For those of you who aren’t familiar with Magento’s standing in the current global CMS (Content Management System) scenario, Magento is an e-commerce platform that offers online merchants a place to sell their goods and services, purchased by Adobe in 2018. Magento handles more than $155 billion in transactions per year and is favored by more than 250,000 merchants worldwide.
SEO agencies in NYC and all across the United States recommend Magento for fast-growing scalable businesses as it is the second most widely used e-commerce platform worldwide. Brands like Bulgari, Omega Watches, Land Rover, and Christian Louboutin use Magento so it should come as no surprise the potential Magento holds as a CMS in helping you grow your business.
So, what is Magento’s secret in helping you rank on SERPs?
As a rule of thumb, every website that runs on any e-commerce platform needs to follow SEO best practices to gain intentful, convertible leads. Magento allows you to modify everything on your website, from your homepage to your metadata, to help portray the best content idea and design language which will in turn aid to fully optimize content on your website and help boost SEO efforts.
Namely, following are a few ways in which Magento allows you to customize your pages, thereby helping you achieve the most with your SEO:
- Meta Data Categories settings
- Meta Data Product settings
- Implementing Canonical tags
- Setting Robots.txt
- Adding Rich Snippets for product pages
- SEO XML sitemap generation
- Alt tags for SEO images
- Prefixes and Suffixes for title tags
- URL Rewrite and Redirect
- Suffix for Product and Category URLs
Now, all of this may seem a tad too overwhelming so first let’s talk about what Magento brings to the table that has made it one of the most preferred CMS’s to work with.
For those that don’t know, Magento is primarily an open source e-commerce website development platform which automatically makes it a fan favorite from the jump, although it does have a paid version called Magento Commerce which comes with a whole array of fascinating SEO-driven features. Due to its robustness, flexibility and scalability, Magento has been able to strike a few chords in the e-commerce world.
Let’s have a look at the advantages of using Magento over other CMS’s:
- Super SEO friendly – The platform was built keeping in mind the SEO requirements of organizations and their need to scale. As we’ve seen in the section above, Magento allows users to generate and redirect SEO savvy URLs. Alongside this, Magento websites are also quite responsive and developers find they are easily compatible across all devices and browsers. This in turn reduces the number of discrepancies faced by visitors and enhances user experience.
- Effortless Content Management – Magento has a WYSIWYG Store Page Editor enabled on their Store View. The acronym stands for What You See Is What You Get – a functional tool that helps edit the web pages without any technical knowledge. This is perfect for store owners looking to manipulate the functioning of the store on the go, as the business evolves.
- Enhanced Reporting Capabilities – Getting the right count on your orders, invoices and taxes is one of the most crucial parts of managing your store. With Magento you get almost 20 individual reports through the web interfaces which are updated constantly to show the latest information. All the major insights such as orders, customer information, and product information, collection of shipping fees, the number of registered accounts and more are presented by their reporting feature, comprising of the latest insights, data, and metrics.
- Improved Loading Speeds – Probably on the most underrated and overlooked factors while designing a website is its loading speed. Competition is stiff and a slow website can mean thousands of dollars lost. Magento understands the needs of the users/visitors and store owners alike in providing fast loading speeds on websites built using their platform and never fail to deliver on that front.
These factors come together to make Magento one of the most feature-rich and powerful platforms in terms of SEO and User Navigation thereby making it a favored CMS pick for growth marketing agencies worldwide.
But, what can you, as a store owner, do to improve your odds of ranking on search results?
Here are a few SEO best practices you can put into place starting today that are sure to help improve your rankings:
- Optimize All Your Images – Believe it or not, images are the first thing that visitors see when they come on to your website. Most users will not stick around to read your content no matter how well-written it may be, if the images that accompany it are either off-putting or non-relevant. To optimize this key element on all your pages, first and foremost provide relevant images then make sure to name your images in the backend and add important keywords in the alt tags to increase the chances of these images popping up in search engines.
- Simplify your URLs – URLs are an essential part of your website since they give users an idea about the contents of the respective pages. Having complicated URLs with tons of operators will not go a long way in making your website or web pages stand out. Whether you wish to have easily accessible landing pages or an attractive homepage, tailoring your URLs to the accessibility of your users is a great place to start.
- Do Your Research – The backbone of any successful SEO campaign are its keywords. Your keywords decide which pages show up and on what rank. As such, it is pivotal to conduct a thorough keyword research before your start designing your content and also update your keyword list every 4 to 8 months depending on market trends and the changing needs of your business. The same goes for content optimization. Your competitors are also doing the same to improve their visibility so make sure to carry out detailed competitor keyword studies every so often to stay in the race.
- Implement No-Follow Links – There are many pages on your website that you don’t want Google to index via internal linking like the checkout page, my account, cart or even the admin panel. For such pages make sure to add No-Follow links, as it might be considered a black-hat practice if you don’t. Also, you do not want Google to assume that you are associating with websites that have a lower Domain Authority score than yours as it might lead to a leak in credibility so make sure to enable No-Follows on such links too.
- Exploit Google’s Resources – Google has made it really easy for website owners to gain insightful information about their website through their extensive list of tools and applications. Use tools like Google Analytics to procure data on your custom segments, top-performing pages, mobile traffic and more in order to deploy an SEO based strategy to improve your columns. The same can be said for Google Search Console which is an excellent administration and reporting tool that lets you identify and handle errors alongside providing in-depth analysis on your website’s traffic. Both these factors can go a long way in correcting underlying errors and ameliorating your ranking on SERPs.
Be that as it may, taking on this herculean task of improving your website’s standings all by yourself as a Magento store owner is no joke. Seeking out professional help from a digital marketing firm can significantly boost your performance in a short span of time.
If you’re looking for an SEO team to help take your business to the next level leave your queries in the comments below. Our team of experts is one of the best amongst all major digital marketing firms in NYC and rest assured we will do justice to every hard earned dollar of yours.