➤ SEO Magento: Guide to Optimizing SEO (2024)

1. How compatible is Magento 2 with natural SEO?

Right out of the box, Magento 2 is by far one of the most user-friendly e-commerce platforms for search engines available today.

As mentioned before, this is due to its high levels of flexibility and unparalleled customization options, as well as a robust set of built-in SEO features, such as product meta tags, SEO-friendly URLs, title tag prefixes and suffixes, rich snippet extensions, the ability to edit the robots.txt file, and much more.

But while Magento is a powerful platform for SEO, if you want to get the most out of it and significantly increase your organic traffic, you need to set it up properly and follow some Magento SEO best practices.

In other words, by combining advanced on-page and off-page SEO techniques, as well as choosing the right theme and extensions, you can achieve the best rankings for your online store. You don't have to be an expert in SEO Magento to be well referenced.

2. Should I use a module or an extension for SEO on Magento 2?

While modules and extensions extend the features and functionality of Magento 2, there is a slight difference between them.

When you develop a custom extension for the Magento store, then that extension is called Module, which is a piece of code that extends Magento's functionality. In other words, an extension is a packaged module (System → Magento Connect → Package Extensions) that can be submitted on the Magento Marketplace.

You can therefore use these terms interchangeably and a Magento extension is similar to a WordPress plugin, which you are probably familiar with.

Here are a few examples of the best Magento 2 extensions for SEO:

MageWorx SEO Suite Ultimate and Amasty SEO Toolkit are two excellent tools for advanced On-Page Optimization (see below).
MageWorx Landing Pages to create high-conversion and search landing pages for promotions, vacation deals, new product launches, and more.
Layered Navigation by Aheadworks to equip your store with a neat and intuitive site navigation, allowing your customers to combine multiple options and search for items by various product attributes like color, price, star ratings, etc. It includes a number of SEO features, such as short, attractive URLs, and custom meta tags.

We'll list other useful Magento 2 extensions later in the guide. With these extensions added to your SEO arsenal, following the optimization tips and steps in this Magento SEO guide will be much easier.

3. How do you rank your Magento 2 site on Google?

Like any other website, SEO your Magento store on Google requires considerable effort, consistency and patience. As you will soon see, optimizing your website for search is a complex process.

But in essence, your store ranking:

On-page optimization : It's about improving the relevance of your site by correctly incorporating keywords into the various elements of your site, as well as creating useful content to satisfy your visitors.
Off-page optimization : To reinforce the authority and trustworthiness of your store in the eyes of Google and customers, off-page tactics such as creating backlinks and obtaining user-generated content are essential.
Technical optimization : These are advanced optimization techniques such as the use of structured data, image optimization, and code reduction.

Before we dive into the various improvements, tips, and techniques, let's take inspiration from some of the...

Major brands use Magento

Take a look at some of the biggest brands that use Magento for their e-commerce needs:

Knowing that all of these amazing and successful stores are powered by Magento, rest assured that your store already has a solid foundation for search engines and overall business success.

4. Basic Magento 2 SEO Tips

As we mentioned at the beginning, SEO is a broad subject and there are a lot of things you can do to improve your site's rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Before moving on to any of the advanced optimization techniques, make sure you understand the basic principles of On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Magento 2 On-Page Optimization

On-Page SEO is the practice of optimizing the internal pages of your website for better search engine rankings. It consists of several factors such as the quality of your code, textual and visual content, the hierarchy and navigation of your site, the overall user experience of your store, etc.

All of these things are totally under your control. Here's how to do it:

Optimize title tags and titles in Magento

The quality of your page title and meta description has a direct impact on your ranking and click-through rate (CTR). So, it's important to write page titles that satisfy search engine crawlers and human visitors.

Right now, Google only shows the first 50 to 60 characters of most page titles. Your titles should therefore not exceed 60 characters so that they are not truncated in the SERPs. Also, always try to include your main keywords at the beginning of the title, in case the title is truncated. Search engines also prefer the first few keywords.

First, change the default title and description for your store's home page. Go to Content → Design → Setup and search for Default Store View, click the Edit link after that to adjust the meta information on the home page of the default store view.

Enter the title and description of your brand here. You can put your brand name in the title suffix, so that it is added to each title tag and thus contributes to brand consistency.

To change product page titles, go to Admin → Products → Catalog, click Edit Product, and scroll down to Search Engine Optimization. Here, you can fill in the meta title and meta description (discussed in the next section).

Follow the same process for the Categories and Content pages. Create compelling page titles that people can't help but click on. A good title is easy to read, includes keywords, and encourages the user to take action.

