesting is that long-tail keywords report higher conversion rates compared to their short-tail counterparts. The good news is – eCommerce sites, including those powered by Magento, are well-structured to target those types of long-tail keywords. The reason for this can be explained by the hierarchical structure of online stores with regard to their increasing levels of detail.
For instance, a click path for an apparel eCommerce website might look something like – Clothing > Men’s Clothing > Accessories > Belts > Designer Brands > Leather Belts > Brown Leather Belts. In this case, there’s a good chance that the pages further along the click path will match some long-tail keywords. A prospective shopper might input “designer men’s brown leather belts” on Google when searching for something specific.
However, since these keywords would be too many to target individually, the solution lies in adopting scalable SEO.
To Improve the User Experience
If there's one aspect of online retail that has remained constant time and again, it's this: A great user experience equals higher conversions. SEO helps store owners understand shoppers and, therefore, optimize the way they interact with their websites. Optimizing your online store’s usability can result in marked improvement in search engine rankings.
Think of it this way.
If a prospective customer wants something, that’s precisely what they’ll search for on the web. The first website to fulfill that desire is the winner. It’s the one that’ll make the sale. Keyword data is an invaluable asset online store owners can use to understand their shoppers’ desires. It’s a crystal ball that tells them how the shoppers think and articulate those desires.
By using those keywords in your eCommerce website, you can tailor your store to deliver an exceptional shopping experience. For instance, if most searchers are looking for “affordable brown leather belts,” you can emphasize low-cost alternatives on your website to enhance usability.
Keep in mind that your focus must be on providing prospective customers with a superior user experience. The moment hoards of visitors click on your site in the SERPs only for them to exit back to search results after a couple of seconds, it signals to Google that your website doesn’t contain relevant results for that particular query. It will inevitably hurt your SERP rankings.
To Lower the Costs of Paid Searches
Google uses its Quality Score to measure how relevant the ads that open up to landing pages are so it can then determine what the cost-per-click will be. With that in mind, the content on your website, which you optimize for SEO, should also be beneficial to Google Ads Campaigns, particularly when integrating keywords that drive value for paid and organic searches.
The more optimized your landing pages are, the higher your site’s Quality Score will be. Higher Quality Scores mean lower per-click costs and higher organic search performance.
To Create Lasting Value
SEO is a long-term investment in the performance of your eCommerce site. Unlike advertising, whose value stops once the campaign ends, SEO is the gift that keeps giving.
That said, it is important to remember that SEO isn't a one-and-done undertaking. It involves continuous optimization efforts, each one focusing on design, content, technology, and other aspects of your online store. On the plus side, your optimization efforts will undoubtedly deliver long-term value that will elevate your organic search performance for months and years.
Understanding Magento SEO Basics
Magento is an eCommerce solution that provides online sellers with a shopping cart system, allowing customers to make online purchases safely and conveniently. It provides store owners with complete control over the look, functionality, and content of their store, allowing them to customize it to reflect their brand.
Magento is available in two versions. On the one hand, you have Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition), which users can download and use for free. On the other hand, you have Adobe Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition), which has licensing fees attached to it.
While each variant offers its own unique set of benefits, the choice of one over the other comes down to the size and needs of your eCommerce business.
See also: Magento Open Source vs. Magento Commerce Cloud – Which Is Better?
How Does Magento Work?
The platform's core structure is built on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. This architecture lets web developers customize nearly all aspects of an online store. Magento also has a modular codebase that allows store owners to integrate third-party apps, plugins, and themes to increase their website’s basic functionality and aesthetics. That way, users can tailor their Magento websites to create custom marketplaces.
Roughly 239,000 merchants worldwide use Magento to power their eCommerce websites. The platform is a top choice for many online store owners for several reasons, including its:
Versatile CMS
One of Magento's major selling points is its versatile content management system (CMS). It allows users to manage and modify all kinds of content, including product descriptions and blog posts and makes it remarkably easy to create site pages. Magento’s CMS even lets you create custom landing pages. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it one of the most nifty content management systems around.
Mobile-Friendliness
Roughly half of American adults use their mobile devices to shop online. It is, therefore, important for eCommerce websites to be mobile-friendly. Magento’s responsive design is built to automatically adjust your store’s layout to give mobile users an optimal shopping experience.
Moreover, Magento provides a separate toolkit that allows store owners to configure their store to create a unique mobile app experience for their shoppers. Whether your site visitors use a smartphone, tablet, or iPad to access your online store, Magento guarantees a superior user experience regardless of their mobile device.
