Magento is an ecommerce platform that offers merchants online an impressive degree of control over the presentation of their online store. In addition to this, its tools for catalogue management, marketing, and search engine optimisation are well-implemented and highly effective. It’s the chosen platform of around one in four online retailers at present, servicing upwards of two hundred thousand stores. Magento has emerged as a major factor in modern ecommerce, and as such it becomes a key consideration for many though not all SEO strategies.
For the most part, Magento is designed to work with Google’s analytics, but its customisable nature belies how much optimisation of this process is not set by default. This makes SEO for your storefront relatively simple at a basic level.
However, Magento continues to develop, the search engines continue to hone their algorithms, and what has worked before may begin to work less well as time passes. It’s worth making sure that your SEO team is ready to attend to the aspects that Magento doesn’t provide inbuilt support for.
While there are plugins and extensions now which handle all of the above tasks – and more – it’s important to stay abreast of the latest developments and keep up with changes as they come. You never know when a new software update might conflict with a plugin you’re using or when search engine algorithms will shift, so whoever runs your SEO should be watching all the appropriate SEO blogs for advance warning, monitoring your analytics data and, of course, fine-tuning your descriptions, keywords, and meta data according to the results of your analytics. It’s also important to remember that any portions of your site not run on Magento also have their part to play, and should be considered as part of your strategy.
In a previous post, we looked at the more basic techniques for improving SEO on your Magento storefront. While that’s a good foundation to build on, if you know what you’re doing it may be worth going the extra mile with your preparations. With that in mind, here are a few other things you can do to tweak your site and draw in those precious last few extra visitors.
It may sound like a complete change of topic, but now that high-speed internet is available for all even on mobile devices, it only takes a delay of around two seconds in loading a website for customers to lose interest, which will see a massive spike in your bounce rate.
Once the search engines take note of a high bounce rate, their immediate assumption will be that your site isn’t of interest to the majority of visitors, and this will lead to you slipping down the rankings. Conversely, a site which becomes noted for its fast, smooth load under any circumstances receives heavy word of mouth, bringing more traffic to its door – which will tell those search engines that your site is very interesting to web users.
Your store should, by now, be indexed thoroughly, and search engines will recognise queries for individual product pages, brand pages, and the like as well as searches for shops in your market sector. However, there’s another point where you can step up your game here, and that involves making sure that the general page for a given category in your store also functions as an inviting landing page to draw more customers in.
Google a product and one of the first things you’ll see on the top page is a list of places you can buy that product or products like it and the prices for each of those places. When someone’s looking that specifically for a particular item, they’ll often stop there – and you should be taking your slice of that market. By marking up the appropriate sections of your product pages, you can be in pole position with the other savvy storefronts.