Also, make sure that you have one and only one H1 tag on each page. Use H2, H3, etc. subtitles in an appropriate hierarchy and try to include your main keywords in all subtitles as well.

Optimize meta descriptions in Magento

Meta description refers to the short text displayed under the title and the URL in the SERPs. Like the title tag, your meta description should not only appeal to Google's crawlers using keywords, but it should also be compelling for real people to click on your store.

When writing meta descriptions, think about your value propositions. Do you offer free or fast shipping, or an offer or a sale?

For example, to encourage clicks to its online store, Bewakoof uses the meta description to indicate that delivery is free and that cash payment is possible.

You can change the meta description of your store's landing pages, products, categories, and content as described in the previous section.

Since writing meta descriptions for each page from scratch takes a lot of time, it's good to use an extension like SEO Meta Templates to create templates that you can quickly reuse and edit for all pages. For example, here is a meta description template for category pages:

“Are you looking for $categoryName? Check out our great collection of T-shirts from $amountOfProducts at $shopName!” , which can be changed to: “Are you looking for running pants? Check out our huge collection of 10,000 running pants at Jack's Tracks.”

And here's one for product pages:

“Buy a $ProductName starting at $ProductPrize. Delivery time: $shippingTime. Only at $shopName!” , which can be changed to: “Buy black sweatpants for as low as $10.99. Delivery time: 48 hours. Only at Jack's Tracks!”

Again, make sure your meta descriptions are short - less than 155 characters, otherwise they may be truncated in the SERPs. Try to include all relevant keywords in the description.

Creating an SEO friendly URL structure in Magento

SEO friendly Magento URLs are an important factor used to rank a website by search engines. In fact, according to Google, “the URL structure of a site should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a way that is most intelligible to humans.”

Unlike a URL like www.example/women/product35574.com, the URL www.example/women/product.com is much more readable for search engines and potential customers. Essentially, your URLs should be succinct, consistent, and lowercase.

So you need to rewrite URLs to make them user-friendly for search engines and users.

Go to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → General → Web. Here you can define URL structure parameters. In particular, pay attention to the URL Options and Search Engine Optimization sections.

If you want to remove the.html extension, go to Stores → Setup → Catalog → Search Engine Optimization. Then, click on the view of the store whose settings you want to change. Then, you'll see the fields labeled Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix.

Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix

Both have the value.html. If you remove this value from both fields, you'll get URLs that look like this:

http://example.com/category for the category page
http://example.com/product for product pages

Additionally, it's a good idea to use the top-level product URL without including the hierarchy of categories and subcategories in the URL itself. By default, your URL might look like this:

http://www.example.com/category/subcategory/product-url.html

This can create duplication issues in Magento, as multiple variations of the same products are on separate URLs. To avoid this issue, use the top-level product URL option, which results in a single version of the URL format that will be used in different categories for the same products.

As an example, let's say you have a black shirt in men's clothing. It falls into two categories:

Category 1: http://www.example.com/mens/shirts/
Category 2: http://www.example.com/mens/new-arrivals/

The top level product URL is:

http://www.example.com/mens

To get this product URL, go to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → Catalog → Search Engine Optimization → Use the category path for product URLs and set it to “Yes.”

Finally, remember to include keywords in the URL of all of your pages, while ensuring that the URLs are short and simple, avoiding fillers (such as “the” and “for”).

Optimize product content and copy in Magento

In addition to titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, it's important to optimize all of the content on your website — blog posts, product descriptions, an “about” page, etc. — for primary and secondary (or “semantic,” that is, related) keywords.

When it comes to content, regularly publishing long-form content optimized by keywords, such as how-to guides and feature articles, will go a long way in achieving optimal rankings on Google.

By sharing this type of useful content on a regular basis, you can target various keywords that have different intentions for users. In other words, some of your pages (like blog pages) may target information searches (for example, “what is a combination”), while other pages (like product pages) may target low search volume keywords that suggest a purchase intent (for example, “buy jumpsuits for women”).

Additionally, it's also important to establish appropriate internal links throughout your site. Within each piece of content, target informative keywords to create internal links to your product and category pages.

Setting up HTTPS in Magento

Displaying an SSL certificate on your store URL is absolutely critical to its success. This is especially true for online businesses, as potential customers will need to enter sensitive credit card information to complete the purchase. HTTPS ensures a secure environment for customers and builds trust.

So if you haven't already done so, you need to enable HTTPS in your Magento 2 store.

Configure HTTPS by going to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → General → Web.

Then expand the base (secure) URLs and change the Secure Base URL and Secure Base Link URL values to start with https. Finally, change the value of the Use Secure URLs on Storefront, Use Secure URLs in Admin, Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), and Upgrade Insecure Requests fields to “Yes.”

