SEO is always evolving as search engines like Google make updates, and 2024 has brought some new challenges and opportunities for Magento store owners.
The search landscape continues to shift toward natural language processing and a stronger emphasis on user experience.
Did you know that 9.5% of all websites created in the United States use Magento?
Those who can provide the most helpful, well-structured content and e-commerce SEO services will be best positioned in 2024 and beyond.
This guide will provide you with the most up-to-date strategies and best practices for optimizing your Magento site for search engine visibility in the new year.
Magento e-commerce SEO services refer to optimizing your Magento-powered website for search engines like Google. At its core, Magento SEO is about making your online store content more discoverable by searchers. This means ensuring your pages are accessible, indexable, and have descriptive titles, headings, copy, and metadata.
Magento ranks third with 8% of the distribution of eCommerce usage.
Some key aspects of effective Magento SEO include on-page elements like title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, internal linking structure, and fast page loading speeds. It’s also important to optimize off-page factors such as quality backlinks, citations, reviews and social signals.
Related: Top 8 Ways To Build E-commerce Backlinks In 2024
Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce SEO agency platforms available, with its flexible design and robust feature set appealing to many online merchants. However, its complexity comes with some trade-offs that are important to consider from an SEO perspective.
Search engines like Google use web crawlers to discover, access, and index the content on your site. The better they can crawl and index your pages, the more likely they are to understand what your site is about and properly display it in search results. Make sure to submit an XML sitemap through the Magento admin. This provides crawlers with a complete list of all your pages, so they know what to crawl.
With the rise of single-page applications (SPAs) powered by JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue, JavaScript rendering has become increasingly important for modern websites and e-commerce stores.
While Magento e-commerce SEO is good for both server-side and client-side rendering out of the box, optimizing JavaScript performance is key for the user experience and SEO.
In 2024 and beyond, having HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) on your Magento site is absolutely essential for search engine optimization. That’s because Google has been steadily downgrading sites that only use regular HTTP in search rankings over the past few years.
Approximately 85% of all websites use HTTPS as their default protocol.
This means that if your site is still using HTTP, it will be seen as less secure and trustworthy by search bots, and as a result, it will perform worse in search results.
Google can better understand the content and purpose of a page based on its URL structure. Complex URLs filled with session IDs and other unnecessary fluff make it difficult for bots to parse important keywords and metadata.
Setting up automatic redirects in Magento ensures your old page URLs still return relevant content to users and search engines. This prevents “404 not found” errors and protects your link profile.
There are a few different ways to set up redirects in Magento. The easiest is using the URL rewrite tool.
You can also use wildcards to redirect an entire folder or category.
Canonical URLs ensure search engines know which URL is the definitive version for a given page when there are multiple URLs that lead to the same content.
This helps avoid duplicate content penalties and ensures the search engines attribute the proper value and ranking to the right URL.
An XML sitemap provides bots with a complete list of all URLs on your site that are available to crawl, including product pages, category pages, CMS pages, and more. This allows search engines to discover all of your site’s content much more quickly and comprehensively.
The robots.txt file is located in the root directory of your Magento site and instructs search engine crawlers on which pages or directories they should or should not access on your site. Properly configured robots.txt files help search engines crawl only the most important content on your site, improving crawl budget allocation and the user experience.
Creating high-quality, engaging content should be a top priority for any Magento store.
According to estimates, Magento held a 30% market share in e-commerce in 2019.
Your content will get found in search results and keep customers on your site longer. But what exactly makes content “high-quality”? Here are a few tips:
Focus on value. Users want information and solutions, not sales pitches. Provide real value by answering questions your ideal customers might have in an informative and helpful way. Make sure content is well-researched, using credible sources.
For your Magento store, you’ll want to optimize each page’s meta title and description individually. Start by including your target keyword or phrase near the beginning of the title. Then, include the name of your store and end with a call-to-action like “Buy Now.” For descriptions, write them in a way that accurately represents what users will find on that page while enticing them to click through.
You can minimize HTTP requests by combining and compressing CSS and JavaScript files to improve load times. You’ll also want to optimize images, leverage a content delivery network (CDN), and perform full-page caching.
High-quality, well-optimized product images increase time on site, increase conversion rates, and reduce bounce rates. Take the time to choose your images thoughtfully. Select pictures that clearly show your products from different angles.
Test different descriptions by analyzing click-through and conversion rates. A/B test variations by changing the structure, benefits highlighted, or tone of voice. Focus on the fields, sections, and descriptions that drive the most traffic and sales. Continuously refine descriptions based on ongoing testing to maximize performance. These small e-commerce SEO service tweaks you make can significantly impact you, as descriptions are often the first impression readers get of a product.
Schema markup is a way for you to provide structured data about your web pages to search engines and other applications using Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD. This structured data helps search engines understand your content, display rich snippets in search results, and improve the overall user experience. Implementing schema on your Magento store pages can go a long way for your SEO.
When integrated properly, these tools provide invaluable insights into how users find and interact with your site.
The source of 53% of all website traffic is organic search.
Setting up this integration allows you to see which of your pages rank well in Google search results and how users behave once they land on those pages from the search engine. This level of insight is crucial for optimizing your on-site content and user experience.
While Magento is a powerful e-commerce SEO agency platform, some not-so-obvious SEO pitfalls can seriously impact your search visibility. Thankfully, most issues are easy to remedy once you know what to watch out for.
46% of customers who purchase on Magento websites do so via a mobile device.
Optimizing a Magento site for search engines requires time, strategy, and testing across platforms. While technical SEO is crucial, it’s also important to focus on building links, creating engaging content, and delivering an excellent user experience. Magento’s flexibility allows for customization that supports both e-commerce goals and SEO.