Launching an eCommerce store is the easiest part of the process. The hardest part is what comes next. And that is driving traffic to your store. And, the traffic needs to be targeted so they convert into sales. This is the part of the equation that causes many eCommerce store owners to fail.
If you have built your store on Magento, then the process is a bit easier as it has default features that help Google understand your site. Your job is made a lot easier when it comes to the SEO for your store. It does take work on your part, too, however.
In this article, we will go over some of the Magento SEO best practices that you can implement to rank high in the SERPs.
Get technical
Content is king, as they say. But, without a foundation built on a solid technical footing, your content will be held back. Too many sites could do much better given the content is very good, but the technical aspects are not properly taken care of.
You don’t have to be a programmer to take care of some of the backend stuff to make sure that Google understands what your site is about so it knows where to rank it in the SERPs.
The first thing to do is also one of the easiest. You should focus on creating short and easy to read URLs. This is for the products and the pages on your site. Avoid having categories in the URL and just the name of the post or product so a reader can distinguish what it is at first glance.
Google loves the metadata on a site and even on a site’s page so make sure you have a description. But, it isn’t just for Google. A reader will see the page title and description. The title should let the reader know exactly what the post is about. And the meta description should have language that persuades a reader to click through to the full article. CTR is a metric that Google uses to determine if the article is relevant to the search. A low CTR will cause the ranking to drop.
Crawling and indexing
The way a site gets ranked is that a search engine sends its spiders out to crawl sites. They “read” what the site is about by going through all of the pages. Once it feels like it has sussed out what the main keywords are and how good the content is then it will start ranking it to gain some metrics.
Here’s the problem with that, though. When a crawler hits your site it is going to read every page, category, and directory. It will end up encountering a lot of duplicate content and may get confused as to what is relevant and what isn’t. In the process, it will either decide to rank the wrong content that doesn’t help your site or drive traffic, or it won’t rank anything since it is confusing.
The way around this is to give the crawlers a set of instructions. This is in the form of a file called robots.txt. In this file, you will give it allow and disallow instructions so it knows which pages it should crawl but not index and which pages it should crawl and index. You can even have it not crawl certain pages. This is handy to avoid duplicate content issues.
This can take some time if you have never done it, so make sure to read up a few guides to ensure it is done correctly.
You can make it simple by also submitting an XML sitemap. This is literally like giving the crawler a map with directions so it knows where to go on your site. You should only include the indexable pages that you want the crawler to focus on. Luckily this is made even easier as it is part of Magento’s functionality.
Here is even the option to split your XML sitemap into separate files in case you have thousands of products in your store. If you have a lot of categories of products then splitting the sitemap into categories also works well.
Keep it fast
Your site’s page speed is hugely important when it comes to ranking on Google. The Magento platform is built for speed when it is set up correctly. You will need to make sure you have the right settings, but it doesn’t stop there.
The page speed is also influenced by your hosting so there are some other things outside of Magento that need to be configured.
Within Magento the first thing to concentrate on is the caching of the site. You don’t need to upload a separate plugin for this as it is built into the platform. Caching a page helps it load quickly since it doesn’t need to come all the way from the server.
When you start adding scripts and plugins, Javascript can slow down the load times of the pages. Configure your Magento by creating separate bundles for the Javascript so only what is needed for that page is loaded.
Then, try using image compression tools to make sure that your image files don’t slow down the page speed by taking too much time to load.
Set up HTTPS
An eCommerce store that is not encrypted, aka has https set up, is doomed to failure. Google does not want to serve up a suggested page that is not trustable with customer data. The security certificate is called https and is essential for peace of mind for a customer that is going to be handing over credit card details.
Processing payments without the security certificate can be intercepted and the customer data stolen. These settings can be configured on Magento so it all works correctly with every page coming up with the https in the URL so a customer knows the site can be trusted.
Once this is done then Google won’t hesitate to rank your site.