Magento 2 Off-Page Optimization

Off-page optimization is about actions you can take outside of your own website to improve your Google rankings. In essence, these activities will make your store more credible and more trustworthy in the eyes of Google.

Let's take a detailed look at the two pillars of off-page SEO that you need to focus on:

Create a backlinks strategy

Les Backlinks are external links from other websites that point to your site. Google considers the quantity, quality, and relevance of these links in its ranking algorithm. In fact, the number and quality of backlinks are one of the most influential factors that determine your store's ranking in the SERPs.

Google considers links to be signs of trust and authority. Without a proper backlink strategy, your site won't make it to the first page of the SERPs.

To create quality backlinks to your store, here's what you need to do on a regular basis:

Guest Blogging

The Guest blogging is a well-established and proven way to earn quality backlinks and improve your brand's visibility online.

Guest posting is the process of creating and providing quality content, such as blog posts and infographics, to authoritative websites and publications. In addition to improving rankings on Google, publishing guest articles also helps attract new audiences, gain their trust, and strengthen the intellectual leadership of your brand.

Raising awareness among bloggers

As you know, every niche (food, tech, fitness, travel, etc.) has countless blogs and some of them are highly followed. The content posted by these top bloggers is trusted by a huge community of like-minded people.

Blogger outreach is a technique where you partner with bloggers to create authentic, useful content that promotes your products or brand. In this way, you take advantage of their influence to increase the visibility of your brand.

It's about finding and identifying authoritative bloggers in your industry. Then, you present them in a personalized way and let them know what they stand to gain (free access to your products, sponsorship fees, etc.) and what you expect from them for your brand.) and what you expect from them for your brand. Finally, once the content is published, you and the blogger promote it on your respective channels, allowing your business (and the blogger) to reach new audiences.

The content that the blogger produces for your brand can take the form of a sponsored article, a review or article about a product, or even a competition. You can help the blogger create content that is winning for both parties while being loyal to the audience.

Promote “linkable” assets

Another great way to create backlinks to your website is to create and publish content with high shareable potential, known as linkable assets. These can be detailed how-to guides, entertaining articles, or interactive infographics that you post on your own website and then offer to high-authority blogs and media publications in your industry.

Not everyone is willing to republish and/or promote your content on their own website, but if your content is really high quality, you'll have no trouble finding a few (or even many) who are happy to do so.

Recovering links and building broken links

Linking isn't just about posting fresh content. Your brand may already be mentioned on several websites without being linked. Use tools like these to find these unrelated mentions, then contact these publishers and ask them to create a link to your site along with the mention. This technique is called link retrieval.

You can also search the web to find broken links on relevant niche sites. If you find a broken link for products/content similar to what you're offering, contact the site owner, let them know about the broken link, and ask them to replace it with a valid link to your site.

Since broken links have a negative impact on a site's SEO, this is a mutually beneficial activity for both parties: they can fix a broken link and you get a free backlink.

In general, when it comes to backlinks, the more the better. However, keep in mind that the quality of the links pointing to your website is just as crucial, if not more so. Thus, a handful of natural backlinks from high-authority websites far outweigh hundreds of links from low-authority or polluted sites.

Get brand mentions and social proof

Sure, backlinks generate SEO juice for your website, but even unlinked brand mentions in high-authority publications (like the Entrepreneur magazine) have substantial weight.

To find out which posts you need to target, you can analyze your competitors' reference domains and media mentions using a tool such as SEMrush Brand Monitoring, and adapt your marketing strategy accordingly in order to get press mentions for your own brand.

Furthermore, it is also essential to have a strong and authoritative presence on the various social media platforms. While this doesn't directly improve your search engine rankings, a solid social media presence means that your brand social profiles will also rank highly on Google, and those profiles ultimately bring more visitors to your store.

Social media helps to make your business more “human.” They allow you to have informal conversations with your followers, offer customer support, and drive brand engagement. These elements are critical to your store's online credibility and long-term success.

Leverage user-generated content (UGC) on social media by asking open-ended questions, organizing hashtag contests, encouraging honest product reviews, etc. All of this is strong social proof that motivates hesitant potential customers to take the plunge with your brand.

Install an extension like Yotpo Reviews to get more reviews from customers and highlight them on your window. With this extension, you can easily encourage customers to write reviews and engage with them in the form of community questions and answers.

In addition to increasing brand awareness and loyalty, all of these social signals contribute indirectly, but significantly, to the SEO of your website.

5. Magento 2 Advanced SEO Optimization

Now that you know all the basic home page improvements you can make and how to build your brand authority on the home page, it's time to kick things up a notch.

Advanced SEO refers to the more technical On-Page optimization you can do on your site to further improve the chances of being ranked at the top of the SERPs.