Performance and Scalability
Magento’s architecture is modular, making it very easy to expand and adapt to the ever-evolving needs and demands of growing businesses. It is also worth noting that the platform has several features designed to enhance performance. One notable one is its full-page indexing and caching capability, a nifty feature that can help your website pages load quickly and run smoothly.
What does this mean for your business?
If your online store’s visibility has increased and you’re experiencing a marked spike in the number of customers visiting your store, Magento can handle high traffic volume without any slowdown, downtime, or performance-related issues. When the time to scale your store's capacity comes, you can do so easily without disrupting your site's performance.
As far as safety goes, Magento is one of the most secure eCommerce platforms around. It comes with several out-of-the-box security features built to provide unmatched protection against potential threats to your store. Threats can include anything from malware attacks to data leaks. The platform’s security is always up-to-date against emerging cyber security risks.
Exceptional SEO Capabilities
Your store’s visibility on search engines should be among your biggest concerns if you want to boost traffic to your eCommerce website. It begs the question: Is Magento SEO-friendly? The short answer is – yes, it is. Magento has outstanding SEO features designed to help your store rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
With Magento, you can create custom meta-titles and product descriptions for your site pages. Optimizing these two aspects of your online store has been proven to bump up click-through rates, which Google and other search engines reward by ranking your site higher.
Its built-in URL rewrites are another helpful feature that makes it ultra-easy for search engine bots to crawl your website. The result: Improved SERP rankings, which means more traffic to your store. More traffic means more conversions and sales.
Expansive Developer Community
Magento's worldwide network of developers is nothing short of impressive. The platform is supported by a large community of designers, developers, and users dedicated to building new modules, extensions, and themes for Magento.
If you ever run into issues with your Magento-powered eCommerce store, there's a good chance that someone in this expansive community has already encountered it and written a detailed tutorial showing users how to overcome it. It doesn’t matter how unique you believe your specific issue is; someone has already figured out how to solve it.
Marketplace Integration Features
One of Magento’s strong suits is its robust marketplace integration feature. It allows you to link your online store with Amazon, eBay, and several other popular marketplaces to increase your brand's visibility and allow larger audiences to purchase your products.
Additionally, this integration capability can help simplify your business's inventory management by letting you sell your store merchandise on multiple platforms conveniently from one central location.
Customization Capabilities
Magento’s customization capabilities are pretty remarkable. It gives users limitless flexibility to create a unique look for their store that aligns with their brand messaging. You can even customize your store’s functionality to meet the specific demands of your business and customers.
With Magento, you can create custom modules, install extensions, or customize your store in any way you see fit, easily and conveniently. If you don't have a web development background, you can leverage Magento’s developer community to get the custom design or functionality you desire.
See also: In-Depth Magento Review
Customizable Security Permissions
So far, you already know that Magento lets you customize your online store’s functionality. It doesn’t end there, though. The eCommerce platform comes with a security permissions feature that lets you customize the store access privileges members of staff have to your site’s backend.
In other words, you can limit what employees can do on the backend by assigning each of them to a custom user group and restricting the actions members of that group can perform. That way, you don't have to worry about people making unauthorized changes to your store content, and you can ensure sensitive customer data remains safe. Employees only get the precise level of access required to perform their day-to-day duties.
Third-Party Integration
Magento makes it remarkably easy to integrate online stores with third-party solutions, including payment gateways and processors, shipping carriers, customer relationship management software, etc.
These integrations make it easier for customers to go through the checkout process and purchase your products. They can also help to significantly reduce the operating costs associated with running your online store by allowing you to make use of the promotions and discounts that these third-party providers offer from time to time.
Magento's flexibility also makes it remarkably easy to integrate new functionalities and features into your online store as needed.
Built-In Upselling and Cross-Selling Features
Upselling and cross-selling are two avenues many online businesses employ to increase customers’ average order values. They work by displaying related products customers might be interested in purchasing alongside the items in their shopping cart at the point they’re ready to check out.
For instance, suppose your store sells boots. Once a customer purchases a pair, you can upsell them on a slightly more expensive brand with superior features. Alternatively, you can cross-sell them a pair of hiking socks that go well with the boots they're purchasing.
Magento’s upselling and cross-selling features provide a great way to boost your business’s sales and conversions by promoting premium substitute and complementary products to buyers.
Powerful Mobile App Framework
With Magento’s powerful mobile app architecture, you can easily develop native apps for your online store. You can build an Android or iOS app for your store independently, even with no web development experience. In other words, you don't need to hire an independent team of developers to build the app for you.
Moreover, the architecture is fully integrated with Magento, which means you can manage your store's orders, customers, and inventory directly from the mobile app. That's something you don't see with most eCommerce platforms.
