Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a very important role when it comes to powering your Magento website for maximum visibility and footfalls.

As a matter of fact, SEO can make or break a website. It’s especially critical for eCommerce stores whose success depends on attracting, delighting, converting and retaining customers.

SEO focuses on improving your online visibility resulting in increased revenue and business growth. The idea is to rank your website on top for any search term/s that your visitors use on search engines like Google.

Ideally, your website should be within the top three positions to significantly increase traffic to your store.

Research has shown that, on average, websites ranking on Page 1 of a Google keyword search achieve an average click-through rate (CTR) of 71.3%. However, Page 2 and Page 3 results combined only get a CTR of 5.59%.

Optimizing eCommerce websites is more complicated than doing SEO for a typical website that doesn’t have hundreds of product listings.

Hence, it’s even more important to follow best practices to ensure that your site is performing at an optimum level.

If you own a Magento store, you’ll need to factor in additional implementation steps to optimize your store for SEO.

6 Tips to optimize your website as a Magento SEO expert

1. AUDIT TO BUILD A SMART PLAN

A website audit covering the domain, structured data, duplicate content, title tags, meta descriptions etc., generates a lot of actionable information.

Document all your findings in Google Sheets or Excel document so you can make your own inferences and come back to it anytime you want. Here’s a checklist of what you need to cover in your audit.

• Specified Domain: It’s critical that search engines only crawl and index the ‘www’ or ‘non-www’ version of your website. So have one specific domain.
• Organized Data: Another factor you want to assess is your website’s use of structured data. These include product reviews, social media links, and product listings.
• Content Duplicacy: This can be resolved by enabling a canonical link meta tag for categories, as well as modifying your Google Webmaster settings for URL parameters.
• Sitemap: To maximize the technical side of SEO strategy, include an XML sitemap. Magento makes this easy as it has a tool for generating an XML sitemap, which you can submit to Google.
• Title Tags: One of the essential parts of your Magento SEO checklist is reviewing the title tags of your web pages. Look for unique, yet short title tags that tell users what your web page is all about.
• Meta Descriptions: Review your meta descriptions along with your title tags. Though they don’t influence your ranking, they do provide additional information about your web page or product.
• Page Speed: Slow page loading time is one of the main reasons why users keep away from a website. Aim for a speed of 3 seconds or less within which your website should load.

2. RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS

One of the core steps of Magento SEO is keyword research.

By spending the time on keyword research, you can optimize your product pages to drive valuable traffic from shoppers looking to purchase your product.

The best way to start your keyword research is by having a look towards your target audience.

On the basis of your market, the audience may have an active community on Reddit. Or they may post questions related to your product on Quora.

3. INVESTIGATE YOUR COMPETITORS

SEO focuses on assessing your competitors. Create a list of competitor websites and product pages. Focus on their  keywords and on what websites are redirecting shoppers to them.

To create an original and unique SEO strategy for your Magento website, monitoring the performance of your competitors should be part your checklist.

Their decisions can also influence yours, such as targeting a certain keyword or refurbishing a homepage layout.

4. REVAMP YOUR PRODUCT CATEGORIES

With the analysis of your competitors, keyword research, and website audit completion the next step is to start revising your product categories. This is a crucial step in Magento SEO.

They’re valuable to users, as well as search engines. here are some of the focus areas:

• Name: Create a product category name which is descriptive and short.
• Description: Write a product description that’s informative and helpful. Include keywords targeting the product category.
• Title Tag: Craft a title tag that’s 60 characters or less beginning with the primary keyword. Depending on the settings of Magento, the title tag may also include your brand name at the end.
• Meta description: Craft a meta description that’s 160 characters or less. Include the keyword you’re targeting in your meta description.

In some instances, you my have to revamp the structure of your website by including category pages, as well as sub-category pages. This will help provide search engines and users more information about your products.

5. REVISE YOUR PRODUCT PAGES

Depending on your past investment in SEO, there may be a need for editing a few older pages or revamp an entire product line-up. Magento’s SEO can improve your product pages with the following steps:

• Choosing a descriptive product name: Create a product name that’s helpful for your users. Tell them what your product is and include your keyword.
• Writing a unique description: Craft your full and short product description. Write descriptions that are unique, relevant, concise and informative. For your full description, provide as much detail as possible but your short descriptions should highlight only the key features.
• A convincing title tag and meta description: For your product title tag and meta description, follow the same standards for product category pages. Include your keywords and provide users with compelling calls-to-action (CTA) that encourages them to click.
• Develop a crisp URL: The URL of your product pages should contain several pieces of information. Ideally, this should include the product name, manufacturer, and model number.
• Compile of high-quality media: It’s essential to include images on your product pages. It’s even better to add images and video which provide users with their perspective, as they highlight your product’s features, uses, and size.
• Include reviews: A review serves as a powerful trust signal to users. Therefore, it is important to incorporate shopper reviews on your product pages. However, ensure that the reviews are for the featured product.
• Integrate social sharing: Encourage users to share their most recent purchase, as well as your brand, with their followers. Including these share buttons on your product pages is a must-have feature.

As Magento SEO strategy drives results, you may notice several products can go out of stock.

If this happens, there is no need to remove the page from your website. Instead, update the page with a notification about the product’s status and it will direct users to similar products.

6. OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGE SPEED

It’s critical to optimize the speed of your website. This is because maintaining a website that loads in 3-5 seconds can lead to 70 percent longer user sessions, as well as a 35 percent decrease in bounce rate.

In fact, improving your website loading time by a single second can increase conversions by 7 percent.

Overall, a good SEO strategy will grow your business by increasing the traffic to your website. This will ultimately result in generating good revenue.

So are you ready to improve your website SEO with Magento? We have you covered. Get in touch with us whatarage.

For further information on Magento and eCommerce, check out LetsTalkMagento.