We all know that Magento is the go-to eCommerce platform when it comes to user experience and stock management, but how good is it for SEO? In this article, we look at the pros and cons of using Magento 2 as your eCommerce platform when it comes to search engine optimisation and ranking on Google.
This article is going to be broken up into two parts. The first part will look at Magento’s site wide SEO settings, and then we will look at how Magento performs on a page by page basis.
So without further ado, let’s look at whether or not Magento 2 is good for SEO.
Magento’s Site-Wide SEO
In this section we will break down how Magento performs on a site-wide SEO basis (also known as on-site SEO).
Default Setting
Like most CMS’s, Magento doesn’t come set up perfectly for SEO and does require some changes to the default settings. You will find duplicate content issues, as well as non-search engine friendly URLs among some of the most important issues needing to be addressed.
Fortunately, these changes aren’t time consuming like they are in many other CMS’s, and can be easily rectified by following our Magento 2 SEO guide.
Site Speed
Like any other major e-commerce platform, Magento 2 is actually pretty fast when correctly set up. A lot of people complain about Magento being slow, but it’s often not Magento that slow – it’s the: hosting, server configuration, poor Magento theme coding or a lack of compression.
Another common reason for a slow load time on Magento category pages is caused by loading too many products into the same page. This causes the website visitor to download a lot of images, which are often incredibly data-intensive. This problem can be avoided by either loading fewer products per page or implementing lazyload functionality.
Making Magento faster without breaking various aspects of the website is achievable but is often a considerable amount of work and testing. This is a slight downside to Magento SEO, but shouldn’t be enough to put you off as it is possible to fix.
Canonical Tags
Canonical tags tell Google exactly which URL it should be indexing in the search results if there are multiple URL’s that display the same page.
In previous versions of Magento this was quite tricky to get right, and was especially problematic for product category pages and product pages.
However in Magento 2 you now have options for canonical tags built into the system – thus preventing issues with duplicate content.
So Magento now gets a thumbs up when it comes to to canonical tags and duplicate content.
Image Optimisation
Image optimisation is very important if you’re concerned about your website’s load time. In fact, images are often the largest thing your customer’s browser has to download when visiting your pages.
Although many SEO’s don’t believe site load time to be important to your rankings in Google, most CRO’s (conversion rate optimisation specialists) agree it’s important to your customers.
If you are not manually optimising your images before uploading them to the site, Magento has a few highly rated extensions you can install for free that will drastically reduce your images file size.
Apptrain’s Image Optimizer Is fairly easy to use and does a great job of compressing the jpg, png and gif files on your Magento website.
Schema
Magento 1 received a lot of criticism for not including product schema “out of the box” (a feature that was standard in WooCommerce SEO for free at the time), but the developers clearly took the criticism on board when developing Magento 2.
By default, you now get product schema (also known as rich snippets) on product and category pages, Making the SERP listings for Magento 2 websites a lot more attractive to potential customers searching Google for your products.
With that being said, we have found many Magento 2 websites outputting schema with errors on the price field when testing during our SEO audit. Luckily, this is often fairly easy for a developer to fix by editing Magento’s code.
Internal Linking
Because Google perceives pages that have a lot of other pages linking to them to be important, it is vital that your e-commerce system allows you to easily create internal links in your content.
This is something Magento 2 makes very easy through its WYSIWYG editor. This means you don’t have to learn any HTML to create internal links in Magento, you just highlight the text and paste in the link URL.
Magento’s On Page SEO
In this section we will break down how Magento performs on an on-page SEO basis.
Product Pages
Product pages are well set up for SEO in Magento 2. As previously mentioned, they now come with product schema by default, which potentially allows you to display the: average rating, price and availability in the SERPs.
This is great for increasing your page’s click through rate, which improves your traffic potential and rankings.
There aren’t any major technical SEO issues on Magento product pages, and the on-page SEO options for each product is all editable in one place (unlike certain other CMS’s).
Product Descriptions
Writing SEO optimised product descriptions is made very easy through Magento’s WYSIWYG editor. You can easily add in heading tags, bold tags, italics and more, making it ideal for the company who prioritises targeting bottom of the funnel keywords.
There also shouldn’t be any issues with duplicate content, if Magento is set up properly, when adding product descriptions to your website.
It’s also easy to add other media to your descriptions, such as: warranty badges, bullet points, centered text and more – all through the WYSIWYG editor. And if you know a little bit about HTML, CSS and JavaScript there are also options for custom code too. Meaning you can add interactive elements, videos, FAQs and more.
Category Pages
Category pages are typically the pinnacle of an e-commerce website, and luckily for Magento users – Magento does a great job displaying them.
By default Magento provides various filter options (that can be easily built on by Magento developers) which provides a great user experience to customers trying to find a product that fits a certain criteria.
You can easily add content to your category pages through Magento’s WYSIWYG editor, and all of your on-page SEO settings are located in one place – making it faster than most to update.
Another impressive feature Magento 2 has is the ability to add filtered category pages to your site with relative ease (after SOPs have been written). This allows you to target long tail keywords that are bottom of the funnel.
This gives you a strong competitive advantage as most companies don’t have this ability, or understand the opportunity in these keywords.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions are easy to edit in Magento 2 by simply navigating to the page, product or product category in the backend.
Magento doesn’t provide any recommendations on what you write in your meta description like Yoast does for WordPress, but there are several free and paid extensions you can use if this functionality is important to you.
For many SEO’s that use their own on-page SEO tools like Cora, POP or Surfer, this functionality is more of an inconvenience than an aid, making this slightly more suited to intermediate/advanced SEO experts
One thing we do feel is missing from Magento’s meta description is a character counter that shows how many characters you have left. This would be a nice addition to help speed up the process when performing SEO on Magento websites, but it’s also functionality that’s missing from almost every other e-commerce platform on the market right now.
Title Tags
The title tag of your web page is one of the most important confirmed ranking factors in Google. It’s the text that shows as your title in Google’s SERPs and is critically important if you are trying to rank for a keyword.
Magento handles title tags reasonably well with its dedicated field for you to input your chosen title. This is conveniently located with the rest of your on-page SEO settings in the back-end of Magento.
Magento doesn’t have the ability to check for duplicate title tags or have a character counting function “out of the box”, but there are extensions on the market that can help add those functions in if required.
Homepage
The homepage of your website typically holds the most authority in Google. It’s the page that’s often used to target the most profitable keywords and funnel branded traffic through to their desired location.
Because of this, it’s important that your e-commerce platform allows your homepage to output whatever it is you need.
In some platforms this can be tricky and require a lot of bespoke coding, however with Magento there’s a lot built in that your developers can utilise.
We have frequently worked with developers on the designs of homepages and noticed certain aspects (such as displaying all featured products in a product slider) to be a lot faster to implement than it is in many other e-commerce platforms.
Having the ability to get bespoke pages developed fast is critical to your website’s SEO as it saves on budget and time. This is one of the key reasons Magento is good for SEO, as it’s often speed that determines an SEO project’s success.