Top 10 Magento 2 SEO Issues and their Solutions

10 Common Magento 2 SEO Issues to Fix Now!

Magneto stores are SEO-friendly and responsive. But they should meet the latest SEO guidelines of search engines such as Google. It can become difficult for merchants to reach their target audience and increase conversion rates. It is urgent to fix Magento 2 SEO issues timely to gain organic traffic.

Here are the 10 common ways to fix the Magento SEO issues and improve your site ranking.

• Add Homepage Title

  Titles are an important SEO step to improve traffic. Mostly Magento homepage has the default title Homepage. Admins do not know they can change the Homepage title to something meaningful to promote the brand.

  Solutions: Follow the steps to change the title:

  • Go to the admin panel > content > open pages.
  • Select Homepage > Edit

• Change Meta Description

  Search Engines rank the sites at a higher position with a good meta description. If you also leave the description box empty, it is an SEO mistake. All the pages of the Magento 2 website will take the default text as the description. It will create duplicate content.

  Solution: Go to the Content > configuration, choose the scope that you want to apply for this setting and click Edit.Head to the HTML head section > Default meta description box > make the box empty.

• Slow Loading Speed

  Your Magento site takes much time to display the page content. Page speed is essential to rank the website. A slow speed may cause trouble for search engines to crawl the web pages of your Magento site.

  Google calculates the time to the first byte when they check the page speed of a Magento store. A slow page affects the user experience and makes it less indexable on search engines. Users are also most likely to leave the site and spend less time on the page. Here is the solution to improve your conversion rate.

  Solution: Enhance your page speed using these SEO tips:

  • Minimize the size of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
  • Reduce redirects that don’t take visitors to another page whenever they visit the site.
  • Use a Content Distribution Network to distribute the load of delivering content.
  • Optimize the images to the right format. PNGs are suitable for graphics and jpegs for photographs.
  • Reduce the time of loading product images while scrolling down the pages.

• Missing URL Rewrites

  URL can also help in optimizing the SEO of your Magento 2 online store. Every product and category page has a URL that can be promoted. So, you should rewrite the Magento URL to improve the page ranking. Test all the URLs and rewrite the unfriendly URLs into better ones.

  Solution: Step to Rewrite the Magento 2 URL:

  • Go to admin panel > click on store > configuration > General > Web
  • Next, expand the Search engine optimization and set the use of web server rewrites as “yes”.
  • Click on Save Config to save.

• Duplicate Content

  Duplicate content affects the reputation of your site. It will create trouble for search engines to decide which content is relevant and shareable. Magento stores should check the internal links that may redirect to duplicate content. It may confuse the search engines, whether to direct the link metrics or a page.

  Solutions: Three ways to fix this SEO issue:

  • Make sure the duplicate pages are 301 redirects to the original pages.
  • Search engines can determine which duplicate page is the original by using Canonical Tags (Rel=Canonical).
  • Specify whether several URL parameters should be crawled using the parameter handling feature in Google Search Console.

• Missing Canonical URL

  Canonical Tag is an element that tells search engines which is the original version. Canonical attributes are helpful if you have multiple pages with the same content. Excluding the canonical attributes will show your content with the duplicate.

  Solution: Enable Canonical URL:

  • Go to the admin panel, click Store > Settings > Configuration
  • Under the Catalog panel, select Catalog
  • Open the Search Engine Optimization section
  • Set Use Canonical Link Meta Tags for Categories and Products = Yes/No.

• Keyword Stuffing

  Using too many target keywords is also a Magento SEO issue. It makes your site look spam and unnatural. It is not a good idea to stuff the keyword.

  Solution: The keyword density should be only 1 to 2% in your content. Google finds it more pleasant and natural than content with relevant keywords.

• Avoid Configuring the ROBOT.txt File

  Robot.txt file tells search engines how to crawl pages and control their access to a part of the page. Several pages should be restricted from indexing by Googlebot, like search result pages, administration pages, and upcoming pages.

  Also, do not block Google from indexing any content pages. Ensure that the meta robots file is in the section of the website.

  Solution: Steps to configure Robot.txt

  • Click Store > Configuration > General > Design
  • Open the Search Engine Robots section
  • Choose one from these options:
    • INDEX, FOLLOW
    • NOINDEX, FOLLOW
    • INDEX, NOFOLLOW
    • NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
  • Enter custom instructions
  • Click Save Config to finish

Search Pages Indexation

It is common for Google to index Magento catalog search pages. Indexation bloat and crawlability are both affected by this Magento SEO issue. It makes users have difficulty discovering your sites. Thus, competitors’ products have a better chance of getting the attention of potential customers via SERPs.

Solution: Add noindex and meta robots tags to increase the website visibility on the search pages. To make the site crawlable, you can add an entire section in the robot.txt file.

Staging URLs in XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is also needed to optimize the Magento 2 site on search engines. It should not include unnecessary URLs. Having a messy sitemap will negatively impact your Magento store’s SEO. It is necessary to set up a staging server during the development of Magento 2 online stores. Some admins forget that a staging URL differs from a live URL and forget to remove those URLs.

Solution: Always add the correct URLs in the XML sitemap. You should include a nofollow or noindex tag before using the staging server URLs from getting indexed.

END NOTES

Update your Magento store to deliver a better user experience and look responsive. Also, ‌check the Magento 2 SEO issues and use the solutions to fix them instantly. As a result, you will get the SEO to optimize a site that ranks higher on search engine pages.