Advanced Search Functionality
Another noteworthy feature of Magento's toolkit is its advanced search functionality. It makes it easy for customers to find the products they need in your store by simply inputting the product’s name, category, SKU, price range, keyword, etc.
The great thing about Magento’s search engine is that it constantly learns and improves over time. This means it gets better at finding the specific products your customers are looking for.
Simplified PCI Compliance Capability
PCI is short for the Payment Card Industry, which is the sector that hosts the various organizations charged with the storage, processing, and transmission of cardholder data. Cards, in this case, refer to both debit and credit cards. PCI compliance means that the organization meets the security standards set by the PCI.
While Magento Open Source isn’t “PCI compliant” per se, it does provide features that make it easier for online store owners to achieve PCI compliance. For this reason, if your store accepts credit card payments, you must identify a PCI-compliant hosting provider to achieve total PCI compliance. That way, you ensure your sensitive customer data is kept safe from hackers and unauthorized third-party access.
It is worth noting that eCommerce websites that are not PCI compliant can be subjected to heavy fines and penalties from their respective payment processors.
See also: How to Upgrade Online Store from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Magento SEO Best Practices
So far, we’ve explored how Magento works and why SEO is important for your online store. The next step involves implementing actual SEO strategies to help with your website’s ranking on SERPs. Here are some Magento SEO best practices to drive your store to the top.
SEO Content Marketing
Content marketing is first on the list, with good reason. By creating engaging, high-quality website content, you deliver value to site visitors and establish yourself as a thought leader and authority in your specific sector of operation. SEO content marketing for Magento eCommerce website involves the following:
- Developing a content strategy aligned with your short and long-term business goals and resonates with your target audiences;
- Conducting in-depth keyword research to identify what your target audience’s search intent is and find relevant keywords with high-traffic potential;
- Creating engaging and informative content optimized for Google and other search engines;
- Optimizing your site content for readability and a superior user experience for prospective customers visiting your online store;
- Creating content designed to provide readers with real value by offering helpful information, solving the specific issues they might be grappling with, and answering frequently asked questions;
- Leveraging email marketing, social media, and other online channels to promote your website content to generate more traffic.
It is worth noting that “content” in the context of SEO includes but is not limited to blog posts, product reviews, product descriptions, tutorials and how-to guides, videos, infographics, etc.
Implement Structured Data Markup
Structured markup is code integrated into your site’s HTML to help search engines understand your website content better. Search engines use it to put details such as what type of content you have when it was published, who published it, etc. That way, they can provide more relevant and accurate results on SERPs.
Implementing structured data markup on your online store offers three distinct benefits for your SEO Magento website:
- It increases your website’s visibility on SERPs;
- It allows your store to display rich snippets on SERPs, increasing click-through rates and website traffic;
- It helps Google build its Knowledge Graph, which increases the likelihood of your online store appearing in rich search results and snippets.
Consider adding structured data markup to your website’s homepage, contact pages, blog posts, product and breadcrumb lists for product pages, and category pages. Product page schema signals to Google that the page in question has information about the product image, name, description, SKU, price, and rating. The collection page schema tells Google that the category page in question contains various products and critical information on each one.
Optimize Product Pages
Optimizing your product pages is among the most business-critical things you can do for your online store. It is, after all, the means through which customers will find and buy the products you're selling. Some popular Magento 2 SEO best practices for optimizing your site’s product pages include:
- Conducting keyword research to identify SEO-friendly keywords and integrating them into the product page title, meta-description, product description, and URL structure.
- Optimizing product pages by using high-quality images showcasing different product angles and integrating relevant keywords into the file names, captions, and alt tags.
- Writing detailed and informative product descriptions highlighting the product’s specifications, unique features, and benefits.
- Implementing on-page SEO techniques, including heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.), internal and external linking, embedding social media share buttons, adding structured data markup, etc.
- Creating unique and relevant content, including product videos, user-generated content, and customer reviews that resonate with your target audience.
Optimize for Crawling and Indexing
Optimizing your Magento website for crawling and indexing by search engines has everything to do with navigation. The first thing you must do to ensure Google crawls your site properly is to steer clear of faceted navigation. It not only increases the total number of pages that can be crawled but also increases the likelihood of search engines erroneously flagging your site for duplicate pages and content. This can be attributed to the fact that pages in faceted navigation can only either narrow or sort existing products. They can’t do both.