Let's dive in.

Optimizing page speed in Magento

Page load speed is not only an official Google ranking factor for searches on mobile and desktop, but it's also critical to the user experience. So it's simply unaffordable to have a store that loads slowly. In addition to hurting your rankings on Google, it will frustrate your potential customers and lead to a high bounce rate.

Put your site in the tool Google's PageSpeed Insights (or GTmetrix) to see how your Magento store is performing and what you can do to improve the speed of your store.

There are several things you can do to optimize page load speed in your Magento 2 store, including:

Magento image optimization

You should compress all images on your website so that the file size is as small as possible while maintaining high quality. Indeed, large product images result in a slow loading speed that affects rankings.

Ideally, the image file size should be under 100 kb. Also, use JPG (not PNG or GIF) for all product images, as it offers the best quality for the smallest file size. Use a free extension like Compress JPEG & PNG Images to automatically compress image file size while maintaining good quality.

Additionally, make sure that all of your images have a short, descriptive file name (black-shirt.jpg instead of something like 258492107.jpg) and descriptive alt tags that illustrate the nature of each image. This not only allows search engine crawlers to better understand your content, but also allows visually impaired visitors who use screen readers.

To add alt text, go to Product → Basic Settings → Images and Videos → Alt Text, then add your alt text in the field. Additionally, be sure to include keywords in both the file name and the alt text of all images.

Minimizing CSS and JS in Magento

Comments and spaces in your source code, i.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, may take up too much space and slow your site down. Minification compresses the code by removing extra characters such as spaces and comments, combining common styles, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.

The file size is thus reduced and lighter, which means that fewer bytes will be transmitted from your server to your customers' web browsers, which speeds up the loading of your site pages.

Change your store's JavaScript and CSS settings by going to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → Advanced → Developer.

Expand the JavaScript settings and change the value of Merge JavaScript Files, Enable JavaScript Bundling, and Shrink JavaScript Files to 'Yes'. Similarly, expand the CSS settings and change the values of Merge CSS Files and Minify CSS Files, and - if your theme allows it - the value of Use the CSS Critical Path to “Yes.”

Use a free extension like Minify HTML CSS JS to easily reduce your HTML code.

Use AMP in Magento

Today, more than half of your store's visitors (and conversions) come from mobile devices, and that number is growing every day. It is therefore essential to reduce the loading time of your store pages on mobile devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source framework developed by Google in collaboration with Twitter that enables faster, better experiences on mobile devices. It's a framework that allows you to create lightweight mobile experiences by simplifying HTML and following streamlined CSS rules.

For some searches, Google shows AMP content in a special location above the organic results. Thus, activating AMP may be the key to achieving optimal rankings in mobile search results.

The extension Accelerated Mobile Pages automatically generates Google AMP pages for home, category, and product pages. It makes it easy and quick to improve the speed of your website on mobile and to get lightning next to your list of mobile search results.

Setting up caching in Magento

Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, so that they can be accessed more quickly.

To enable the caching features built into Magento 2, go to System → Cache Management, then check all the boxes, select Enable from the dropdown list, then click Submit.

To enable full page caching, go to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → Advanced → System. Under “Full Page Caching,” you'll find the Caching Application field. By default, it's set to Built-in Cache, and you need to change it to Varnish Cache. In the Varnish configuration, fill in the details according to your host.

Setting up redirections in Magento

First, for your domain, you can have “example.com” or “www.example.com.” Both are good from an SEO perspective. Regardless of your choice, you should permanently redirect (301) from the non-preferred URL to the preferred URL.

Navigate to Stores → Configuration (under Settings) → General → Web.

Enter the base URL you selected in the Base URL and Base Link URL fields. Then, under Search Engine Optimization, set the Use Web Server Rewrites value to “Yes.” Finally, under URL Options, set the Auto-Redirect to Base URL value to Yes (301 Moved Permanently) and click Save. This ensures that the authority of incorrectly placed links is fully transmitted to the correct URL.

However, having broken links (“404 not found” error) on your website harms both SEO and the user experience. So when a page on your store becomes inactive — like when you remove a product or category — you need to redirect that page to another relevant page on your site, giving visitors (and crawlers) a new destination instead of a disappointing error.

Keep in mind that you shouldn't just redirect removed/inactive pages to the home page or to an unrelated page. Redirect only to a page that is related to the deleted page.

Magento 2 has an elegant built-in redirection tool that you can use to set up 301 redirects that permanently transfer SEO juice from the previous page. Go to Marketing and click on URL rewrites.

Click Add URL Rewrite. You can see Create a URL rewrite in the dropdown list. Leave the default setting (Custom).

