Magento SEO Best Practices (2024)

What is Magento SEO and is it a good option for businesses?

Magento is one of the best e-commerce platforms that has SEO features integrated into its interface and offers plug-ins that are designed to make SEO processes easier to implement and use. The tools Magento currently has available address all three facets of SEO, on-page, off-page and technical SEO.

Improving your SEO efforts via these tools and extensions will help to enhance your user experience and overall ranking performance, and understanding how these tools work and can be used will help you to generate the results you want.

Magento Best SEO Practices To Improve Rankings

Understanding the SEO integrations provided by Magento is just the start to make the tools work for you, and to gain the desired results you need a strong SEO strategy. Following guidance around Magento SEO best practices will give you a head start in building the foundations of your SEO strategy.

Keep in mind, although the goal is to appear high in the search results, it is not the sole importance to your SEO strategy as your site must resonate with your target customer base in order to convert traffic from organic search into conversions.

Optimise Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions give your page relevance and tell users about your product offerings. When referred to together, your page title and meta description is called metadata.

Meta titles and descriptions are often the first things users will see when coming across your site within search results, so they can greatly influence click-through rates and are important to get right if you want to gain SEO success.

Product titles (Meta titles) should be concise and easy to read. The recommended length for a product title is between 30–60 characters when following Magento SEO best practices. You should also try to include a relevant keyword within your page title if possible and ensure that each page has its own unique page title even if the product offering is similar.

Meta descriptions provide an opportunity to describe your product offering and encourage the reader to click through to your site from the search results. A good meta description should be descriptive of the page offering and, where possible, include a relevant keyword. When following SEO best practices, meta descriptions should sit between 70–160 characters as a recommended length. Each page should have a unique meta description, even if the product offering is similar.

Use Keywords That Have Commercial Intent

Keywords with a commercial intent are usually the phrases or terms your target customer base would use to search for your product or service. When searching using these keywords and phrases, users are interested in purchasing a product or service or are wanting to find additional information about the product or service to inform their decision.

There are numerous SEO tools out there to help you find the most appropriate keywords for your products, however, a good starting point would be to try to search for your product and see what the other suggested searches are for. If using Google to search, look at some of the relevant featured snippets, such as the ‘People Also Ask’ snippet to see what kinds of key phrases are included in the questions.

This will give you a good indication of the search landscape and give you an insight into what your competitors might be doing on their sites.

Use SEO-friendly URLs

To encourage a better level of user experience, your URL structure should be as simple as possible and should not include any special characters such as an underscore ‘_’ or a question mark ‘?’ to ensure your URL file paths are clean as best SEO practice.

Your URLs should aim to organise your site content in an understandable and clear way that is easy for users to follow and understand.

A good URL structure will also help search engine crawlers understand your page content and site structure and allow pages to be ranked appropriately in search results.

Product and category URLs should be short and simple and written in lowercase letters only in order to remain consistent across your site. You should use hyphens to separate words in the URL to avoid whitespace.

Set Up XML Sitemap in Magento 2

XML sitemaps act as a directory for your entire site. They can be crawled by search engines to help them to understand the structure and hierarchy of your site and the pages can be crawled and ranked accordingly.

Search engines also read sitemaps to allow them to appropriately prioritise which pages they should crawl more efficiently. Having a structured sitemap helps search engines to simplify this process and obtain the most valuable information.

To ensure that your sitemap is enabled in Magento, you can follow the steps below:

1. Go to stores>settings>configuration.
2. Select catalogue>XML sitemap from the menu on the left.
3. Click the drop-down menu for ‘category options’, ‘product options’ and choose your preferences.
4. Click on ‘generation settings; and ensure this is set to ‘yes’.
5. In the ‘search engine submission settings’ section, enable robots.txt, then click ‘save config’ to apply these changes.
6. Head to marketing>SEO search>Sitemap. Click ‘add sitemap.’
7. Fill in the prompts and click ‘save and generate.

Optimise Product Images

Images are vital to an e-commerce store, and they are usually what draw users to a specific product on your site. They directly influence customer decisions and can impact your search rankings too.

To ensure you are following SEO best practices for product images on Magento, you should compress and resize your image to reduce the size. All images you use on your site should be of a high resolution and have appropriate file names that use descriptive names such as ‘floral-red-red.jpg’ rather than ‘IMG004565.JPG’

Each image has an alt tag which allows search engines to understand the image and allows users with screen readers to gain a useful description of what the image shows, making your site more accessible. You should make use of alt tags and ensure that they follow SEO best practices.

You can access alt tags when uploading an image to the product section by double-clicking on the image thumbnail to access all the image details, within these details you should be able to see a box for alt text. You can then add an appropriate image description that should include a relevant keyword for the product where possible.

Modify Your Robots.txt files

A robots.txt file is used by search engines to know which URLs to crawl and index on your website. This file is saved in the root directory of your site. You can use robots.txt to limit the pages you want search engines to crawl. Ultimately, you only want search engines to crawl and index customer facing pages so you may wish to exclude log in pages, shopping cart pages and checkout pages, internal search pages and user accounts.

To update or modify your robots.txt file to exclude unwanted URLs navigate to content=> design&configuration and click ‘edit’ and scroll down to ‘search engine robots’ once complete click ‘save config’ to implement your changes.

To see your finished robots.txt file, you can add ‘/robots.txt’ on to your site URL.

Use Headings Appropriately

Headings are a vital part of content structure. They tell the user what to expect from a piece of content and can sometimes help users to navigate through the content to find the information they need.

Heading tags are used within the HTML of a site to adjust the text size, font, boldness and ultimately pick certain elements out of a piece of content to highlight and mark as a heading or title.

Title tags run in a sequentially descending order from H1 through to H6, it is good SEO practice for all pages on your site to have an H1 title tag.

Often heading tags can pull in from menu or footer items if the page content is not formatted correctly, to ensure appropriate use of title tags ensure your page content is formatted appropriately.

Often heading tags can pull in from menu or footer items if the page content is not formatted correctly, to ensure appropriate use of title tags ensure your page content is formatted appropriately.

Correctly sequenced heading tags make it easier for search engines to understand the content on your page and can make it easier for users with screen readers to navigate through content, making your site more accessible.

Create relevant and informative content

Content creation is arguably the foundation for a successful SEO strategy, after all, it is mainly your content that sells your products. Although an e-commerce site is mainly focused on generating revenue, content such as blog posts and frequently asked questions as well as product descriptions that are keyword focused can all be used to attract customers and persuade them to convert.

Adding commercial keywords into your content naturally will help to increase your sites' visibility in search results, and search engines usually reward content that is helpful and informative to potential users. If you focus on creating user-focused content before creating content specifically for SEO purposes, your rankings should increase.

Why Hire an Agency with Magento SEO Experience?

At Envisage Digital, we pride ourselves on our knowledge and expertise with Magento SEO. Magento is a flexible, scalable platform for e-commerce stores, but it does require some additional technical expertise in order to successfully maintain the site, which is why it is a good idea to use the services of an experienced Magento developer on your site.

Our Magento developers are also SEO experts meaning that they can help you to prepare your site technically and check all elements of SEO in one full service package. This creates less hassle and less time spent on internal communications as all services come from a singular integrated team.

Contact us today to book your free consultation and discuss our Magento services and offerings.