Quick SEO Tips for Magento Websites

Any e-commerce website faces stiff competition in the highly saturated marketplace today. In order to gain conversions, you must have customers find your company in the first place. One way that a website developer enhances the ability to find their brand is through managed SEO services – or search engine optimization. Managed SEO services and support provide the best results for your company, allowing web browsers to easily find your Magento store and brand.

What Is SEO?

SEO refers to the variety of ways that a website can increase its ranking in a search engine. Google and other engines base the results of a search on a few technical factors. The search engines have an archived collection of the internet’s website pages, and crawls them with bots to determine their content, origin, authenticity and relevance. When someone googles something, the search engine shows these results based on how the search relates to the content of each website.

Improving a Magento website’s SEO requires managed efforts to increase the Google ranking. SEO is a science unto itself, so there is no comprehensive way to handle the Google algorithm in every case. At the same time, there are a few consistent technical matters that affect most website pages, and impact how you can increase your Magento store’s ranking. A few factors that influence SEO ranking are:

• Keywords and keyword optimization
• Location – local services are almost always ranked higher
• Mobile support
• Readability – if a website is written by a bot, for example, Google ranks it lower
• Duplicate content – repeating material imposes a major results penalty

Improving your Magento website managed services requires following best practices when it comes to SEO. So how can an e-commerce brand increase its ranking?

Keyword Research

A top website developer will gather a short list of the most important terms relating to the company’s brand. For an e-commerce website that sells shoes, for example, a list of keywords is likely to include “boots,” “flats,” “sandals” and anything else relevant to the type of products sold. The best keyword lists have managed maintenance on a regular basis, especially to stay ahead of the crowd.

Location Services

Do you have a brick and mortar store in addition to your Magento e-commerce website? If so, you might benefit from registering with Google My Business in order to maximize your Magento store’s ongoing relevance to shoppers in your area. This will enhance your ranking with anyone googling relevant searches that are nearby.

Technical Support

Running a website requires regular maintenance, and SEO is no different in this case. A great deal of the behind the scenes maintenance or technical elements of your website have a major impact on how the search engines react to your data. Maximizing your ongoing SEO requires support for these factors and services in order to make the most of your Magento platform.

While you may be able to optimize aspects of your website such as domain and URL names, sometimes a developer may be better suited to provide the most optimization services for your needs. Magento is a diverse platform, and your Magento storefront needs to make use of the technical support available in order to rank higher.

There are a variety of backend services you or a developer agency can use to enhance your Magento website. Many of these services are highly technical in nature, and it may be worth bringing your developer onboard for managed ongoing enhancement. A few examples include:

1. Meta Tags and Headers

Magento does not automatically generate tags for your website, so this is a process you or your developer must complete separately. Tags in HTML indicate what a block of text represents, and this enhances your ongoing SEO by telling the search engines what piece of data is most important in your eyes. Your Magento website receives the most benefit by including indicative information in a high-value header, possibly including your most important keyword.

A related function is meta descriptions. These support clickthroughs by highlighting relevant information on the search engine results page, or SERP. You can improve your ongoing SEO by making your meta descriptions readable and relevant to searchers – though it will not improve your ranking on its own.

2. Remove Duplicate Content

One of the worst penalties you can receive is a duplicate content mark from the search engines. Your Magento store must be unique on every page, otherwise your SEO will decrease – even if you repeat content from yourself. A developer trick to support this is to canonicalize your duplicate pages, which tells the search engines that any linked page included in the canonical tag is based on the origin page, meaning it won’t mark it as plagiarized.

3. Managed Sitemap Support and Priorities

Your Magento page should include a meta sitemap for the search engine bots to follow. A sitemap is a literal roadmap for bots that allows them to understand where to go on your site, and which links go where.

What to Do Next

At Forix, we understand that not everyone is a top Magento support specialist. Running an e-commerce brand is a full-time business itself, let alone having to perform managed maintenance services on top of your branding. When you struggle with managed support, you may want to turn to an outside Magento agency to ease the burden of running your store’s technical backend.

When you choose a Magento support development firm, you want services that provide the maximum benefit to your SEO and company identity. Fortunately, Forix is a top Magento Developer, and will develop your website from an existing Magento store or assist you in upgrading to the Magento platform. We know that you need ongoing maintenance services and will provide continuous support to build your website now and into the future.

Want to hear more about SEO on the Magento platform? Reach out to the experts at Forix to answer any questions you have.