Then, fill in the Store, Request Path, and Target Path fields. The Request Path is the original path and the Target Path is the new path that corresponds to the new web page. This will be the target URL for your redirect.

For the type of redirect, choose 301 and click Save.

Also note that whenever you change a URL after it goes live, remember to set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, otherwise you will generate a 404 error on your site.

Optimizing Robots.txt in Magento

Essentially, the Robots.txt file provides instructions for search engine crawlers about what pages to crawl and how to index your site.

For e-commerce sites, in particular, it is essential to use the robots.txt file to point search engine robots in the right direction and prevent them from accessing the wrong URLs in order to avoid duplicate content issues and to optimize the crawl budget.

Your Magento 2 store has some URLs that you don't want web crawlers to access, for example:

/customer/account/login/ - login pages.
Internal search results pages.
URLs containing the SID and PHPSESSID parameters.
Filter criteria such as price, color, and size.

So you need to make some changes to your SEO robots.txt file. Go to Content → Setup (under Design). Click Edit for the main website.

Then, scroll down to Search Engine Robots where you can define the content of your robots.txt file. Keep the default Robots as INDEX, FOLLOW, and enter your custom instructions in the text box provided after that.

The ban on the above URLs results in robots.txt instructions that look something like this:

User agent: *
User agent: *
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/
Disallow: /*? sid=disallow: /*? phpsessid=disallow: /*? price=
Disallow: /*&price=
Disallow: /*? color=
Disallow: /*&color=
Disallow: /*? size=
Disallow: /*&size=

To check if your changes have taken place, go to the site's home page in your browser and view the source.

Structured data in Magento

If you want your store listing to be highly visible in Google SERPs, you need to add structured data tags to your Magento 2 site.

In other words, if you provide Google with a data set in a specific, structured format (hence the name “structured data”), you can make your product pages stand out in the SERPs:

Such a list immediately catches the user's attention and is more likely to be clicked on than conventional results. Additionally, increased click-through rate (CTR) tells Google that your site deserves a better SERP ranking.

Simply put, structured data markup gives search engines more information about your store and its content. In the context of e-commerce, structured data (or schema markup) can provide Google with useful information about your products (such as price, availability, rating, number of reviews, etc.), which Google can then display in SERPs in the form of rich snippets.

There are now several structured data formats that you can use:

JSON-LD
RDFa
Microdata

However, the use of JSON-LD is recommended by Google because it is the easiest to add and update, and it is compatible with dynamic data.

For e-commerce sites like your Magento 2 store, the product diagram is the most priority structured data, as it helps attract potential customers to the SERPs by presenting valuable information such as reviews, price, and availability.

The easiest and most effective way to implement rich snippets for products on your website is to use an extension like Rich Snippets (free) or Rich Snippet Suite. You don't need any coding knowledge - setting up these extensions is extremely easy and you can start implementing structured data right away.

XML sitemaps in Magento

The XML sitemap is a file that contains all of the pages on your website, making it easier for search engine crawlers to see the full layout of your site and understand your content. Set up and submit your store's XML sitemap to Google via the Google Search Console can help you get indexed more quickly.

Magento 2 has built-in XML sitemap functionality. To set up the XML site map, go to Stores → Setup → Catalog → XML Site Map.

The settings for products, categories, and CMS pages are precisely configured, and the images are also present in the XML site map.

You can specify how often the XML sitemap should be refreshed under Generation Settings. Your sitemap should be updated as often as the content on your site changes, that is, daily, weekly, or monthly. By default, the Enabled field is set to “No.” Change it to “Yes” so that your XML sitemap is automatically regenerated.

Set the value in the Frequency field to Daily so that the XML sitemap is refreshed every day. That said, if the content on your website only changes once a week, choose to only refresh the XML sitemap once a week.

For example, if you set the start time to 03:00:00, it means that the XML sitemap is refreshed at 3 am. You should change this value to correspond to the quietest time of the day for your store, as refreshing the XML sitemap may have a temporary impact on the load speed of your Magento store.

Then, you can set the maximum number of URLs per file and the maximum file size. Keep the first setting as the default and set the second to 52428800, which equals 50MB.

Maximum No of URLs Per File and Maximum File Size

Finally, go to the Search Engine Submission Settings section and check if the value in the Enable Submission to Robots.txt field is set to “No.” If so, change it to “Yes” so that your robots.txt file refers to your XML sitemap.

Once the configuration is complete, the next step is to generate the XML sitemap. Navigate to Marketing → Site Map and select the orange Add a Site Map option at the top right.

Add the file name like sitemap.xml and then choose the path where it should be placed (usually in the root folder). Click the Save and Generate button and you're ready to go.

