5 SEO tips for optimising your Magento store

Since its inception in 2008, Magento has grown in popularity from a simple niche ecommerce platform into a universally-respected Content Management System for the online business space. With over 200 000 online stores established over Magento platform, choosing it for your upcoming ecommerce project makes a lot of sense.

With simple visual customisation, Magento online stores are easy to set up for exceptional search engine optimization, but often we make big SEO mistakes for Magento projects and that in turn leads to lower conversion rates.

Importance of SEO in boosting your ecommerce sales

No matter who you are, you must be aware of the techniques that will improve traffic on your ecommerce site. There are some essential SEO tips, which can seriously improve conversions and sales on your site.

Before moving towards learning SEO tips for your Magento store optimisation, it is vital to know why you need SEO for your site.

1. How many times you prefer online shopping after being redirected from a social media site rather than searching for products over Google? Most of us prefer Googling products before making a purchase to just making the final purchase through the redirection of social sites. Therefore, search can ultimately bring in 3-4 times more traffic than social sites on your online store.
2. A recently conducted behavioral study suggests that 75% of Internet users do not scroll beyond the first page of Google search engine.
3. A well-established online store receives 40% of its clients through search engines rather than redirection through social sites.

There is no magic bullet that can help skyrocket your ecommerce sales, but understanding the best SEO tips will definitely help in generating more leads to your websites.

There are however important and effective Magento SEO tips that will ensure better user engagement and conversions on your online store by taking your site’s rankings higher over popular search engines.

1. Product names and descriptions

Do a little research and you’ll see that plenty of store owners populate their catalog with loads of products. Do you think visitors will make a purchase just by viewing so many products in your catalog?

You’re much better off customising your product names and descriptions according to what people are looking for. It is, after all, the product names and descriptions that help your customers to get information about the product. If your product is missing its name or description, customers might just leave the page without making a purchase.

Edit your product name and description and include the searched keywords to make your product SEO friendly for the search engines. Apply the same technique for category name and description as well for getting better search results for your products.

2. Use CMS pages effectively

While it is good to use CMS pages for exhibiting information about your business and its policies, targeted keywords should not be ignored, as they are solely responsible for bringing traffic to your online store.

Make sure to add keyword rich pages, product questions, videos, product tours & guides, pictures and other important details in your Magento online store. You can also use the CMS for developing impressive landing pages for your site promotion by targeting important keywords to drive more traffic.

3. High quality blog content

A plethora of Google algorithm updates mean that a high quality blog now plays a very significant role in driving more leads to your Magento store. The use of Magento blog extensions in your store store, should help bring in traffic.

Instead of focusing only on writing and uploading product descriptions, it is important to develop your online reputation by writing about your services and products on the latest topics, media, news or anything, which directly brings short bursts of traffic to your Magento store.

4. Product reviews

As is the case with product names and descriptions, product reviews also contribute to traffic over your online store.

User contributed product reviews influence the mindset of new customers and improve the chances of leads and conversions on your online store. You should try to motivate customers to write reviews for your products after making purchases as they will help in contributing more traffic to your site.

5. Imposing Meta titles and Meta descriptions
When people search for some information on search engines, it’s the meta title and meta description which first appear in front of them. It’s vital then that you get them right. Meta titles should be between 50 and 60 characters long, while meta descriptions should be between 100 and 155 characters.

Remove the keyword field from your Magento store

Keyword stuffing is very much considered a black hat SEO technique these days. It’s probably best to remove the keyword field completely from your Magento store to avoid Google penalizing it. It also helps in concealing your keyword tactics from your competitors.

Use canonical URLs
If you own a Magento store and still don’t implement canonical URLs, then you are at greater risk of getting penalized since they are must for every Magento store. All Magento stores come with a canonical system integrated with the you just have to implement them in your store.

You can do so by going to System>Configuration>Search Engine Optimizations and selecting the YES option for Canonical Link & Meta Tag section.

Other SEO settings

If you want any of your web pages not to be indexed on Google or other search engines, then ensure to use “nofollow” tags for those pages. You can also optimize your XML file and robots.txt file to direct the search engines towards what need to be indexed on priority. If you choose to submit your sitemap to Google, you will be able to scrutinize and track what’s going on over your site.

Responsive and faster loading of pages
You cannot ignore the growing number of people who access the web exclusively via mobile devices. Each page of your Magento store should be responsive and have fast loading speed to make things easier for these users. A fast loading online store will generate more leads than a slow-moving one.

Google has also admitted to giving priority to fast loading sites. Just a one second drop can lead to lower conversion rates on your site. You can keep a check on your page loading speed with the help of Google Analytics tools, such as the “Site Speed” feature for different browsers.