Despite being one of the best platforms for building eCommerce websites, Magento’s settings won’t go easy on beginners trying to figure out things. Beginners likely commit SEO mistakes while setting up Magento 2, which might significantly impact your website’s rankings. If you’ve already set up your Magento 2, or you’re planning to set it up, it’s essential to know the most common Magento 2 SEO mistakes.
That’s why we took some time to analyze some of the common Magento 2 SEO mistakes made by the users so that you can avoid them when starting your Magento journey.
Here are some of the Common Magento 2 SEO Mistakes
- Not Using a Customized Homepage Title
- Indexing Both HTTP and HTTPS of the Same Link
- Layered Navigation Block by Robots.txt
- Search Results not Blocked by Robots.txt
- Usage of Duplicate Content
1. Not Using a Customized Homepage Title
Everyone knows that the homepage is one of the most important pages on a website. It is the one that ranks for the most crucial keywords. And this is exactly why you shouldn’t keep the title of your homepage as just “home” or “homepage.”
Write a catchy title for your homepage that best conveys what you’re pitching. Insert the keywords you wish to rank for and build your title around that. This will attract both Google’s and the reader’s attention.
2. Indexing Both HTTP and HTTPS of the Same Link
The HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same link being indexed are responsible for duplicate content on the website in most cases. This is where the rel canonical tag comes into play.
By using the rel canonical tag, you can choose to prefer any one (HTTP or HTTPS) of the versions over the other. By this, you’re pointing one of the versions to the other, that in return, eliminates duplicate content on your website.
Generally, the HTTPS version of the page is always preferred over the HTTP version, as this is one of the huge rank factors considered by Google. If your website is not secure, you lose the visitors’ trust and, ultimately, the visitors themselves who’ll go to other websites, as they always prefer secure websites.
3. Layered Navigation Block by Robots.txt
Most of the Magento store owners don’t want Google to index the layered navigation and other filter and sort options on your page. The most common way people use to block them is through robots.txt.
Blocking them with robots.txt disallow is not the best way to deal with it, as this makes the Google bots don’t crawl them, but they will still be indexed in Google’s search engine results page.
On top of this, by blocking them through robots.txt, you’re also eliminating all the link juice, if there is to be any.
Another way how you can block them is by using the meta noindex and follow on your URLs. In this way, you can stop them from getting indexed on the SERP page and save the link juice of the URLs.
Avoid following both methods, as because your robots.txt disallows crawling, Google won’t be able to read the meta noindex and follow on your URLs.
4. Search Results not Blocked by Robots.txt
In the previous section, we discussed how blocking layered navigation using robots.txt disallow is a bad practice. But what you can block through robots.txt disallow is the site search results, specifically the /catalogsearch/ URL path.
This is done so that you don’t stop Google in not indexing your site search. Another important point to note is that Google’s Panda algorithm also penalizes websites that allow a large amount of indexation of the site search data. Disallowing this URL path helps reduce the number of indexed pages on your website.
A few Magento websites, besides not disallowing their website’s search results by using robots.txt, also link to their website search results on the homepage.
They link the brand logos on numerous websites’ home pages to website searches that use that brand as a question parameter.
This was most likely done since Magento 2.0 had no “shop by brand” extensions available when the website was being developed. You can use Visual Merchandiser to automatically populate the entire class with products corresponding to a specific manufacturer’s price.
5. Usage of Duplicate Content
Every search engine, including Google, prefers good quality, fresh, and unique content posted by websites. That is why we are able to see the good quality content ranking in the top spots in SERP is fresh and unique. While most websites focus this on blogs, some of them forget this for product descriptions and meta descriptions.
Using duplicate content on product descriptions and meta descriptions will affect your rankings. We understand that writing product descriptions and meta descriptions for eCommerce websites with hundreds of similar products are difficult.
This is where extensions like Mageworx come in handy.
Using MageWorx, you can add meta descriptions for all product and category pages by creating custom templates with variables for different products and categories. This way, you can write unique meta descriptions for all the products on your Magento website.
As far as product descriptions are concerned, you have to write different descriptions for each product, including target keywords, which will help rank your product pages higher.
Conclusion
As said, it’s common for beginners to make mistakes, but it’s important to identify and rectify them as soon as possible before having a huge impact on your website. Not focusing on SEO is one of the biggest eCommerce mistakes you must avoid.
Knowing these common mistakes before even starting your Magento journey will help you from preventing these mistakes from happening on your website.
By avoiding these common Magento 2 SEO mistakes, you clear the barriers that might stop you from ranking higher in the SERP. But avoiding these mistakes isn’t just enough. If you wish to rank at the top, it’s necessary to follow some of the best Magento SEO practices.
Maintaining an online store is difficult, especially with vast platforms like Magento. It requires constant checking of various factors to ensure the website is up and running all the time perfectly.
Apart from the common issues mentioned above, other complex things also affect your website ranking. If you can’t spend the time and effort to monitor them all and deal with the issues, we recommend Magento managed support services for getting your Magento store in safe hands and avoiding other Magento 2 SEO mistakes.
We hope this article helped identify some common Magento 2 SEO mistakes to rectify or avoid them to rank your website higher in the SERP.