All that's left is to go to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap URL.

Optimizing the Magento 2 model for SEO

There are some really good templates, or themes, available on the Magento marketplace. However, not all of them are optimized for SEO. There are things that you need to explicitly take care of.

In general, optimizing your Magento 2 template or theme for SEO involves things that are already covered, such as reducing CSS/JS, caching, and compressing images. But there's more you can do, like:

Code cleaning:

In many themes, a lot of unused code is written, resulting in an unnecessarily large file size. Any additional JavaScript and CSS that you may have in your template files, move them to an external JavaScript and CSS file, and keep your templates clean and lightweight.

Thus, your visitors will be able to cache these files as soon as they are first loaded and search engines will not have to download them unnecessarily. You may need to hire a developer to help you clean up your model code.

Using a CDN:

A CDN is the abbreviation for Content Delivery Network. It is a technique that allows you to distribute the content of your website more quickly and more effectively to people based on their geographical location.

A CDN is essentially a network of servers (“points of presence” or POPs) spread across the globe. The CDN server that is closest to a user is called an “edge server.” When someone requests content from a website served by a CDN, they are connected to the nearest edge server, ensuring the fastest possible response times.

As a result, your content, such as product images, is cached on a CDN, so it is delivered from the edge server to your visitors much more quickly than if it had to be delivered from the origin.

If you are on Magento Commerce (Cloud), the CDN Fastly is included and its configuration is well documented. If not, you need to set up a CDN of your choice in Magento 2.

To do this, go to the Stores → Settings → Configuration section. Click on the web under the General tab.

Expand Base URLs and do the following:

Update the base URL for the static display files with the URL of the location on the CDN where the static display files are stored.
Update the base URL for the user's media files with the URL for the JavaScript files on the CDN.

Do the same for the Base URLs (Secure) section, then click Save Config. Besides Fastly, recommended cloud CDNs are Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront.

Creating CSS sprites:

CSS or image sprites can greatly optimize the loading speed of your page. An image sprite is a collection of images grouped into a single image and called by specific CSS classes so that the page does not send multiple requests to the server and therefore does not take much time to load.

Using image sprites saves bandwidth. In other words, CSS sprites reduce the total number of HTTP requests, can reduce the total size of images, and ultimately decrease the load time of your page. Again, you may need to seek help from a developer to use CSS sprites.

6. Magento 2 SEO Plugins

Here are some of the best SEO extensions (free and paid) for your Magento 2 store that we recommend:

Apart from these, an important extension that you need to install is Google Shopping by Magmodules. With hundreds of millions of people using Google to shop, the Google Shopping tab is a great place for e-commerce brands to list their products.

In the past, the Google Shopping tab only included paid ads, but Since April 2020, the free ads appear alongside paid ads in search results. In fact, the Magento platform is a Google e-commerce partner, and the aforementioned Magmodules extension is a turnkey solution for seamlessly connecting your Magento products to your Google Merchant account.

You don't need any coding or API knowledge, just a simple initial setup and you can get started. So be sure to take advantage of this extension to get your products listed on Google Shopping.

That said, it's critical to only install the extensions that you actually need. Obviously, you won't buy extensions that have nothing to do with your goals, but keep in mind that just because an extension is free doesn't mean you need to install it.

Blowing up your website with unnecessary modules and extensions will slow it down, which will have a negative impact on your SEO. So be sure to choose and install only the extensions that are needed.

7. Magento SEO Tips and Best Practices

Now that you're aware of the various on-page, off-page, and advanced SEO improvements you can make to your store, why not take advantage of a few proven Magento e-commerce SEO tips that work well for all platforms.

More specifically, let's look at some best practices you can implement to improve search engine visibility on your store's home, category, product, and blog pages.

Magento homepage SEO tips

The home page is your storefront, not only for potential customers but also for search engine robots. It is therefore just as important to optimize your homepage to be welcoming to search robots as it is to be attractive to customers. Here's how to do it:

Use only one H1 tag that includes the main keyword for your business.
Write a subtitle under the title and a meta description that describes your business with keyword-optimized copy.
Include all general and relevant keywords in the text on your home page.

SEO tips for Magento category pages

Category pages group products together and are valuable for SEO because you can target different types of keywords on these pages, which is not possible for individual product pages.

In addition to optimizing the titles and meta descriptions on your category pages, here are some things you can do to rank higher:

Create a unique copy for each page so there's no duplicate content.
Target long-tail keyword phrases for each product in the category.
Write a detailed description of the category to increase each page's uniqueness score. Avoid creating a burdensome wall of text by using bullets and putting keywords in bold.

