One of the features of Magento that sets it apart from other ecommerce CMSs is the degree of customization. Here, unlike most other systems, it is possible to customize every page, every product and every piece of code for search engines.
In this series, we’ll go over all the basic principles you need to know to better equip your Magento site thanks to magento extension development services by Elogic to achieve top search engine rankings, which will boost your sales and income.
Planning a keyword strategy
All SEO campaigns start with effective keyword strategy planning. This is true for e-commerce platforms as well:
- When planning a keyword strategy for an e-commerce platform, we need to maintain an effective balance between three important factors:
- Relevance means that a page optimized for a specific keyword (s) should contain relevant content;
- Achieving the goal implies that the content of the page should also guide the user towards the final goal of the site, that is, to stimulate sales;
Structure means that the SEO priority of a page is inversely proportional to the depth of the page in the structure of the site.
Thus, the main page will have more weight than the product page or CMS. Therefore, the home page should be optimized for more general and competitive keywords, while the lower level pages should be optimized for more specific and less competitive keywords.
To develop an effective keyword strategy, we must consider each of these three factors. We need to make sure that our keywords are tied to the page with sufficient weight and that the content is relevant enough for the user to be interested in it. All this should help in achieving the main goal of the site.
Setting up Google Analytics
Tracking your traffic is an essential part of any successful web company. Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used analytics tool in the web industry.
We integrate Google Analytics into our Magento system to track which keywords are driving us the most traffic, which products are top sellers, and other statistics.
Sign up for Google Analytics if you don’t already have an account. Create a new property and define tracking for its parameters by opening the corresponding property in the Admin tab at the top of the page and clicking Property Settings:
Next, you need to enable ecommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. To do this, again go to the “Administrator” tab, select “E-commerce Settings”, and set the “Enabled” status:
And after that enter the tracking code in Magento and enable tracking. To do this, go to System> Configuration> Google API> Google Analytics. Enter your tracking code here and enable tracking.
XML Sitemap setup
Creating a well-structured XML Sitemap file is an old proven way to make it easier to index your site pages. Creating and maintaining an XML Sitemap on an e-commerce site can be particularly challenging, as there can be thousands of products in the product range, broken down into hundreds of categories and subcategories.
To provide its users with this opportunity, the Magento team has created an XML sitemap generator. To set up your Magento Sitemap, go to System> Configuration> Google Sitemap and configure the Frequency and Priorities for generating the sitemap.
For most e-commerce sites, category pages should be given a higher priority in the first place, as they serve as primary for most search terms.
Next in priority will be product pages, which users will navigate to if they are looking for a specific product. The lowest priority will be for CMS pages that contain static site content. Turn to custom magento development to know more.
In terms of update frequency, I would recommend updating the categories and products in the Sitemap on a daily basis, while CMS pages can be updated weekly as they do not change very often.
What next?
After completing all the steps described above, we have created a fairly good SEO foundation for our Magento store.
In later parts of this series, I will continue to talk about how to improve your Magento site from a SEO standpoint. At the end of the series, I hope you have a fully SEO-optimized Magento site.
