Search engine optimization is one of the key factors for any e-commerce business. While off-page Magento SEO, that is citations and links pointing to your site, is important, you should never forget about on-page optimization. The latter is within your full control and can be implemented properly.
What are the Magento SEO best practices?
Magento SEO best practices are methods you can take to help your site get to the top of search results. You need to optimize your site for Google's requirements to get higher positions in search. In this post, we've compiled all Magento 2 SEO settings and tips that are available there out of the box.
Main Magento 2 SEO aspects
Magento 2 has the following SEO features:
- Meta tags for product and catalog pages
- SEO-friendly URLs for products and categories
- Meta tags for the Home page
- Images optimization
- HTML and XML sitemaps
- Robots.txt and meta robots
- Canonical tags
- Rich snippets
- Google Analytics and Google AdWords integrations
- Improved layered navigation optimization
Meta tags for products
One of the main aspects of Magento search engine optimization is Meta tags. The importance of meta tags cannot be overestimated. Your site needs them to rank high and look attractive in SERPs. Product pages are most important for e-commerce sites, so I’ve decided to start with them.
There is one new Magento 2 SEO optimization feature that you will like: Fields Auto-Generation. It helps to set templates for product metadata. They are applied on a global level.
The setting can be found under Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Product Fields Auto-Generation:
This is a great tool which will save you lots of time, especially if you have many products. However, there are some drawbacks I must point out:
- As auto-generated fields are set up globally, you can’t change them for products found in particular categories, say, for men and women clothes.
- Currently only 3 placeholders are supported: {{name}}, {{description}} and {{sku}}. This doesn’t provide much pliability.
- Adjustments you can make in these global settings are not retrospective, i.e. they won’t be applied to the existing products. It’s not convenient if you’ve found a misspelling or just want to change something quickly.
- The {{description}} placeholder may not be the best choice for Meta Description Mask if the product descriptions are long which is probably true for most stores (and it’s OK as they are the main content on such URLs). So if you use {{description}}, you will probably get something like this:
To sum it up, while a new Product Fields Auto-Generation feature is a great perspective, it is quite basic and limited right now.
Alternatively, you can edit titles and Magento 2 meta descriptions right from the product page settings: Catalog> Product > Edit > Search Engine Optimization:
They will overwrite meta data set globally via Product Fields Auto-Generation. This way you can customize product titles and meta descriptions, but it will be extremely time-consuming if you have many products as you will have to make changes on a one-by-one basis.
To overcome these limitations and extend the default possibilities, we developed the Meta Tags Templates extension. With its help, you can not only create templates for meta title, meta description, and keywords but also set up H1, description, image alt for categories, subcategories, and products.
SEO-friendly URLs for products
A product URL in Magento 2 is created in accordance with the SKU you’ve specified. But you can change or edit the URL if you need it. This feature is located in Product > Basic Settings > Search Engine Optimization.
To use SEO-friendly URLs in Magento 2, you need to enable URL rewrites in store settings.
- Go to Stores > Configuration > General and click on the Web tab
- Open the Search Engine Optimization section
- Set the Use Web Server Rewrites field to Yes
- Save the changes and clear the cache
But if you want to generate product URLs automatically, you can use the Unique Product URL extension. Once you have set up this extension , it will work automatically without any attention required.
Meta tags and SEO-friendly URLs for categories
Metadata for categories can be set up on a store view level in Stores > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head. This can be overwritten on a category level at Products > Categories > Search Engine Optimization:
Here you can also choose a URL for the category according to your needs.
Another way, how you can make URLs more SEO friendly is by enabling URL rewrites. This tool optimizes URLs by deleting unnecessary words like index.php. that have a low impact on performance or site rank. See how to enable Web Server Rewrites.
Meta tags for Home page
Magento 2 will continue the tradition of Magento 1 and set the default main page title to – guess what? – Home Page, right. So one of the first things you should do when you switch to Magento 2 is to customize this important tag.
