Magento SEO

Top Magento SEO Issues and How to Fix Them

What are the most common Magento SEO issues?

When it comes to an SEO strategy, Magento is often the key to success. With a whole host of resources and features, it’s one of the best platforms for eCommerce SEO as it ensures your ranking gets a boost organically. But it doesn’t come without its fair share of issues.

While Magento is highly regarded, it’s also considered one of the more challenging platforms for eCommerce. Much of the Magento SEO problems stem from properly boosting your eCommerce store for both on-page and technical SEO. Thankfully, the vast majority of Magento SEO frustrations are easy to fix, though some may require some assistance from developers.

Wondering how to deal with Magento SEO problems? To take the stress out of your Magento SEO issues, our team at Catapult Revenue is diving into some of the most common problems and how to solve them. Let’s get started.

Loading Speeds

First on the list of elements in need of a Magento SEO fix? Loading speeds.

A slow website not only impacts that crawlability but your user’s experience, too. With consumers only waiting about three seconds for a site to load, a slow website is a quick way to lose business. Unfortunately, Magento is known to be a relatively slow platform, and for this reason, it’s important to get ahead of the game to make sure your website is fast and high-performing.

How’s this done? We recommend starting by disabling Magento logs (default) and enabling log cleaning to help speed up your site. You can also choose a content delivery network (CDN), make sure you’re using a properly set up server with enough RAM, and compress your assets and images. With all of these fixes, you can do a great deal to improve the speed of your website.

Product Tags and Titles

Magento doesn’t automatically equip your site with great product tags. In fact, they are often ambiguous with just a product name and no other information. You want to let customers know what a product really is, right? Thankfully, this Magento SEO issue isn’t too challenging to fix.

If you’re a smaller business that doesn’t feature too many products, you can manually assign a title tag to a product, ensuring it is just right and optimal. However, if your business has an overwhelming amount of products that would make the manual process too tedious, we recommend setting up a convention that shares more of what a product is. This can include variables like the product type, color, and even gender or brand.

Next are header tags. This is often considered less important compared to title tags, but it’s key when it comes to optimal SEO, so both consumers and search engines understand your site and what content is featured on a page. For this reason, go back and make sure your header tags have the right hierarchy and are properly incorporated to better boost your site.

Product URLs and Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is a beneficial tool for customers to explore a large eCommerce site, allowing them to filter searches to find just what they’re looking for. However, faceted navigation can be a challenge when it comes to optimization as, with Magento SEO, they can create parameter URLs that are indexed in a way that causes four different SEO problems:

  • Weakens link equity
  • Passes link equity to pages that actually shouldn’t be indexed
  • Takes up a large portion of the crawl budget and impacts crawlability
  • Generates duplicate content

These problems are all important to solve when it comes to an optimal SEO strategy, and there are a few ways to approach these Magento SEO issues:

  • Robots.txt: The robots.txt is an easy way to block the parameters, but it does come with some concerns. Robots.txt can impact programmatic campaigns, so you need to take the time to ensure it’s not impacting any other existing campaigns.
  • Google Search Console: You can control URL parameters with Google Search Console in a more precise manner. It only requires adding the parameter, how it adjusts content, and how Googlebot should deal with the URLs.
  • Nofollow: Add no-follow links behind faceted navigation so that Google won’t crawl the pages. However, if these pages are linked to the sitemap, they will still be explored and indexed by Google.
  • AJAX Navigation: With AJAX navigation, you can adjust content on category and product listing pages without actually changing the URL. That being said, keep in mind that this may impact site speed.
  • Canonical Tags: to tackle duplicate content, go with canonical tags. This will signal to Google that multiple versions of the same content should actually be treated as one page.

With these different avenues, you can avoid any faceted navigation and URL-related impact on your SEO success.

Relevant Keywords and Keyword Overuse

Incorporating relevant keywords into your website and copy is always an SEO best practice, but with Magento SEO, there’s a bit more to consider.

One of the big Magento SEO issues is that the system tends to repeat targeted keywords a bit too much. This can actually hurt your SEO strategy as search engines may regard your site as spam. But that’s not all. With overuse and constant repetition of keywords, your content will also come off as unnatural and likely won’t make the most sense, making it unappealing to your audience.

When it comes to keywords, the ideal density is only between 1-2%. This way, the content remains natural without a nonsensical abundance of keywords.

Indexing

The last of the Magento SEO problems that eCommerce stores face is the fact that the Magento catalog search pages tend to be indexed by Google. Why’s this an issue? Well, in being indexed by Google, this actually creates indexation bloat that negatively impacts crawlability. Thankfully, you can solve this by adding no-index and meta robots tags to the search page. So, if you’re facing a crawlability issue, add the section to the robots.txt file.

    While Magento SEO solutions can be wonderful for your strategy when operating properly,  tackling the Magento SEO issues swiftly is necessary to ensure they don’t impact your success. If you’re looking to build your eCommerce website in Magento and want to ensure that these common issues don’t impact your business, our team at Catapult Revenue is here to help. As a web development and digital marketing service, we know all the ins and outs and just how to solve your Magento SEO problems quickly and efficiently. For more help, contact us at 312-625-0447.

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