Future-Proofed Magento SEO at Imagine 2015
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Transcript of Future-Proofed Magento SEO at Imagine 2015
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
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
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
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: [email protected]