SEO tips for Magento product pages

If you're able to get a first-page ranking for your product pages, you can be confident that you're going to see a significant increase in sales. Here are some best practices for optimizing your product pages:

Create a neat hierarchy by using titles, subtitles, and bullets correctly, making it easy for visitors and crawlers to navigate the page.
Write crisp, stunning product copy with your brand's unique tone.
Highlight your unique value proposition - what are the unique benefits and characteristics of using your products or brand that visitors cannot find elsewhere?
No jargon - write easy to read texts with short sentences and paragraphs.
Optimize your site for top, medium, and long-range keywords, but don't stuff them in an effort to rank. Readability remains the priority.
Anticipate and respond to any potential doubts that may arise in the minds of potential customers.
Include structured data on products and FAQS.

SEO Tips for Magento Blogging

Everyone knows that having an active business blog is important to improve SEO and online presence in general.

Follow the tips below to create an effective business blog that will help you position yourself and increase your traffic:

Strive to make each blog post useful and complete rather than producing lots of useless posts that no one wants to read or share.
Be consistent with your publishing schedule and aim for at least two long, high-quality articles every month.
In each article, target informative keywords to create internal links to your product and category pages.
Your content should educate, inform, entertain, and delight readers, providing a great user experience, which is critical for Google.
Ensure that your messages are factual and grammatically correct.
Include a call to action (AAC) at the end of each article to encourage the reader to take a desired action, such as viewing your product catalog or subscribing to your newsletter.

8. Common Magento SEO Problems and Solutions

With its numerous customization options and built-in functions, Magento 2 is undoubtedly one of the best e-commerce platforms for SEO. However, there are some SEO issues that need to be addressed on your end, for example:

Duplication caused by filters for configurable products

Magento allows you to create configurable products where you can provide multiple options like size, colors, and other customization options to users and for each option, you can set different prices. Each option selected is in fact a separate simple product with a unique SKU, making it easy to track inventory for each product variation.

However, the problem of duplicates arises because of these customization options and faceted navigation. In fact, the issue of duplicate content is a priority issue that frequently affects e-commerce sites.

Duplicate content is when the same or similar content exists on two distinct URLs on the same website. This creates a problem for search robots, as they are not always able to determine which of the two pages should be considered the “preferred” or canonical version. To help Google determine the primary version of the page you want indexed, use the rel="canonical” tag.

Simply put, a canonical URL is the most authoritative URL of the page you want search engines to see and is considered to be the most representative of a set of duplicate pages on your site.

In Magento 2, you can enable the use of canonical tags and avoid these duplicates due to faceted navigation by simply doing this:

Go to Stores → Settings → Configuration → Catalog → Search Engine Optimization → Use canonical link metatag for products → Select “Yes.” Do the same for categories, then click Save Configuration.

Thus, product and product category pages will have canonical URLs, which will help avoid duplicate content on your store.

You can also use an extension like Improved Layered Navigation which makes it easy to configure canonical URLs.

Pagination attributes

By default, Magento does not use the prev/next pagination attribute link on paginated pages to explain the relationship between these pages. Although Google says it no longer needs this attribute to make sense of a series of paginated pages, rankings on other search engines may be affected.

So use the SEO Toolkit for:

Add a rel="next/prev” link (next/previous)
Add the page number to the meta title
Add the page number to the meta description

Additionally, follow these pagination best practices:

Apply self-referencing canonics to paginated pages.
Do not apply robot noindex directives to paginated pages.
Don't disallow paginated pages in your robots.txt file.

/catalog/ type URLs can be indexed

Magento often generates product and category URLs that return to the original /catalog path, as well as duplicate URLs based on page titles.

It is essential to identify these URL rewrites and limit them in the robots.txt file so that they are not indexed.

URLs with a number

We've already talked about creating an SEO friendly URL structure in Magento 2. However, due to the possibility of filtering products and the site's internal search, URLs may be supplemented with numerical values, which is not good for SEO.

In Magento 2, URLs with query parameters are indexable as standard. For example, if you're on a category page and filter prices between $50 and $100, you'll be directed to a URL like https://example.com/category/?price=50-100.

This URL should not be indexed as it only shows a subset of the products in the category.

Likewise, if visitors also want to view the products in a category sorted from the cheapest to the most expensive, they will be directed to a URL like:

https://example.com/category/?price=50-00&product_list_order=price&product_list_dir=asc

This page shows the same products in a distinct order and provides no added value from an SEO perspective, so these pages should not be indexed either.

Additionally, you can insert query string parameters into your URLs to track information about a click, such as session IDs, languages, and other data. But query string parameters can lead to multiple variations of the same URL, all of which refer to the same content, which again isn't good for SEO.

