What’s the next step after setting up a Magento store?
Optimizing it with the best hacks to improve rankings in SERPs, of course. According to PipeCandy, Magento takes second place in market share, with 29.89% of top ecommerce platforms around the globe.
From this statistic, we can conclude that Magento is one of the most popular platforms in the market. And it’s easy to see why. For one thing, it is feature-rich and provides you with the flexibility to customize your ecommerce store with SEO friendly.
That said, it takes some effort to grow the web presence of your ecommerce store powered by Magento. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a large retailer looking to enhance your store’s SERPs ranking, you need to understand what optimization hacks work for you.
So let’s have a look at seven Magento store optimization hacks for great SERP rankings.
Hack 1: Optimize your Magento Store with SEO-Friendly URL Structure
The primary keyword tells search engines what the page and content are all about. That’s why the URL of the pages should contain the primary keyword (if possible). This helps search engines rank your page in SERPs, and offer more information about products to the users.
As a best practice, Magento recommends you implement the following URL structure for category/subcategory and product pages on your store.
- The URL structure for category page:
example.com/categoryname/
For example, the image below perfectly illustrates this URL structure for the category page.
- The URL structure for subcategory page: example.com/categoryname/subcategoryname/
Here is an example of a subcategory URL structure containing a category and subcategory name.
- The URL structure for product page:
example.com/category-subcategory/product-name/However, if your store has a large product inventory, then you can implement a flat URL structure such as example.com/product-name/
The image perfectly illustrates the flat URL structure for the product page. You can further optimize the URL structure by going into the Stores>Configuration>Catalog>Search Engine Optimization setting.
Hack 2: Optimize Magento Site with Unique Content
It might seem the easy way out, but don’t make the mistake of using duplicate content for the same products! Also, never copy content from the manufacturer’s website and paste it at your website. You won’t get any benefit from it; in fact, it will likely harm the SERP rankings of your product pages. Search engines may even penalize and stop indexing your website if they find duplicate content. So always write up new and unique content for your product pages.
If writing’s not your forte, you can outsource content production services. Just make sure that the content is compelling enough to entice users to visit your page and make a purchase.
Duplicate content issues can also arise through poor product filtering, pagination, product variations, or the same product allotted in multiple categories. To get rid of this problem, follow Stores>Configuration>Catalog>Search Engine Optimization. Enable the canonical meta tags for both category and product pages as shown in the image below.
Hack 3: Optimize Your Magento Store with Meta Tags
Meta tags not only significantly affect the SERP ranking, but also impact the search engine CTR to the store pages.
That’s why you need to put in the effort to write up and optimize the page with relevant meta titles and descriptions. You can easily learn how to create effective meta tags. Web analytic and SEO tools like Moz recommend having 50 to 60 characters for meta titles, and 100 to 160 characters for meta descriptions.
Best practices entail including primary keywords in both types of meta tags. If possible, include a secondary keyword in the meta description to optimize it further. But there’s no need to force it – the secondary keyword should be used organically as stuffing keywords would adversely impact the SERP rankings.
Hack 4: Optimize Your Magento Store’s Page Load Speed
As per a Kissmetric’s website performance study, 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, 79% of dissatisfied customers won’t return to a site with poor page load speed.
So how to speed up Magento 2 Site? For a start, you can compress media files like images, videos, and GIFs. You should also implement lazy load, enable the cache management system, merge and minify JS and CSS files, and if possible, switch to a better hosting provider.
For a better caching mechanism, Implementation of Magento varnish cache system is suggested.
To merge and minify JS and CSS files go to Stores>Configuration>Advanced>Developer. Here you will be able to merge and minify CSS and JS files, as shown in the image below.
You can also use Amazon’s server to host all your media files and downloadable files with the help of Amazon S3 extension for Magento 2 to further optimize your store’s speed.
Search engines like Google factor in the page load speed of your Magento store to decide SERP ranking. Magento also recommends fixing code issues to improve the page load speed further.
Hack 5: Optimize Magento Website with Schema and Rich Snippets
Schema and rich snippets are a form of structured data in code that can be attached to the product pages to show additional information in SERPs. These allow you to display details such as product price, reviews, ratings, availability, and images in the search result pages to appeal to potential customers.
In the image below, you’ll notice how the highlighted portion contains information relevant to customers like products rating and pricing.
Rich results like these, which enhance customers’ shopping experience, will significantly improve the chances of the users clicking their way to your store pages. This indicates to search engines that your page holds more value compared to the competition. So ultimately, rich snippets improve the ranking of pages.
You can also simply opt for a Magento performance optimization service that does the job for you.
Hack 6: Optimize Pages for Long-Tail Keywords
As you may have noticed during your own searches, search engines are becoming more and more specific regarding just what results they show in SERPs.
Long-tail keywords offer more information to trigger search engines into showing the most relevant content. The length of these keywords is no less than three words and is often more than five. They also include short keywords you want to target.
You can use long-tail keywords to optimize your product, category, or CMS pages. Suppose a customer wants to purchase a pair of blue color sports shoes of a specific brand. In this case, visitors know what they are seeking. Their search query would look something like this: “brand-name sports shoes in blue.”
Research long-tail keywords customers may use to find products you are selling. Include those keywords in places like product descriptions to optimize them for those keywords. This indicates to search engines that your pages are relevant results for queries containing those long-tail keywords.
Customers are more likely to purchase an item if it meets their needs.
Hack 7: Optimize Your Magento Site Further with the Blog Page
A page devoted just to blogs is another great hack to attract more traffic, expand the reach of your website, and attract new customers. You can also target keywords you haven’t had the opportunity to use on your product pages to bring in more traffic.
A blog page exposes your business to more customers and increases sales. As per research, ecommerce websites with blog pages have 434% more pages indexed than websites with no blog pages – that means search engines reward these websites with recognition.
Wrapping Up
This article highlights seven great Magento store optimization hacks to improve the SERP ranking of your store pages. Implement them right away to see improvements in your rankings.
That said, Magento store optimization is not a day’s work. It is a continuous process that requires constant effort from your end.
So make sure to regularly check your Magento store for performance-related errors. Analyze your competitors as well, and keep a close eye on the search engine algorithms. Your SEO game can only get to the next level when you exercise constant vigilance in your Magento store.
Author Bio
Gaurav Jain is a co-founder slash computer engineer with extensive marketing skills, who spends his time handling all kinds of customer queries. Noted for his helpful nature, he has a reputation for sprinkling some delight into his customers’ day When he isn’t working, you’ll find Gaurav reading or traveling. He is also a speaker at Meet Magento India.
Abdur Rahman
Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
