Magento is one of the most popular open source e-commerce platforms in the world with an estimated 12% market share and over quarter of a million stores running the platform.
Although the platform was recently acquired by tech juggernaught Adobe, it still remains one of the most robust platforms for serious e-commerce players.
Recently, the Magento platform was upgraded to Magento 2 which boasted:
More flexible architecture: a complete re-write of the underlying architecture to bring state of the art commerce to the ever changing web
Updated Shopping Experiences: more personalisation options to put the customer at the heart of the shopping experience
Faster Page Speeds and Less Bloat: M2 has a faster load time across catalog and checkout pages with most of the platforms enhancements being focused on speed
Updated modular interface: this is great for flexibility as it allows you to build pages and features easier than ever before
With all of these changes, the platform became more robust however the migration from M1 to M2 has caused many people issues with their SEO performance. This is because of poor migration planning and execution that confuses Googlebot and negatively affects site rankings.
At Type A, we have managed multiple M1 to M2 migrations that have resulted in preserved, and in some cases increased, organic traffic to the clients site.
Many of our clients provide direct back end access to their Magento builds which allows our consultants to directly optimise their site without any client interaction needed.
As a result we are very familiar with man Magento extensions including popular SEO plugins such as
Magento SEO Suite Pro
Mageworx
Amasty
Wyomind
Weltpixel
As Magento is highly configurable, most of the SEO work should be pre-work carried out by your SEO consultant to decide on the critical SEO factors needed when building out more content on the site.
In particular, product taxonomy and URL structure are two of the key areas that need to be worked on in order to set a baseline for continued SEO work.
When creating the URL structure it's important to also pay attention to the template you use for generating meta data. By using a template structure for the title, meta description and H1 you can save lots of time and create a uniform out put across your site.
Another important out of the box Magento SEO optimisation is to fix the canonical tags across the site as Magento does not add self referencing canonicals by default. This is a particularly large issue with e-commerce as it may result in lots of duplicates in the search results.
The easiest way to fix this issue is to code a self referencing canonical directly into the page template however, if you are not a developer there are many canonical extensions available that will do this for you.
Another SEO consideration for Magento is around the pages that it automatically allows to be indexed. Out of the box, Magento indexes search pages - this is very bad for SEO and can sometimes lead to a large manual action as was experienced by the GIF search engine Giphy who had the majority of their organic traffic removed as their results were search pages. Google does not want to serve a user a search page, it wants to serve the user the answer they want.
To fix this simply add the noindex, follow robots directive to all search pages on your site. This should remove them from the index but still allow page rank to flow threw these pages.
Another tweak will be needed to any pages that produce parameterised results. We do not want URLs with parameters showing up in the search engines as it creates duplicates and bloat. The more useless duplicate pages you make Googlebot crawl, the less likely they are to find, crawl, index and rank your main pages. Just like you have a financial budget, you have a crawl budget with Google that can get used up on junk pages that Magento automatically creates. An experienced Magento SEO Agency will be able to build a smart strategy to build your ecommerce traffic and revenue regardless of your technical stack or Magento integrations.
Type A can help your business grow - request a proposal today to see how.
If you’re interested in becoming a client, email [email protected] and we’ll get back to you ASAP.