Magento SEO issues: The problems and how to deal with them

Magento is often regarded as a challenging e-commerce platform, especially in terms of SEO. While off-page technical SEO has much importance, the on-page SEO aspects are as crucial for Magento 2 stores. However, many owner stores overlook the benefits of optimizing the on-page and technical SEO aspects. In this post, we show you a list of helpful pieces of advice and fixes for the common Magento SEO issues.

The majority of Magento’s known issues are fairly easy to fix. However, a lot of them need assistance from developers. Whether or not you’re utilizing Magento Community or Enterprise versions, the complication of the platform means you may well be affected by a number of these problems.

1. Load Speed

Load Speed

Having a slow Magento website can badly impact both crawl ability and user experience, both of which can have an effect on your organic search performance. Magento is a slow platform, and because of that, there are proactive ways you should apply to make sure your organic performance is not hurt by a slow speed

Solution:

You can frequently check your page speed through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to know timely if it is slow. If you are definitely in this issue, we suggest these tips speed up your web page

  • Disable Magento logs (default) and enable log cleaning in the back end to speed things up.
  • Diminish CSS, Javascript, and HTML, and optimize your code (combing removing spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters)
  • Minify redirects because every time a page redirects to another, it takes users more time to wait for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish
  • Utilize a CDN (Content Distribution Network) to classify the load of delivering content.
  • Use a server with sufficient RAM and configure it correctly
  • Optimize images by utilizing the right format. For example, PNGs are generally proper for graphics, while JPEGs are better for photographs.

Use these solutions to fix Magento SEO issues before or after set up to enhance the overall speed of your Magento 2 site. Moreover, there is a lot more to site speed than just the above points, you can refer to this post: 

>> How to optimize a Magento e-commerce page

2. Faceted Navigations & Parameter URLs

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigations are an extremely beneficial way for visitors to navigate a giant e-commerce site. They allow customers to filter down to search what they need. Unfortunately, faceted navigations can also generate a headache for optimization. Faceted navigation in Magento generates parameter URLs that are often indexed posing for Magento SEO issues

Indexation bloat is a problem, as Google only crawls a portion of your Magento site at a time, and you want it to target the core pages that offer visitor value (and have value to the business). If there are hundreds or thousands of URL parameters for it to contend with, you aren’t optimized for crawling

  • Dilutes link equity
  • Passes link equity to the web page that shouldn’t even be indexed
  • Eats up the crawl budget and affects crawlability
  • Generate a lot of duplicate content lead to Magento SEO issues

There are a variety of solutions you can deal with these Magento SEO issues

  • Robots.txt: Utilizing the robots.txt to block the parameters may be an effective way because of its ease. However, this could interfere with programmatic campaigns, so it’s crucial to make sure the robots.txt won’t hurt any other campaigns.
  • Google Search Console: Controlling URL parameters in Google Search Console is a more precise way to solve parameters. You simply add the parameter, express how it adjusts the content seen by the visitors, and what should Googlebot do with the URLs.
  • Nofollow: Another way is to no-follow the links behind the faceted navigation. By adding a no-follow to these links, Google won’t crawl them. That being said, if they are linked to from the sitemap or from other areas of the Magento site, the URLs can still be explored and shown in Google’s index.
  • AJAX Navigation: utilizing an AJAX navigation will help users to alter the content on the category/product listing page without replacing the URL. There are a number of other technical problems this can cause, such as generating excess JavaScript and impacting site speed.
  • Canonical Tags: This is a great way to tell Google that multiple versions of the same page, or same content, should be treated as one page. Have a look at the article by Moz about the importance of canonical tags

3. Magento URL Rewrites

URL Rewrites

Magento SEO issues are that Magento allows you to create a category or product URLs that revert back to the original /catalog/ path and duplicate the URLs produced depending on the title of the page. These URLs should be blocked (via Robots.txt) and should be observed, especially when refreshing as some can revert back without reason and no 3xx redirect will be used.

How to enable Magento 2 URL Rewrite?

  • On the admin panel, click Store => Configuration => General => Web
  • Expand the Search Engine Optimization section
  • Set Use Web Server Rewrites as “Yes”
  • Click Save Config to finish

3. Product Page Magento SEO issues

Magento SEO issues
  • Simple and Configurable Products: Canonical Fixes

Like most e-commerce vendors, you will need to use simple products along with configurable products. Because a number of products are configurable — for example, a may have a shirt with a lot of different colors — a lot of Magento users will generate the same shirt as a simple product to display the various variations of the shirt on the product listing page. If you using this approach, it’s also unlikely that you’re rewriting the content on each of these pages.

Solution:

To handle this duplication problem, but help your product listing pages look full, you need to utilize the canonical tag which links back to the core configurable product to show Google that they are duplicate variants of the one product.

  • Product URLs

There is an option in your Magento settings to only utilize top-level item URLs, rather than combining every category and subcategory hierarchy in the URL itself.

Solution:

If you’re using the hierarchical URLs, you may have trouble with duplication because you will have various variations of the items on individual URLs. This approach also helps reduce indexation bloat and offers you to have a single version of a product that can be nested under various categories.

If you’re already using category paths in your URL strings, make sure that you’re utilizing canonicals to recognize the main version of each item.

If you’re moving away from category paths to top-level product URLs, remember that you update all internal links and have your programmers write the crucial redirect rules and that they are applied when the switchover occurs

4. Search Pages Index

Pages Index

Google often indexes Magento catalog search pages. This Magento SEO issue can lead to indexation bloat and negatively impact crawl ability. This Magento SEO issues generate search results in search results, which is not friendly to user experience because they have to search twice. As a result, competitors’ products have a better opportunity to approach potential shoppers with the product information shown directly on SERPs.

Solution

The simple way to handle this Magento SEO issue is to add no-index, follow meta robots tags to the search page, and queries in the directs. If the crawl is an issue, you can insert the section in its entirety to the robot.txt file

5. Rich Snippets Structured Data Markup

Rich Snippets Structured

Rich snippets are a crucial part of structured data markup you can utilize to make pages on your Magento site more user-friendly. They offer more information like rating, price, breadcrumb, business address, author, and others.

Rich Snippets also help search engines to better understand the content of each webpage. Moreover, users can make more informed decisions from SERPs that improve organic CTR. And more CTR. As a result, your pages have a high chance of ranking on top.

Solution

Default Magento 2 website only displays ratings and reviews about a product in SERPs. You may have to use an extension for Magento 2 to add extra Google rich snippets to solve these Magento SEO issues

6. Keyword Overusing

Keyword

Repeating as many target keywords as possible is one of the Magento SEO issues. This strategy is not encouraged and may harm your Magento SEO issues because it’s easy to be regarded as spam by search engines. Besides, this action can make your content unnatural and useless to your audience and make them unpleasant to consume.

Solution

Many experts suggest the optimal keyword density is around 1–2%. This density helps your content to be natural and more effective than a version with so many keywords added.

7. Magento SEO issues – Pagination

SEO issues

Product listing pages are broken up into pages, which is helpful for the user but can cause duplicate blocks of text.

In 2011, Google introduced the rel=” next” and rel=” prev” tags to help webmasters to display paginated pages. To go one step further, we also recommend a robots=”noindex, follow” tag to the paginated pages.

Conclusion

It’s crucial to solve these common Magento SEO issues so they don’t negatively affect your website. If you are considering developing a new website in Magento, make sure you work with a Magento website development company that can address these common issues in their scope so you don’t have to worry about these after your site is released. Magesolution is definitely the best choice for you. CONTACT US if you want to know more information about Magento.