To fix this URL parameter issue, you need to use an extension like SEO Suite Ultimate.

The site's search results are indexed

By default, internal search result pages in Magento 2 are indexable by robots, which is bad for SEO, as it can lead to an enormous number of low-quality pages being crawled and indexed, which can create indexing overhead and impact crawlability.

An effective way to address this issue is to add robots noindex, follow meta tags to all internal search results pages.

9. Migrating to Magento 2.X

Knowing that official support for Magento 1.x versions will end after 2020, if your store is running on an older version, it's high time to upgrade to Magento 2.x. As such, Magento 2 is better than previous versions in terms of site speed, more user-friendly admin interface, simplified two-step payment process, and greater mobile usability.

So, to remain competitive and ensure a high level of security for your website, you need to migrate as soon as possible.

Before you begin the actual migration process, consider doing the following:

Make a complete backup of the Magento 1 store, including all files, folders, and the database.
Remove outdated and unnecessary data from the database. This includes newspapers, recently viewed products, compared products, etc.
Create a clone of your Magento 1 store. Do not use the real store for the migration process. Migrate data from the cloned Magento 1 store database.
Analyze your store. Review what should be retained or removed from the new Magento 2 site.
Check if your current theme (s), extensions, and custom code are compatible with Magento 2.

If the the migration process is well documented, Maintaining your store's ranking on Google during the upgrade can be a challenge.

You will most likely see a temporary drop in rankings, even if everything goes off without a hitch. Indeed, every time Google sees a significant change, it takes a step back to reindex and reanalyze everything. So, whether it's a migration or a domain change, you'll see a temporary drop in rankings.

That said, you can significantly reduce the time it takes to reach your rankings by taking the following steps:

Submit a new site map via Google Search Console as soon as you launch the new version of your store.
Analyze changes to the website's robots.txt file and to the XML sitemap generation to ensure that unnecessary pages aren't indexed and don't hinder the effectiveness of the crawl. Also, make sure you're not blocking any JavaScript or media files.
Make sure your XML sitemap is updated and contains the entire structure of your new website.
Identify and fix all 404 errors on your site. Navigate to the Index → Coverage section in Google Search Console and be sure to correct them before the migration process.
Ensure that you have properly set canonical tags for all static pages on your website. Canonical tags make it possible to transmit the link juice to the right pages in case of duplicate pages.
Don't change the meta tags, as they could impact your performance in the SERPs.

Consider using an extension like Migrate From M1 to ensure a transparent and secure migration process. This extension is easy to use and migrates data while ensuring 100% uptime for your store, as well as 24/7 support.

10. Magento SEO checklist

Phew! There's so much you can do to improve your store's search engine rankings. If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the SEO Tips and tasks at hand, here's an SEO checklist that you can check off as you progress:

On-Page SEO

Use only one H1 tag on each page
Write compelling page titles (around 60 characters) and meta descriptions (under 155 characters).
Create a URL structure adapted to SEO
Define alt text and descriptive file names for all images
Publish long, useful content such as how-to guides, feature articles, and blog posts.
Optimize all product content and copy for the right keywords.
Setting up HTTPS in Magento

Off-Page SEO

Create backlinks to your store by publishing articles, contacting bloggers, retrieving links, and more.
Obtain brand mentions in authoritative publications and social proof in terms of customer reviews, as well as a better social media presence.

Advanced SEO

Make sure your site is properly indexed
Create and submit the XML sitemap to Google
Eliminate duplicate content using canonical tags
Optimize the robots.txt file
Incorporate structured data for rich snippets
Set up 301 redirects if needed
Ensure fast page loads by optimizing images, reducing CSS and JS, using AMP, and caching data.
Optimize themes

This list summarizes everything that was covered in the Magento SEO guide. Even if not all points are useful for your business, there is nothing wrong with being better informed.

11. Final word

And that's it! That covers just about everything you need to get on track to rank your Magento store on the first page of Google.

Start with basic On-Page Optimization techniques, be consistent with Off-Page Optimization (backlink building, media mentions, and social proof), then ramp up a gear using structured data, AMP, caching, and other advanced techniques like Magento's multi-lingual SEO.

As you can see, with Magento, things are going to get a bit technical, and of course it will take a few months to see the fruits of your labor, but all that effort will be worth it in terms of rankings, authority, visitors, leads, and ultimately sales!

Need help with your SEO on Magento? Find a freelancer on Fiverr to take care of your store's visibility in search engines so that you can focus on other important aspects of growing your e-commerce business.

If you want to explore other e-commerce store options, you can check out our comprehensive guides on Shopify SEO, BigCommerce and WooCommerce.

Related reading - Squarespace SEO Guide, Webflow SEO Guide