Common SEO Mistakes that Most Users make with Magento

Needless to say that Magento is an incredible content management platform for e-commerce websites. With the advancement of powerful inbuilt tools, templates, and extensions, you can build impressive and professionally appealing online store on the fly.

In fact, selling products and services become super-easy on Magento e-store. But for that, you will need to improve the visibility of your brand and encourage people to buy something from your e-store. In order to boost the visibility of your site, you will need to implement the best SEO practices to get higher ranking on Google and other search engine platforms.

The best part is that Magento offers some of the amazing SEO capabilities to let you optimize your e-store for higher SERPs. But still, there are many site owners who make some common mistakes while optimizing their site for search engines. Such mistakes could negatively influence the ranking of your site on search engine platforms and affect your online sales.

If you want to avoid this scenario, you will need to know the common blunders that you are making with your existing SEO campaigns and fix them as soon as possible.

Here, in this blog post, we will discuss some of the silliest SEO mistakes that every Magento site owner should avoid while optimizing their site for better visibility and higher ROI.

Here we go!

1. Forget to Change the Default Meta Tags

Most of the Magento store owners, especially beginners forget to change the default meta tags of their site and then suffer in getting the better ranking on search engine result pages.

Using default title tags and meta descriptions mean they are not optimized for search engines – as there is no targeted keyword into it. If you want to improve your SEO ranking, make sure you add relevant keyword phrase within your title tag and meta description.

This will not improve your web visibility but also boost the click-through rate of your Magento store. Also, ensure that you use unique, engaging, and of course SEO friendly meta descriptions for each of your web/product page.

2. Overlooking the Importance of Alt Tags

Having an online store without SEO-optimized product images won’t help you get higher ranking on SERPs. There is no use of adding beautiful, relevant and high-quality images if they are not optimized for search engines.

Since search engine crawlers can’t find what your image is about, you need to write the relevant description for each of your images. So, if you haven’t added the alt tag on your images, then immediately add it and improve the visibility of your images on Google and other search engine platforms.

Adding relevant, user-friendly, and SEO-friendly alt tags on images also help people to find your online store with ease. They can take the buying decision instantly after reading the piece of content related to your product images.

3. Using the Non-descriptive URLs

This is one of the biggest mistakes when it comes to optimizing online stores for search engines. It is essential to optimize the URLs of your website to let the search engine spiders read and index your site quickly and easily.

By adding relevant keyword phrase into the URLs, you will be able to index your web store with ease. If you want to drive more web customers towards your store, make sure you create readable, engaging and search-engine friendly URLs.

Instead of using non-descriptive URLs (such as adding a product number), you should focus more on creating relevant and user-friendly URLs something like this:

forexample.com/product/men-casual-trousers 

This will help both the search engines and web visitors to know what your web page is all about, which in turn boost your ranking and generate quality leads.

4. Ignoring Staging Server After Transferring the Site to the Live Server

If you are already a Magento store owner, then you must be aware of the staging server. It is used during the development phase of an online store to test the changes. Since there is a risk to test the changes on the live server, it is better to use the staging environment to detect the changes and improvise it before transferring it to the live server. It can also help you reduce the entire cost of deploying new code.

Also, add noindex/nofollow by making the use of the meta tag before you begin using staging server. This will prevent your site from getting indexed by search engine crawlers. This is a great way to limit possible mistakes that would occur in the future.

But most of the Magento users ignore the staging server once after transferring their site to the live server. Being a Magento site owner, you should create and submit your XML sitemap, along with quality content and SEO-friendly URLs to let the search engine spiders find you quickly and easily.

5. Forget to Change the Robots.txt File

Most of the store owners forget to tweak the robots.text and meta robots directives after the staging phase. This restricts Google and other search engine crawlers from indexing your web store for better SEO ranking.

To avoid this mistakes, you should check your robots.txt file and meta robots directives that can be found in the <head> section of each web page. Make sure to set them to INDEX, FOLLOW by default. You can also check it by:

Accessing your System → Configuration → General → Design → HTML Head → Default robots. 

6. Ignoring Rel = Canonical

Use of canonical meta tags can solve issues related to duplicate content, especially if you have an eCommerce site with hundreds and thousands of product pages and categories. In fact, most of the online stores have URLs containing non-descriptive elements such as ?=, p=7.

These are basically duplicate pages that shouldn’t be crawled and indexed by Google. To combat this situation, you should make a use of rel=canonical. This will limit the indexing of the duplicate pages and let Google index only the fresh web page.

Well, setting up the canonicals won’t be enough. To get the best result, you will need to set them correctly. A one-word mistake can reduce the ranking of your Magento web store.

7. Using Duplicate Content

Since Google and other search engines love fresh, unique, and quality content, make sure you don’t use duplicate content in the form of product descriptions or meta descriptions.

There are many store owners who use the same content or manufacturer’s information in their product descriptions.  This is something that won’t help you get visibility on search engine platforms. Search engine spiders find difficulties in displaying the URLs if you have duplicate content – they don’t understand which URL to show off first in search results.

To get higher ranking on SERPs, you will need to ensure the quality and uniqueness of your content. No matter how big or small your eCommerce site is, make sure you contain engaging and fresh information related to your products and services.

In fact, you should write fresh, relevant and engaging content about your products and services to let people make buying decisions instantly.

Conclusion

Making silly mistakes while creating a web store on Magento won’t help you get better ranking on Google and other search engine platforms. To get the most of the eCommerce SEO campaign, you will need to address such mistakes and fix them as soon as possible.