To guarantee that search engines crawl and index your Magento site pages correctly, here's what you can do:
- Do a site-wide audit to find low-quality pages that might have been indexed in faceted navigation;
- Implement canonical or no-index tags to get rid of these low-quality pages from the index;
- Analyze your site’s log files to identify any potential low-quality pages that are being crawled;
- Only allow site pages with high search potential to be crawled and indexed;
- Prevent low-value parameters in the robot.txt file from being crawled.
Implement JavaScript Rendering
If any elements on your website rely on JavaScript to load, you must ensure that Google indexes them correctly. You can use tools like the Rich Results Test to verify which elements Googlebot can render on SERPs. Alternatively, you can take the manual approach to check the index using the search operator "site:" to identify the elements loading via JavaScript.
See also: Magento vs. WooCommerce vs. Shopify.
Optimize Magento URL Paths
Optimizing Magento URL paths involves:
- Creating cleaner, more readable URLs by removing the .html extensions at the end of URLs;
- Implementing 301 redirects (as opposed to 302);
- Creating permanent redirects for URLs;
- Implementing 1:1 redirects for each page to ensure old pages are redirected easily;
- Using the feature in Magento to create page redirects if URLs change automatically.
Add Related Products
By integrating "Related Products" into the product pages in your online store, you increase the upsell and cross-sell opportunities, generating more revenue. It also enhances user engagement by displaying similar products. To activate this feature on your Magento store, you must set Related Products on every product page.
Integrate Blogging Functionality
While Magento’s default settings don’t include a blogging function, you can still add one by integrating WordPress. A blog on your eCommerce website offers more opportunities to rank on Google by featuring how-to content, product reviews, and anything else search engines deem helpful to users.
Add Metadata
Metadata provides prospective customers with information on your site's contents and is displayed on SERPs. It plays a central role in how search engine bots index your website. The three types of metadata include:
- Meta titles: The meta-title appears as your product page title in search engine results contains 70 characters or less, and must include a high-value keyword.
- Meta descriptions: The meta-description also appears in search engine results and offers a brief overview of what the product page contains. It can be no more than 160 characters.
- Meta keywords: These are displayed on SERPs, must only include keywords, and have no maximum limit.
To set product metadata on your Magento store, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Product Fields Auto-Generation.
Enable Canonical Tags
If multiple URLs exist for the same content, you must use canonical tags to specify the preferred URL structure. Failure to do this means Google will flag your eCommerce site for duplicate content, which is bad for SEO.
To enable canonical tags in Magento, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization.
Add Alt Text to Images
Optimizing product images on your website improves your store’s user experience and shortens page load times, both of which can positively impact your site’s SEO. Aside from using high-quality, medium-sized product images, you must also include alt attributes, which is essentially a short description of what the image is. It is good practice to include a high-value keyword in the alt text to help with SEO.
To add alt attributes in Magento, go to Product > Edit > Images and Videos > Image > Alt Text.
Final Thoughts
To retain a competitive edge in the online marketplace, having a solid search engine presence is the most important piece of the puzzle. The future success of your online store hinges on it. By following the Magento 2 SEO best practices we’ve covered in this guide, you can boost your search engine visibility, drive more traffic to your website, and generate more sales and conversions. Nothing can stop your rise to the top.
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FAQs
How to do SEO on Magento?
To optimize your eCommerce store for search engines, some SEO Magento best practices you can implement include:
- Focusing on content marketing
- Implementing structured data markup
- Optimizing product pages
- Optimizing your store for crawling and indexing
- Implementing JavaScript rendering
- Setting product metadata
- Adding alt tags to site images
To set product metadata on your Magento store, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Product Fields Auto-Generation. To add alt attributes in Magento, go to Product > Edit > Images and Videos > Image > Alt Text.
How to improve SEO in Magento 2?
To improve Magento SEO for your eCommerce website, consider taking the following steps:
- Integrating blogging functionality
- Optimizing Magento URL paths
- Adding “Related Products” for improved user experience
- Adding metadata
- Enabling canonical tags
- Adding alt attributes to images
Why is Magento good for SEO?
Magento offers exceptional built-in SEO features designed to help your store rank on search engine results pages. Store owners can create custom meta-titles and product descriptions for their site pages and leverage the built-in URL rewrites feature that makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl and/or index your site.
What is the best Magento extension for SEO?
Some top Magento SEO extensions worth checking out include:
- Magento 2 Google Rich Snippets
- Advance Sitemap & SEO Suite
- AheadWorks Ultimate Magento SEO Extension Suite
- BSS Commerce SEO Extension
- FMEextensions Canonical URL Magento SEO Extension
- Magefan Magento 2 SEO Suite
- FishPig Magento WordPress Integration
June 13, 2023 
Comment by Katelin Lewis
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog post as it provided me with valuable insights and information.