2019 Setting Up SEO in Magento 2.0

When it comes to eCommerce platforms, few are as SEO-friendly as Magento 2.0. Magento 1.0 was already easy to use for SEO, but M2 has improved the setup process dramatically, taking a lot of the work off your hands. Here are a few different settings and strategies you can immediately start using to make your Magento website or eCommerce store much better suited to work with Google and other search engines. Setting up SEO in Magento is easy just follow the instructions below.

Meta tags

Search engines use “crawlers” to explore and catalogue the pages of the site, helping them rank higher. Meta tags help them catalogue them more effectively and can be inserted in the titles and descriptions automatically through the Product Fields Auto-Generation function based on the product name alone, current use of the title tag is very important. A little adjustment of your own may be necessary to ensure the meta tags accurately reflect categories and other details, but it can save time. There are also SEO extensions available for Magento to help you with your SEO tasks.

Header settings

A keyword-rich, content-relevant title can offer some quick ranking influence. From the System page, go into Configuration, then General, then Design, then HTML Head. From here, you can put in your company name or keyword in the Title Suffix Field, replacing the “Magento Commerce” that usually appears in the page title.

Product Page Optimization

Under Stores, Configuration, Catalogue and Search Engine Optimisation, you can find the option to use not just the SKU of the product in the product page URL, but also category paths that help index the site and create more specific URLs that search engines tend to prefer.

With enough pages, you run the risk of having duplicate content, titles, and URLs, which can hurt your ranking. In the same section, you should enable canonical tagging to ensure pages are effectively separated. Lastly, make sure you have contextual alt text for product images by selecting the right image under the Images and Videos tab. Avoid using larger images as they tend to increase load time, which can diminish your SEO efforts, too.

Rich snippets

This new feature of Magento 2.0 allows you to select or curate certain details that can be added to how your site is shown to browsers in their search engine results. You can select things like star review ratings, prices for products, and other details so that they appear alongside the other search results. Not only does this offer the customer more information at a glance that can bring them all closer to clicking and converting, but it also helps crawlers catalogue the site more.

Your sitemap

We’ve mentioned the crawlers that explore every page of the website so they can catalogue it effectively to make it more search engine-friendly. There are 2 types of sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, and XML sitemaps. A sitemap is exactly as it sounds, a map of the site. However, it’s primarily for the benefit of the crawlers, helping them understand the site hierarchy and directing them to the pages you want to rank the most. Keep your sitemap simple and ensure it makes sense and the crawlers will make better use of it. These XML sitemap configuration options can easily be found in Magento 2.0’s settings. Images can be automatically added to it and you can even submit the sitemap’s URL to robots.txt, translating it into a form that crawlers can more efficiently read.

Robots.txt

Misspellings, bad grammar, and other text issues can cause a lot of damage to your SEO efforts. You might be spelling keywords wrong, ensuring that customers using relevant keywords are less likely to be directed to your website. You can easily check your Robots.txt for errors and configure it by using the “Search Engine Robots” option under the Design Section of the Catalog tab.

Homepage optimization

Use the metadata tab to create keyword-rich meta descriptions that can help your page rank more effectively about queries suited to your eCommerce site’s speciality. Don’t neglect to use the most valuable long-tail keywords in the “keywords” field, as well. You can also get rid of the default “Home Page” title by clicking the Page Information tab under the Home Page information. The brand name is a good start, but try to include a keyword-relevant phrase, as well. Just as you get rid of the default title, get rid of the default Alt text for your logo, and insert your relevant copy through the Header field under the HTML Head section.

Categories URLs

First, start by going through your category’s URLs, ensuring that they’re keyword-rich while erasing words like “the” and “a”. The URL doesn’t have to contain the full title of the page, just relevant details.

Suffixes

Magento 2.0 now allows you to add a suffix to your page sites. While it’s unclear how much this affects your SEO rankings, it’s better to be safe than sorry, using the Search Engine Optimization settings to add a keyword-relevant phrase. As with all keywords, keep it relevant to the content or page you’re editing.

Google Analytics

It’s important to not only implement the strategies that can help your SEO efforts but to measure just how effective they are. It’s all about testing the changes you make, learning what works, cutting what doesn’t, and making your SEO efforts more efficient as a result. Magento 2.0 works with Google Analytics much more effectively, now. The Google API tab has the option “Google Analytics”, which can help you quickly check your GA stats, as well as using experiment code to see how it affects the Analytics on the fly. It can save you a lot of time that might be spent bouncing from Magento to Google Analytics and back.

Load times

Besides compressing images or using smaller images, there are other ways you can reduce the load times of the site, make it faster, and thus make it more SEO-friendly. Magento 2.0 has caching systems that can be configured to ensure that it’s faster. What’s more, you can use it to inspect site load times and find any pages that are significantly slower than others and why, exactly, that’s the case.

Hopefully, with the tips and techniques above, you can make your Magento eCommerce site more SEO-friendly in no time, driving the traffic, clicks, and conversions that help make it a success.

Related articles by Click Through Digital