Future-proofed SEO for Magento stores
About me Working in SEO / digital for over 8 years (in-house, agency + consulting) Working with Magento for the last 5 years Specialise in Magento SEO (mostly consulting & auditing) Work as part of a consulting group Mostly work on audits (SEO, analytics, paid search, performance optimisation and Magento code audits)
Overview 1.0 Getting the basics right 2.0 Magento configuration & technical SEO 3.0 Future-proofing your visibility
Getting the basics right The fundamentals of on-page SEO
Build SEO into your page templates Lots of reviews Reviews based on customerfocused metrics as well as just written content Useful / relevant reviews get more visibility Good product content Product videos and lots of images Q&A content from Facebook
Be more strategic with UGC Product reviews are important for injecting unique content Split test your emails, timing and incentives to improve CR% Try and build relevancy and usefulness into your algorithm Integrate with your ESP and add sales data to monitor CR% and deliverability metrics Give someone ownership Good use of space means more review content
Better site structure / architecture Try and build out high quality pages for secondary queries Complete a keyword discovery Add in rankings & landing page data Complete a gap analysis to identify pages required Create new pages (make sure you add content, otherwise you re just creating lots of thin pages)
Product-level duplicate content Canonicalise very close variants of products Have a second feed for resellers and affiliates (if viable) Don t let affiliates and resellers use your review content Try to avoid using supplier copy Avoid using blanket bits of copy on all products
Be careful with your robots.txt file Avoid the standard robots.txt that everyone uses Blocking dynamic pages with robots.txt can impact products that are hidden behind merchandised products Don t block your CSS and JS files Use the robots.txt strategically for crawl budget
Utilise rich snippets Easy opportunity to generate more clicks from existing rankings I usually recommend price, rating and search as a minimum for ecommerce sites
Magento Config & Technical Getting the setup right
Get your canonical implementation right Not on CMS pages and homepage by default Make sure you re not self-referencing things like tracking URLs Canonical tag will only work for close variants If it s not right, Google won t listen Canonical to configurable product if you re using both
Keep an eye on URL rewrites Can cause frequent URL changes, especially on proudtcs (mainly appending numbers) Can cause issues with redirect loops and crawlability CSV uploads can over-ride URL key Older /catalog/ URLs can get indexed because of rewrite issues
Be vigilant with indexing of low quality pages Layered navigation pages Search pages Pagination Session IDs Sort / order pages General site filters Duplicate /review/ pages
Watch out for duplication from secure pages Https variants of pages often get indexed This can be a very annoying duplicate content issue Two easy ways to resolve this: Canonicalise https pages to http equivalent (depending on size of site) Apply a redirect with exclusions for pages that need to be secure
A focus on layered navigation These pages cannot be indexed Don t listen to people who say they re valuable for long-tail Replace filters with volume with static pages Don t be fooled by search friendly URLs
Split out your XML sitemaps More necessary for larger websites Gives you more visibility over issues (for different types of pages) I usually suggest at least product and category page sitemaps You could split out by categories Create an index sitemap if you do this
International SEO with Magento Use the hreflang tag Create separate Webmaster Tools accounts Localise content where possible Avoid using IP redirects (they still cause issues!)
Other things to think about Invest in performance! Google say it impacts rankings More importantly (in my mind) for crawl efficiency Think about mobile early Either do responsive or do your mobile site properly
Future-proofing your visibility
Be pro-active with link removal
Disavow as your profile improves
Focus on smaller numbers of top tier coverage
Crawl your site regularly and after releases
Process for discontinued products / redundant pages
Make sure your site passes Google s mobile test
Invest in data! (rankings, visibility, competitors, mobile etc)
Feel free to ask me questions Twitter: @paulnrogers Email: paulrogers21@gmail.com https://paulnrogers.com