- To edit Magento 2 page title, go to Content > Pages
- Open Home Page in the edit mode
- And add a custom title in the Page Title field
- Save the changes
Meta description and meta keywords can be changed on the Search Engine Optimization tab.
Prefixes and suffixes for title tags
If you need to add your company name or anything else either at the end or at the beginning of your title tags across all site pages, you can do it in Stores > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head:
Images optimization
Images optimization plays a vital role in site speed. The latter affects your site rankings: the faster your site is the more ranking ability it has.
Unfortunately, Magento 2 doesn’t have out-of-box tools for image compression.
In Magento 2 you can add alt attributes for product images in Product > Edit > Images And Videos > Image > Alt Text.
And please change the alt text for your logo image from “Magento Commerce” to something related to your brand in Stores > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Header:
Unique Content
I have already pointed out many duplicate content issues that can be found on most e-commerce sites. The good news is that Magento 2 has some out-of-the-box tools to solve many of these SEO problems.
Canonical Tags
Canonical tag, also known as canonical URL, is an URL that you mark as a preferred search engine. Thus, Google bots know which pages they need to crawl firstly.
If you don’t use canonical tags, Google can take any page from your site and show it in search, even the one you don't want to show. What's more, it will crawl both pages, which means that Google's bots will spend limited resources on pages you don't need, and won't reach the ones you want to show up as soon as possible. Learn more about canonical URLs.
To enable canonical tags for categories in Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization:
This setting guarantees that canonicals are also applied to sorted and filtered pages, i.e. the ones with product_list_mode=list, product_list_order=name, etc. This minimizes the chances of thin content occurrences on your site.
However, there are a few things to remember:
- Instead of canonicalization, pages with sorted or filtered results can be noindexed either by setting up exclusions in Google Console or by adding meta robots META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" to such URLs. But the latter is quite problematic since there is no default option for this in Magento 2, I’ll write about it in detail below. Mind that either canonicals or noindex tags should be used, not both entities simultaneously.
- If you want to utilize pages with applied filters and/or sorting options for SEO by creating landing pages, you can achieve this only with a special extension like Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2.
- If you choose to set “Yes” for Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories, canonical tags will be applied to paginated results too.
Category path in product URLs
If you navigate to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization, you’ll find an option to choose whether to enable or disable showing category paths in product URLs (see the image above, 3). These category indicators are good for indexing and clearly show the logic of store navigation. There are a few scenarios of using this setting in combination with canonical tags:
- You can choose not to add a category path to a product URL. In this case, there won’t be any threats of potential duplicates.
- If you add category paths to product pages addresses and don’t enable canonicals, you might face duplicate content issues.
- If both category paths and product canonicals are enabled, each product page will have a canonical pointing to itself without any category indication. Concurrently, each product URL will have a category path in its address and be accessible from all the categories you’ve added it to.
Control of site indexing
Robots.txt
One of the greatest improvements of Magento 2 in terms of SEO is the ability to edit your robots.txt file right from the Magento 2 admin panel.
- To generate robots txt in Magento 2, go to Content > Design> Configuration
- Find the line Global, click the Edit link, and open the Search Engine Robots tab
- Edit custom instruction of robots.txt file
- Save Configuration
This is quite handy, isn’t it?
Your robots.txt file can be accessed at yoursite.com/robots.txt which is the right place for it.
Though a default configuration of robots.txt is ok, you would probably want these directories disallowed as well: /catalog/product_compare/, /catalogsearch/, /wishlist/. See the list of custom instructions for robots.txt.
Meta robots
As you can see on the image above, default meta robots in Magento 2 are set to INDEX, FOLLOW which is correct if you want your site to be indexed by Google.
However, you can’t customize it on a specific page. For example, if you create a duplicate product to set up an experiment in Google Analytics, you will have to find a way to restrict search engines access to this page. You could add such URLs to the robots.txt file but this doesn’t always work as expected.
