An SEO’s Guide to Magento Commerce

By Paul RogersHead of Digital Marketing for GPMD

About Magento

• Powers well over 100,000 ecommerce sites worldwide

• Three different versions: Community, Enterprise & Go

• Bought by eBay in 2011

Configuration

• Check your headings• Redirects are set to 302 by default• Ensure that you’ve got auto-redirects for URL

changes turned on• Only auto-redirect to base URL if you’re

installing Magento on the root

Redirects & Rewrite rules

• Ensure that you’re using 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects

• Remember to redirect query strings & pagination too

• Think about hooks for rewrite rules before you need to

• