Magento offers a few easy things you can take advantage of to improve your search engine rankings. This will help you get more traffic to your site which means more sales.

Improve Magento metadata

Metadata is accessible to search crawlers and is contained in the website’s source code. Though clients can view it in the search results, it is not displayed anywhere on your website. Metadata consists of your title tag, meta description, keywords, schema information, and canonical URL. All of this is controlled in Magento.

Based on these components, search engines may crawl a website and determine the purpose of each page on your website.

You can edit the title tags and meta descriptions on the product under the SEO section.

SEO-friendly URLs

Your search engine rankings and the visibility of your website are affected by more than just metadata. Your Magento SEO is impacted by URLs as well. For the sake of both people and search robots, it is advised to keep them brief, simple, and informative. 

You can edit the URL on the product under the SEO section.

Generate Magento XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap is one of the most significant built-in SEO capabilities for Magento and a common SEO need. It’s a file that catalogs a website’s key pages so that Google can identify and crawl them all. Additionally, it aids in search engines’ comprehension of your website’s architecture. Every vital page of your website should be crawled by Google.

You can generate an XML sitemap under Stores -> Settings -> Configuration -> Catalog -> XML Sitemap. Magento offers a full Sitemap guide about each setting.

URL Rewrites and Redirects

Rewrites and redirects support you in making sure users land on the appropriate version of the page and search crawlers find your website using the appropriate path. Fortunately, Magento is incredibly adaptable when it comes to redirection. It enables you to make both automatic and personalized ones.

You can manage your rewrites and redirects under Admin Panel > Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites.

Optimize for mobile usability

There has been a sharp increase in the number of mobile users and roughly 79 percent of them use their devices to make online purchases. With such significant stakes, you simply need to focus more on mobile because it might fundamentally alter both SEO and sales.

To optimize for mobile refer to #2 under the performance section.

Robots.txt

Configuring robots.txt in a web application is one of the most crucial aspects of a website’s SEO optimization. When you allow search engines to index your website, you must also tell web crawlers via the robots.txt file to avoid indexing the majority of the pages that are forbidden.

Steps to configure:

  • Navigate to Content > Design > Configuration.
  • Select the Store you want to configure the default Magento robots.txt file for.
  • Choose the Default Robots you want to be enabled on your website.
  • Save Configuration.
  • Flush the Magento cache.

Additionally, you may want to limit how often robots crawl your site to reduce your server usage. This can speed up your site. You also want to block certain directories from being indexed.

A brief but not thorough example of robots.txt might look like:

User-agent: *

Allow: /

Disallow: /*SID=

Disallow: /checkout/

Disallow: /*.zip

Sitemap: https://your-site-example.com/sitemap.xml

You can find and edit this file on the root of your Magento install.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are user-centered, practical metrics that aid website owners in making sure your customer has a good user experience (UX). They basically consist of a trio of web performance measurements:

  • The largest text, image, or media block on a web page is measured using the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric.
  • First Input Delay (FID) is a metric for measuring interactivity that shows how long it takes a page to process an event once a user interacts with it.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) gauges a page’s stability as it loads and undergoes user interaction.

Google updated their algorithm around August of 2021 to factor Core Web Vitals into their search rankings. The user experience is mobile first since more people are using their phone to browse the web. In laymans terms this means you want your website to be fast and not to be jumpy on mobile.

A comprehensive guide to improving your user experience and the Core Web Vitals is found in the performance section in point #2 but here are a few quick hitters.

  • Make sure your images are optimized for web

This could be as simple as saving the image in a compressed format. There are online tools that you can use to reduce the image size for free

Visiting Google Page Insights and running a scan on your website will tell you what images you need to optimize. 

In the example below this website could save 1.7 Megabytes on mobile by optimizing just one image.

  • Lazyload images

Lazyloading images means load images when the user scrolls to them. Instead of loading everything at once that the visitor lazyload them when needed.

  • Minify your assets
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Make the files your website uses as small as possible by minifying them. The less your visitors need to load the faster the site will be. Magento offers a way to do this out of the box.

Run the following commands on your server to combine your assets, make them smaller, and clear your cache. 

NOTE: this will usually put the website in maintenance mode for 5-10 minutes.

bin/magento deploy:mode:set production

bin/magento config:set dev/js/enable_js_bundling 1

bin/magento config:set dev/js/minify_files 1

bin/magento config:set dev/static/sign 1

bin/magento config:set dev/js/merge_files 0

bin/magento config:set dev/css/merge_css_files – 1

bin/magento config:set dev/css/minify_files – 1

bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

bin/magento cache:clean config