Running a successful Magento e-commerce business requires people to be able to find your store – and that’s where SEO comes into play.
If people can’t find your store, how do you hope to make any money?
Of course, if you want to drive traffic to your e-commerce store, you can elicit the help of paid ads.
The issue with this though, it’s a pay to play system. Meaning, you only generate traffic when you’re paying.
Imagine, instead, if you could keep people coming to your site, without having to pay per user?
That world is well within your reach.
In this post, you’re going to learn a number of Magento SEO tips like:
- Why you need to create a series of useful content
- The importance of optimizing your images, videos and product descriptions
- How and why to create a sitemap and robots.txt file
- The benefit of generating links back to your e-commerce site.
Let’s go!
Create rich, useful content for search engines and people
When using the internet to find the solution to their problems, or seek out new product ideas, they often look to search engines.
Although your e-commerce site will be rich in product pages, you should also think about creating a blog to help others find you.
Let’s suppose you wanted to sell coffee online.
If we landed on this product listing, the questions we might ask ourselves are: what’s the difference between Chemex and Aeropress?
If you’re a seasoned coffee lover, this will make immediate sense to you. But if you’re not? Well, you’re going to be left confused.
That’s why it’s important to create a wealth of useful content that the search engines will love.
If we do a search for Chemex vs Aeropress,
There are over a million results. If you plan to sell coffee, it could be useful to create content around this.
This technique works for any industry. The type of content and topic of content you create will largely depend on your own target audience and who you’re hoping to attract.
Not only will creating useful content help your customers and potential customers, but it will help search engines better understand the type of website you’re operating and boost your positions on search engines.
And while it’s a great idea to create content, you need to be very careful about duplicate content.
Google will penalize your site if it notices you’ve copied your content from another source, or even your own website.
Instead, try to keep all your content original and if you do need to reference another source, be sure to add relevant citations.
Optimize product images and videos
If you’re running an e-commerce store, you want to make use of various product photography and videography.
Your customers aren’t able to touch products or even see them in person when they shop online so make sure that your product images are not only high quality but optimized for search engines too.
When you upload a product photo to your site, whether you know about it or not, there is an image meta tag (alt description).
This meta tag tells search engines what the image is of. It’s also used for when a visually impaired person needs to identify what an image is of.
You can actually see what people have used as their alt tags quite easily.
Simply find the image you want to look for, right click and then click Inspect.
As you can see, the image tag for this photo is “pink speckle pattern mug” – which accurately describes the image.
With your image tags, you want to be as descriptive as possible to increase the chance of someone finding you on a search engine.
Optimize URLs
Your URLs are important if you want people to be able to find exactly what they’re looking for straight from the search engine.
Let’s say I’m looking for a waterproof jacket. I enter the search phrase into Google and the following comes up.
Note the URL structure here. They’ve used /jackets/waterproof-jackets to help people know they’ve come to the right place and also to help search engines know the content on the site is relevant to the search query. Imagine, in contrast, if the URL was costwoldoutdoor.com/gvjgfg? Do you think users or Google would be able to guess the content on that page? No.
When it comes to SEO, your URLs are crucial in ensuring your products and websites can be found. So make sure that your URLs are descriptive. This goes for your category pages too.
Often, if you list similar items (from the same category), you’ll attract a bigger pool of potential customers from searches where people are not sure about the exact product they need.
Optimize product listing
How you describe your products on each listing page is as important for the user as it is for the search engine.
Search engines are able to crawl the text that appears on each listing and can pick out keywords your potential customers might be searching for.
Your product listing should be two things:
- Descriptive
- Informative
If you pick just one, you’ll do yourself a disservice.
You want your product listing to be descriptive as this will help convince consumers to buy. After all, if you cant show someone why they need your product, you’re going to struggle.
At the same time, though, your product listing should be informative. Meaning you should highlight the key features that make your product different. These features will often be keyword rich.
What this means is they’re words and phrases your customers might use to find the products they’re looking for.
Method home is a great example of good product listings getting the balance right between descriptive and informative.
The image above shows the product description. Note, even though it’s a chemical cleaning product, they don’t focus on the chemical aspects in their description.
Instead, they tell a story and connect with potential consumers.
This doesn’t mean that they don’t think about being informative. Quite the opposite.
Instead, they have a section at the bottom of the page that outlines the technical aspects of the product for anyone who is interested.
Links links links
One the best ways to improve your ranking and show search engines that the content on your site is worth looking at is to think about how you generate and optimize for links.
Links are when someone else links back to your site from their site. A link from a high authority site will have more weight than a link from a low authority site.
Links also help Google crawler navigate its way through the internet. And a site that has loads of links pointing towards it? Well, it tells Google that this site or page is worth taking note of.
Final thoughts
Before you begin exploring these Magento SEO strategies at hand needed to get your site ranking in the coveted top positions, it’s important to make sure that you’re using the latest version of Magento.
Not only will this include any recent SEO support features, but it will ensure your ranking is as high as it can be.
You now have an idea as to the type of tasks you should think about when it comes to optimizing your Magento store for SEO. Try these Magento SEO tips and let us know how it went!
Although at first, the idea of SEO might seem difficult or perhaps too technical, in reality, once you get it right, it’ll put you in a brilliant position.