XML Sitemap
Magento 2 provides many useful settings when it comes to generating an XML sitemap, you can find them in Stores > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap:
The most important changes are the following:
- All the images can be added to the sitemap automatically
- There is an option to submit the URL of your XML sitemap to robots.txt
- You have the ability to set the number of pages per file as well as the maximum file size
And now here is some bad news:
- There is no opportunity to choose which product types should be added to the XML sitemap: grouped, simple, configurable, etc. You may want to add only one type, for example, if you have configurable products that consist of two or more, say, software versions. Each version is a simple product and will be automatically included in the sitemap, while you need to include the configurable version only
- An option to add images to the XML sitemap is certainly great, but what about other file types? If you want to include PDFs, Microsoft Word files, etc., you will have to add them manually
- You can’t exclude or include particular pages if there is a need for that
HTML Sitemap
Unfortunately, no HTML sitemap is available in Magento 2 out of the box, so you’ll need customization or extension to create one.
Additional changes
Suffix for Product and Category URLs
This new Magento 2 SEO feature helps to set up a suffix for your site pages: Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization:
In theory, you can use different suffixes for products and categories. But you will hardly benefit from that as users expect to see an identical URL structure within one site.
Moreover, using different suffixes may lead to numerous 404 pages: changes you make in these fields are retrospective but no redirects are created automatically.
So, if you used to have a product at yourstore.com/category/product.html and changed the product pages suffix to .ht, your former page will return a 404 error, so be careful with such significant changes.
Microdata, or rich snippets in Magento 2
This is a great innovation of Magento 2 and I’m sure merchants will be happy with it. All product pages have microdata added to them by default.
There are no settings available: they are not necessary as almost all important tags are included:
You may ask why I wrote “almost” above. Well, there is a reason for that: while Magento 2 default microdata will help to get rich snippets in Google SERPs, it is still rather basic.
For example, it’s missing “Availability”. You can compare the results from a page which uses the Google Rich Snippets extension:
As you can see, much more info is provided to Google in this case.
Additionally, only product snippets are available in a default Magento 2 configuration; if you want to add breadcrumbs, organization or search box markup, you will have to do it yourself or with the help of an extension, for example, the one I’ve mentioned above.
Google Analytics and Magento 2
Magento 2 offers a handy tool for adding a Google Analytics tracking code to your store: Stores > Configuration > Sales > Google API > Google Analytics:
All you need to do is to enable Google Analytics and add your Tracking ID which can be found under Admin > Tracking Info in your GA Account. See how to add Google Analytics to Magento 2.
Another great point is the ability to enable content experiments. If you do that, you will be able to add a Google Analytics Experiment code to a product page section: Product > Advanced Settings > Product View Optimization:
However, you will still need to create a duplicate product page and add a noindex tag to it. Generally, other aspects of setting up split tests in Magento didn’t change.
Google AdWords and Magento 2
Magento 2 developers decided to do their best and made Google AdWords implementation much easier for merchants. By navigating to Stores > Configuration > Sales > Google API > Google AdWords, you will see all the needed settings:
Conversion ID, Format, Color, etc. can be found in your Google AdWords account.
Navigation optimization
It may not be obvious, but you can improve SEO by changing settings of the Improved Layered Navigation extension. Too long URLs, filtering results crawling, similar content, all these problems can be managed by right settings combinations. Follow the guide to learn how to:
- block everything from indexing;
- add brand pages to indexing;
- make filtered results more appealing.
Final thoughts
As you can see, a lot of things have been done to improve SEO and overall online marketing possibilities of Magento 2.
However, while these new settings are useful for Magento SEO marketing, most of them are too basic and offer minimum to no flexibility when it comes to real stores and products.
I do hope the article was helpful for you! Wish you good luck with your Magento 2 SEO strategy. If you still have any questions, please do ask them in the comments!
