The Expert's Guide to Magento SEO

Magento, by and far, is one of the most robust ecommerce platforms ever built. It has several different unique benefits. It's highly functional, scales nicely, has multi-store management, and has a nice platform for supporting headless commerce. If you are a Magento owner, this article will cover the following:

1. How to create a category/sub-category structure so that your URLs rank.
2. Making sure that your title tags and meta descriptions are correctly optimized. 
3. Making sure that you have the fastest speed available for your website.
4. How to structure content for blog posts and pages so that you rank for evergreen content. 

Preliminaries: Making Sure That Your Magento Is Safe and Secure

For larger ecommerce store owners, they get this part right. Smaller ecommerce store owners usually get stuck on an older version of Magento and need to upgrade by the date when their version is no longer supported. Here are the most current supported versions of Magento:

• If you are on Magento 2.4.4, your support ends in April of 2025.
• If you are on Magento 2.4.5, your support ends in August of 2025.
• If you are on Magento 2.4.6, your support ends in August of 2026.
• If you are on Magento 2.4.7, your support ends in August of 2027. 

Basic On-Page Optimization for Magento SEO

Category Descriptions 

Before Magento was a part of the Adobe family of digital products, you used to have to buy an extension or call a developer to add category descriptions to your content. Now, hosted versions of Magento have this built in! Having a category description for your ecommerce categories is a must. Here is what we recommend:

• Use an introduction that is moderately keyword rich and generally describes the products that are in that collection.
• In a read more section, include some more detailed information about your products in that category.
• Include internal links to specific products.

Category descriptions are the first thing that help us rank our products and ultimately our website for transactional keywords.

Product Descriptions

For Magento SEO, we need to start thinking about our product descriptions more like sales pages. What does this mean? It means that we need to focus on longer-form product descriptions. Once you have the ingredients, materials, or other general information about a product, think about your product page as more of a sales page. You are convincing people who land on your website to purchase the product. Better product descriptions will result in better SEO rankings and therefore more conversions. Do you have a lot of product descriptions to write? Here is a way you can go about writing product descriptions with ChatGPT. This prompt will help you write great product descriptions every time:

Write a detailed and persuasive product description for [product name], emphasizing its key features, benefits, and unique selling points. Use a tone that matches the brand’s voice (e.g., professional, friendly, luxurious, rugged). Highlight how the product solves a problem or enhances the user’s experience. Include sensory details, technical specifications, and any competitive advantages.

Make sure to:

• Start with a compelling hook that grabs attention.

• Use bullet points for quick readability (if appropriate).

• Incorporate relevant keywords for SEO without making the text feel forced.

• End with a strong call to action.

Make Sure That Your Magento Setup Focuses on Product Schema and Reviews 

Yes, Magento (Adobe Commerce) provides built-in support for product schema markup and product reviews, but with some limitations. 

Magento does not automatically generate structured data (JSON-LD) for products out of the box. However, it does include basic microdata for product information (such as name, price, and availability) using the schema.org vocabulary. To implement full-fledged JSON-LD schema markup (which is preferred for SEO), you’ll likely need:

• A third-party extension for structured data.
• Custom development to add JSON-LD schema markup in the product template files.

Magento does support product reviews natively:

• Customers can submit ratings, reviews, and comments for products.
• Reviews include star ratings, which can be displayed on the product page.
• Admins can approve, edit, or delete reviews before they appear on the storefront.

However, Magento's default review system is basic and lacks advanced features like rich snippets for reviews or Google review stars. You may need an SEO extension or custom schema implementation to ensure Google properly picks up review markup.

Here are some other things to think about when working with your Magento platform to make sure you succeed: 

Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /*?p=
Disallow: /*?limit=