SEO Audit For Magento®

We are SEO-focused development company specializing in Magento.

It means:

We know WHAT to fix and HOW to fix in a better way

We divide SEO issues by their ranking impact and set priority to the fixes

We take into account UX, Marketing and Business factors offering a solution

Pro SEO Audit

(Advanced SEO)

Basic SEO review

Structured Data analysis and correction instructions

Crawl and Indexes analysis

Errors reveal and reasons (base on Search Console Data)

Page speed improvement instructions

Server response test and improvement recommendations

Html code tests and optimization instructions

Mobile Friendly review and improvement instructions

Traffic Drop analysis

Images Optimization instructions

Backlinks analysis. Disavow file for Google if needed.

Pop-ups compatibility with Google policy

Competitors SEO key parameters (up to 10 websites)

Free SEO Audit

(Basic SEO)

Review of the robots.txt and sitemap.xml

Page speed status and improvement recommendations

URLs reviews and improvement recommendations

301 redirects review

Images alt attributes and naming review

Review of the meta tags (Title, description, meta name robots)

Canonical and hreflang review

✕

Magento and E-Commerce SEO Based On:

Page Speed

Page speed is one of the key ranking parameters for Google. The company even developed its tool that helps to understand how fast the website. It is not so hard to check load time using the Page Speed Insights tool or checking data in the Google Analytics account. But the average number and general recommendations don’t help much.

Page Load time consist of 2 components:

Network And Server Time

(redirection time, domain lookup time, server connection and response time)

Browser Time

(parsing the document and loading it, executing js code)

When it comes to e-commerce and Magento page speed everything becomes even more complicated. Page speed optimization of a static article isn’t the same as the optimization of large stores with thousands of products and lots of calculations on the server.

Magento page speed can be affected by:

unused extensions
code conflicts
long requests
improperly set up caching
bots requests that take server resources
uncompressed images
non-optimized js, css, html files

The list of reasons isn’t full. Every website has its structure and features, that’s why page speed analysis requires an individual approach.

Page Relevancy

When a user enters a query into the search bar, the system has to select the best matching pages. This process is similar to the human search process. How do you usually decide which book or article worth reading or not?

As a rule, you go to the book shop (or your favorite news website).
Than you search for proper stand (bestseller, books on sale) or category.
Than you see a book and read its title, look at cover image, author, you may take a quick look at the tables of content.

Let’s convert these parameters into the digital world. And you see that your favorite bookstore = authorized website that links to another website, stand = anchor text and text near the link, title = <title>, table of contents = headings, author = your website. But bots do not see images (or do this not very well yet), Sure. But they can read images alt tags!

Key Parameters

Title
Description
H1-H6 structure
Alt attributes of images
Text content itself
Backlinks resources
Anchor text
Microdata (helps bots to determine the type of content)

Page Index

The process of adding pages to Google index consists of 2 parts:

Crawling

Google doesn’t have a central database of web pages, so it constantly searching for new pages and add them to the list of known pages. This process is called crawling. Usually, Google finds a new page when it follows a link from a known page to a new one or when a site owner creates a sitemap.

Indexing

When Google discovers a page, it tries to understand what this page is about. This process is called indexing. Google analyzes the content, all embed videos and pictures, trying to understand whether the content is relevant or not. The obtained information is stored in Google Index which is a huge database of websites and their content.

To discover new pages Google uses the links in your pages html and sitemap xml file. It means that navigation on your website matters. Tough header menu, useless filter options, lots of subcategories with 2-3 products inside are common issues that e-commerce websites have. They neither improving website crawling nor helping users.

While indexing Googlebot tries to understand if the page worth to be included in the index or not. Despite determining the relevancy, Googlebot looks if there are other pages in the index that provide the same data. This is the place where duplicated content problems exist.

If Google sees lots of similar pages on your website it will pick up only one page that it considers as the most relevant. That’s why it is important to give directives to the bot how to handle your webpages.

These points are important for website indexing:

Robots txt
Sitemap xml
Categories and subcategories structure, layered navigation
Canonical tags
URL structure (folders and paths)
Redirects
Regional and Language versions’ (hreflang tags)

Page Quality

When ranking websites Google tries to determine the most quality pages. For this purpose, it uses different signals:

Location and language settings
Last update of the content
Number of inbound links
Content popularity (users traffic)
Content quality rating (reviews, aggregate rating)
Pop-ups compatibility with Google policy
Website security (https, presence of insecure js, etc)
Mature content marks
doorway pages signals

There are also signals that you can’t measure: how many users return to search after visiting your website, links click-through rate, browser bookmarks with your website pages. Unfortunately, this information is hard to find.

But what you can see is: bounce rate, how many pages users visit on your website, how many returning visitors you have, how often they click on different elements and others. These metrics help to understand your website user experience status.

The Right Way Of Doing SEO For Magento Stores

Our clients have to deal with SEO issues which are closely connected with Magento platform processes. We’re sure that solid SEO for a Magento store can’t be done without deep knowledge of the platform’s code and correct server optimization. We know Magento code imperfections which help us to resolve technical SEO issues quickly.

SEO is an essential part of eCommerce in handling the user’s flow. Search Engines form at least 60% of the whole online store traffic. It depends on the positions your website occupy (Top-5 and Top-10 are goals). Your website should be well optimized to appear on SERPs higher positions. It requires a wide range of actions and modifications which should be done to improve your website ranking.

Magento SEO is divided into two aspects: internal and external optimization.

As usual, external optimization takes a long time and costs a lot. Well done internal optimization can significantly impact your ranking and save resources.

Merchants rarely have their own SEO specialist, that’s why they outsource freelancers or agencies. The main problem of the companies which offer SEO services for Magento stores is that their team knows SEO but poorly knows Magento. As usual, SEO agencies just give tasks to customer’s developers. These SEO companies often insist on modifications that require a lot of developers’ work (=bigger costs for a client) but the impact on a website’s ranking is small. That’s why it’s much better when a developer and SEO specialist have common goals and think about business first.

Magento SEO: Ranking Factors

Google ranking algorithms pay attention to a big number of factors. According to top webmasters and our own experience, we made a chart of the most important SEO factors and their impact.

Link building is one of the most important parts of Magento SEO. It’s time and resource consuming process. Most of the SEO agencies are good at creating a strong external linking but rarely can provide quality internal website optimization that is 30% of your SERP success. There’s no surprise because a well-done internal Magento store optimization requires:

deep knowledge of Magento;
knowledge of specific server software;
knowledge of hosting companies offers and hardware capabilities;
UX and data analytics knowledge.

The average number of inbound links required for Top-1 ranking is about 30,000. It would be hard (and expensive) to overcome competitors, particularly if you launched your Magento store not long time ago. Nevertheless, you can do it if your internal optimization is done properly.