If you looking to move your conventional brick-n-mortar store to e-commerce store, then there are a lot of efforts need to put to achieve a better one. SEO in Magento 2 has always been a challenging job for the e-store owner. By going through the checklist, you can easily address any SEO mistakes when performing search engine optimization in your online selling site. SEO doesn’t mean only to achieve higher rank at Search Engine Results Page but it also means to achieve maximum conversion rate. In this blog post, we will discuss the complete SEO checklists from scratch. The implementation of this checklist by Magento Development Company helps an e-commerce store to achieve desired business outcome in terms of web traffic, sales, ROI & conversion rate.
Technical Magento SEO Checklists
1. Site Speed
The most important factors impacting SEO is the website speed. Magento 2 support faster loading time than Magento 1. But for user engagement it is possible to further upgrade your site speed even more. Magento 2 is integrated with enabled flat category, merged CSS and JS files, use Content Delivery Network, Image Optimization and Cache Management.
Tip: A simple way to improve website loading speed is to install Defer JavaScript extension. This will surely help your web page to be loaded at a faster rate with HTML and CSS before JS.
2. Mobile Friendly
Most online shoppers have access to mobile devices to search for the items they need. Thus mobile-friendly is an important feature for any e-commerce website. And Google also consider it crucial ranking factor. Magento 2 already supports mobile responsiveness on any devices.
Tip: In addition to being mobile-friendly, it is important to check for Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages.
3. Google AMP
The Accelerated Mobile Pages was released by Google in 2016. If you check the search result, you will get to see the AMP sites with a minute lightning symbol. The AMP is 4 times faster than the basic mobile pages, which is highly crucial for SEO in the future.
Tip: Make sure to keep the structure as simple as possible. For the most shopping website, the page rank depends majorly on the homepage. The deeper the site structure is, the weaker the page authority becomes.
4. Navigation
For an e-commerce website, streamlined navigation is a must-have in terms of Magento SEO checklist as it helps users to browse website easily. But, you need to be careful with it as in several situations, the Google-bot could waste crawling bandwidth in and out of navigational filters.
Tips: One smart solution for smooth SEO-friendly navigation is to Hire Magento Developers to use AJAX. Default Magento 2 has not this feature but with extension this problem can be addressed.
5. HTTP Vs HTTPS
In general, HTTPS is a highly secure version of HTTP. It works in collaboration with another protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to transfer data securely. Since 2014, Google has announced that they prefer the HTTPS than HTTP regarding website ranking factors.
Tip: If you are already using HTTP and planning moving to HTTPS, remember to track your migration carefully in Analytics and Webmaster Tools. You need to perform some changes in data tracking and crawling.
6. Magento 2 Robots Txt File
The robots.txt file is placed inside the root of the Magento 2 installation. This robot file is read by the search engine crawlers as an instruction to index the site as your wishes. The Magento robots.txt, thus, plays a key part in Magento 2 to make SEO optimization simple. Don’t ignore this Magento SEO checklist in your e-commerce development plan.
Tip: A good SEO tip is to exclude some private pages with internal usage from the indexing. All cart and login related pages must be hidden from the Google bots. The same goes with the checkout and thank you page.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is SEO friendly web page?
SEO web design is a way of designing and developing websites to make them search-engine friendly. Making a website SEO-friendly means that Google and other search engines can crawl each page on the website efficiently, interpret the content effectively, and index it in their database.
2. How many keywords do you need for SEO?
At the bare minimum, one; some pages may have a singular focus that answers only one query. It’s much more likely that you’ll want to target two or three keywords per page, even if they’re just close variations. Any more than four is a bit crowded; after all, each page only has one title tag and Meta description.
3. What keywords should I use for SEO?
Long tail keywords are long terms that searchers use in Google and other search engines. And they tend to have a lower keyword difficulty compared to 1-3 word “head terms”. So for people that are new to SEO, long tails are usually the best keywords to start with.
4. How do I write SEO friendly content?
Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts
- Research before you write
- Devise a structure for your post
- Use paragraphs and headings
- Use transition words
- Use related keywords
- Optimize the length of your article
- Link to existing content
Wrapping Up:
For an e-commerce platform like Magento, Search Engine Optimization needs different set of specific changes and settings. The Magento SEO checklist discussed above are the remarkable optimization to be made. You can also consult professional website development agency to achieve desired business results. They focus on Magento extension development when default extension is not capable to achieve e-commerce results.
