Magento is an open source ecommerce application for the web which allows businesses to create their own custom online store. It’s highly customizable and offers lots of great features for designing a professional ecommerce site.

But unfortunately, many businesses that use it are not even taking the most basic steps to optimize Magento for SEO. They are either doing nothing or using the wrong techniques and harming the search engine rankings of their online store.

If your store cannot be found on a Google search, then many people will not be able to find your products and you will make few sales! Here are some of the most common Magento SEO mistakes to avoid when optimizing your online store.

Using the Default Navigation System

The default layered navigation system which comes with Magento is terrible for SEO. It creates way too many URLs and duplicate content, including duplicate page titles and descriptions. There are many different ways that you can adjust your settings so that your page is organized in a better way which will be more SEO friendly.

Forgetting to Change the Homepage Title

When you first set up your Magenta store, the homepage title will default to reading “home”. Most people forget to change this title to something that reflects their business instead. By doing so, you will improve the SEO on the page as well as tell visitors what the page is.

Failing to Modify Robots.txt

When you are developing your Magento commerce online store, the program automatically adds in a robots.txt file which prevents search engines from indexing your site. This is because when the site is being built and has sample prices and products you don’t want it to show up in Google’s search results.

However, when your site is completed and ready to be seen by the web you will need to get rid of this robot.txt file. Otherwise, it will still be telling search engines to go away and ignore your store!

It is a simple fix that you can make in the settings and system configuration of your store, but it will make a huge difference to your rankings.

Accidental Duplicate Content

Did you know that Magento uses the category structure in the product URL when it assigns URLs to all of your merchandise? This means that if you have some products which exist in multiple categories you will have duplicate content (the same content at two or more different URLs), which Google will penalise you for. You can change these settings in your system configuration so that the category name is not included in the URL of the product.

Targeting the Wrong Keywords

Another major mistake that people often make when using Magento is attempting to rank for the wrong keywords. It doesn’t work to simply pull words out of thin air and then attempt to get high search engine rankings for them. If you are optimizing for keywords that your customers are not searching for, or keywords that are very popular and you have no chance of ranking for them, you will not get anywhere.

It takes research to find out which keywords will bring you the best results, but if you take the time to find out your SEO efforts will be much more effective.

These are just a few of the most common SEO mistakes that Magento store owners often make when setting up their site that prevent them from getting more customers. Though basic in nature, they can have a huge impact on your bottom line, and may even make the difference between staying the course, or becoming another statistic in the legions of small business failures.

Related articles
Tags: , , , , , , , ,