Find out the answers to MAGENTO SEO issues

Check out the most common Magento SEO issues faced and how you can resolve them

Keywords: Magento SEO, Search Engine Optimization, website ranking.

There are the three components of the SEOs, technical, on-page and off-page. All of them are equally important when it comes to optimizing your SEO strategy to enhance your website performance.
This article provides the most common SEO issues faced by e-commerce website on Magento and ways to fix them. This would help the brands have better website ranking in the long run. Issues relating to Magento SEO has to be taken care in the beginning so that you do not lose out on giving the best user experience to your customers.

E-commerce websites operating on Magento can play a crucial role in user experience. It is well known that user experience directly depends on the system in place. Magento can be slow if it is not optimized correctly.
Here are a few points to optimize the magento at the application level.

Disable Magento Logs

Minify HTML, CSS and Javascript

Avoid / Minimize redirects. Redirects take more time to wait for the request-response cycle to complete.

Optimize the images. (go for webp formats)

Use a CDN

1. Faceted Navigation / Parameter URLs

Faceted navigation is a beneficial and user friendly way to navigate an ecommerce website. It allows customers to filter down and search what they need. But it also poses a challenge for SEO optimization by generating parameter URLs that are indexed and pose SEO issues.

Some of the solution to fix the issue:

Block the parameters in robot.txt

Control the parameters in Google Search Console.

Add no-follow to the links behind the faceted navigation.

Uses Ajax based navigation.

Use Canonical tags - Best way to deal with the issue.

2. URL Rewrites

Magento allows users to create and update SEF URLs for the products and categories which are otherwise very complex and non-friendly for search engines and users. This feature also creates a problem for having duplicate and ugly urls indexed in search engines.

Solution to the issue:

Block non-SEF url via robot.txt

Enable Magento URL Rewrites

Add 3xx redirects if updating the urls

3. Product Page SEO issues

Simple and Configurable products:

Businesses may choose to have the variations of a configurable product show as simple products as well for a quick access to customers. This is a good strategy to allow customers to pick their needed products quickly. But it may also result in duplicate content on each of these pages and hence affecting negatively on SEO ranking.

Solution:

Use a canonical tag which links back to the core configurable product to show Google that they are duplicate variants of the one product.

4. Product URLs with category paths

If you are using hierarchical URLs, there are chances of having various variations of the items on individual URLs. This causes indexation bloating and hence causes a drop in SEO ranking.

Solutions:

Avoid using hierarchical URLs (use only top-level item urls). Magento has a setting for this.

Use Canonical URLs to recognize the main version of each item.

5. Search Pages Index

Google often indexes Magento catalog search result pages. This issue generates search results in search results which is not friendly to user experience. This can cause indexation bloat and affects negatively on SEO and crawl ability.

Solution :

Add no-index, follow meta robots tags to search page and queries in the directs.

6. Rich Snippets - Structured Data Markup

Rich snippets are an important part of structure data markup. They help search engines to better understand the content of web pages. They also help users make more informed decisions from SERPs and hence improve organic CTR, resulting in higher chances of ranking on top.
However, default Magento only display rating and reviews about a product in SERPs.

Solution:

Customized the theme template pages. OR

Use an extension like this one.

7. Keyword Overusing

Repeating as many keywords as possible is not a good practice when doing SEO for Magento Websites. Search engines may treat your website and a spam and it makes your content unnatural and useless to the audience.

Solution:

Optimal keyword density is around 1-2%.

Ask for expert advice to choose the keywords wisely.

8. Pagination

Product listing pages are broken into pages, which are helpful for the user but can cause duplicate blocks of text.

Solution:

Use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags.

Add noindex,follow tag to the paginated pages.

SEO is mostly taken for granted when developing a new website in magento or when migrating from other platforms or upgrading to newer versions. Also, magento provides a lot of SEO friendly features, but if not used properly it can be challenging to improve your website rankings. To ensure that your website is appropriately optimized there needs to be constant learning on Magento best practices.

ZakApps partnered with iXfocus is an Adobe Certified Solution Partner has the experience in providing the best service for Magento users.