What makes Magento SEO Friendly?

SEO is a crucial factor in Google positioning, which is why eCommerce platforms like Magento have to be SEO friendly. But are they? To answer this question, we must first discover what features make a platform truly SEO friendly. After reading this article you will have known:

• what are Magento SEO services,
• which SEO ranking factors are solved by Magento SEO services,
• why is it important for eCommerce platforms to have SEO services,

One of the key elements taken into account when choosing an eCommerce platform is its impact on positioning. Most of the internet traffic comes from organic searches, and that is true for eCommerce as well. According to a SEMRUSH study, in which channels for 13 stores were estimated, eCommerce search channels are dominated by organic (40%) and direct searches (42%). Because of this we can easily see that on average SEO is crucial for the success of more than 80% of searches in eCommerce.

This requires eCommerce owners and managers to focus on SEO for their platforms. After all you don’t want to risk losing up to ⅘ of your potential and existing customers. And that is why Magento has included services that makes it a SEO friendly eCommerce platform.

Magento SEO services

When it comes to finding a SEO friendly eCommerce platform, we must consider if they have solutions for most important SEO ranking factors. These are as follows:

• Security and Accessibility,
• Page speed,
• Mobile friendliness,
• Optimized content,
• Technical SEO,
• User experience,
• Links,
• Social signals,
• Real business information.

Some of these factors cannot be provided simply by technology like eCommerce platforms. For example links referring to your content, optimization of said content and social signals are operations performed outside the framework. Links require marketing actions such as back-linking campaigns; social signals are part of social media marketing; optimization of content is a part of content marketing strategy; real business information is filled in Google My Business and Facebook. As for domain age eCommerce platforms cannot magically or superficially date your website. However the eCommerce platforms like Magento enable you to affect certain of the aforementioned factors, such as: security and accessibility, page speed, mobile friendliness, technical SEO, and URL. So, let’s see how Magento can help you become more SEO friendly.

SEO ranking factors: Security and Accessibility

Arguably the most important and maybe the least obvious factors of SEO friendliness are security and accessibility of the website. This means that when Google crawlers index your page they will take into account things like: your HTTPS protocol, the website structure, its clarity, etc. In eCommerce the latter two translate into clear and concise page navigation and search optimization. Among Magento’s SEO services are features to keep those as friendly for Google bots as possible. What are those features?

Catalog Navigation

This is one of the most frequently missed SEO optimizations in eCommerce. Because SEO is commonly understood as part of content marketing strategy, managers and owners may forget to perform so-called on-page SEO optimization. 

However, if you want your website to actually convert the customers actions into profits, you must ensure that your store navigation is on point. Magento helps to do that with a wide range of technical tools that can improve and personalise it. 

The term navigation relates to the way the customers can view and navigate throughout your website in order to find and consequently obtain your products or services. Store or Catalog Navigation includes things like the shop’s categories design, product photo and description, view modes, etc. In order to help make it more SEO friendly in Magento, the creators at Adobe provided following tools:

• Top Navigation,
• Pagination Controls,
• Product Listings,
• Breadcrumb Trail.

How Magento Catalog Navigation tools help SEO?

The Top Navigation tool allows you to configure the main categories menu of your store. In here you will probably want to include things such as the main departments of your offer. These can further be divided (root category model) into subcategories. 

The Pagination Controls tool enables you to provide the customer with choice in how they want to view the website and personalise it according to their expectations. It contains options such as: View As (format of view) , Sort By (order sorting changes), Show Per Page (number of elements shown on a single page) and Pagination Links (links to access other pages).

Product Listings allow for defining the way products are displayed and how many of them are visible on a single page.

Breadcrumb Trail is a tool that will ensure your users are not lost on your website. Thanks to the Breadcrumbs you can easily show the users where they are in relation to other subpages on your website.

HTTPS Protocol and SSL Certificates

When it comes to SEO for eCommerce websites, secure protocols are the basic essentials. Providing safety to the customers is not fulfilling their expectations but also is encouraged and awarded by Google in the form of better positioning. Magento provides ways to make sure all your websites (that work on the platform) are always defined as safe. The first one is the option to enable HTTPS.

In order to become more SEO friendly, Magento enables you to change the protocol from the administrator panel within the framework. This can be done after you have obtained an SSL certificate. Not coincidentally, Magento provides a Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate. Alternatively, you can use your own SSL/TLS certificate.

SEO ranking factors: Page Speed and Mobile Friendliness

Magento SEO services include features improving page speed and mobile friendliness, which are also important factors for SEO positioning. One of the most prominent and advanced features is the Magento PWA Studio, which allows you to build Progressive Web Apps with the Magento platform.

Magento PWA Studio

Why is building PWA considered SEO friendly? The answer is that Progressive Web Apps do not directly influence SEO rates, but they do affect its ranking factors of speed and mobile responsiveness. Originally PWA was developed in order to increase the quality of User Experience for mobile online users and become a rival to native applications. This resulted in higher loading speed and turn for RWD, which stands for responsive web design and, to put it in simple terms, is a way of designing web pages to scale better for mobile devices. This is crucial from the SEO perspective as Google’s policy of Mobile First has become one of the good practices for web app building requirements. Since that happened, Google has officially stated that its bots index content and establish SEO rankings on mobile versions of a website.

The Magento PWA Studio enables Magento developers to more smoothly develop Progressive Web Apps, therefore it accelerates the time and reduces costs and resources needed to achieve a more SEO friendly website.

SEO ranking factors: Technical SEO and URLs optimization

Technical SEO is an umbrella term that refers to many actions that optimize the technical part of your website. These include:

• Page titles,
• Meta descriptions,
• Image alt tags,
• URL addresses.

Among Magento SEO services you can find options that directly or indirectly help in making the aforementioned parts of technical SEO better. But why are these parts so important for the SEO?

Why is technical SEO important?

Page titles appear in the bookmark names in the browser, as well as links in the search results. There is a strong correlation between the content of keywords in the page titles and search results. It is particularly effective if you compose your page titles so that the keywords that you want to rank for are at its beginning. 

URL addresses relate to links shown in the browser bar that identifies a given article, product or category. The keywords contained in the URLs have significant impact for the SEO.

Meta descriptions appear in the browser under links in the search results. Although the descriptions themselves do not have such a big impact on the position of the page in the search engine, properly prepared, they can significantly increase the click-through rate of the website relative to the competition.

The alt tags added to the images are used to describe the content of images for search engines that are not able to recognise the contents of the images in a normal way. While fats are not very important for search results, they already have a significant impact in the case of searches with the option to find graphics. It is therefore important that the tags for photos be added automatically.

If Magento is SEO Friendly, what’s the next step?

If you think that Magento SEO services can improve your website or online store, or maybe you are not sure if it’s the right move to change eCommerce platform you can contact us. We have more than 10 years of experience in eCommerce implementations and consulting, which we will be happy to share with you.