Future-proofed SEO

for Magento stores

About me

• Working in SEO / digital for over 8 years (in-house, agency +

consulting)

• Working with Magento for the last 5 years

• Specialise in Magento SEO (mostly consulting & auditing)

• Work as part of a consulting group

• Mostly work on audits (SEO, analytics, paid search, performance

optimisation and Magento code audits)

Overview

1.0 Getting the basics right

2.0 Magento configuration &

technical SEO

3.0 Future-proofing your visibility

Getting the basics rightThe fundamentals of on-page SEO

Build SEO into your page templates

• Lots of reviews• Reviews based on customer-

focused metrics as well as just written content

• Useful / relevant reviews get more visibility

• Good product content• Product videos and lots of

images• Q&A content from Facebook

Be more strategic with UGC

• Product reviews are important for injecting unique content into

product pages

• Split test your emails, timing and incentives to improve CR%

• Try and build relevancy and usefulness into your algorithm

• Integrate with your ESP and add sales data to monitor CR% and

deliverability metrics

• Give someone ownership

• Good use of space means more review content

Better site structure / architecture

• Try and build out high quality pages for secondary queries

• Complete a keyword discovery

• Add in rankings & landing page data

• Complete a gap analysis to identify pages required

• Create new pages (make sure you add content, otherwise you’re

just creating lots of thin pages)

Product-level duplicate content

• Having a single product feed (or single fields) for your site, resellers

and affiliates is a risk

• Don’t let affiliates and resellers use your review content

• Try to avoid using supplier copy

• Use the canonical tag for very close variants of products

(configurable and individual variants)

• Avoid using blanket content for the sake of it

Be careful with your robots.txt file

• Avoid the ‘standard’ robots.txt that is included in lots of blog posts

• Blocking all your dynamic pages with robots.txt can impact products

that are hidden behind merchandised products

• Don’t block your CSS and JS files

• Use the robots.txt strategically for crawl budget (for things like

search and multi-select layered nav pages)

Utilise rich snippets

• Easy opportunity to generate more clicks from existing rankings

• I usually recommend price, rating and search as a minimum for

ecommerce sites

Magento Config & TechnicalGetting the setup right

Get your canonical tag implementation right

• Magento provides option to enable canonical tag on product and

category pages only

• Canonical tag should be on every page

• Not on CMS pages and homepage by default

• Make sure you’re not absolute referencing things like tracking URLs

• Canonical tag will only work for close variants

Keep an eye on URL rewrites

• Can cause frequent URL changes, especially on products (mainly

appending numbers)

• Make sure you check this after doing upgrades

• Can cause issues with redirect loops and crawlability

• CSV uploads can over-ride URL key

• Older /catalog/ URLs can get indexed because of rewrite issues

Be vigilant with indexing of low quality pages

• Layered navigation pages

• Search pages

• Pagination

• Session IDs

• Sort / order pages

• General site filters

• Duplicate /review/ pages

Watch out for duplication from secure pages

• Https variants of pages often get indexed with Magento

• This can be a very annoying duplicate content issue

• Two easy ways to resolve this:

– Canonicalise https pages to http equivalent (depending on size of site)

– Apply a redirect with exclusions for pages that need to be secure

– Ensure that links from account / checkout pages etc are pointing to http

versions of pages

A focus on layered navigation

• These pages should not

be indexed

• Don’t listen to people who

say they’re valuable for

long-tail

• Replace filters with volume

with static pages

• Don’t be fooled by search

friendly URLs

Split out your XML sitemaps

• More necessary for larger websites

• Gives you more visibility over issues (for different types of pages)

• I usually suggest at least product and category page sitemaps

• You could split out by categories

• Create an index sitemap if you do this

International SEO with Magento

• Having separate stores isn’t enough alone

• Use the hreflang tag (there are a few good modules available via

connect)

• Create separate Webmaster Tools accounts

• Localise content where possible

• Avoid using IP redirects (they still cause issues!)

Other things to think about

• Invest in performance!

– Google say it impacts rankings

– More importantly (in my mind) for crawl efficiency

• Think about mobile early

– Either do responsive or do your mobile site properly

Future-proofing your visibility

Be pro-active (not re-active)

with link cleanup

Focus on smaller numbers of

top tier coverage

Crawl your site regularly and

after releases

Process for discontinued

products / redundant pages

Make sure your site passes

Google’s mobile test

Invest in data! (rankings,

visibility, competitors, mobile

etc)

To summarise…

• Be vigilant with what you’re allowing Google to index

• Be aware of how Google’s accessing your website (check your logs

regularly)

• Don’t forget the basics (UGC, site structure etc)

• Keep a close eye on mobile

• Lastly, invest in SEO (by far the best CPA / COS if done properly)!

Feel free to ask me questions

Twitter: @paulnrogers

https://paulnrogers.com

Email: paulrogers21@gmail.com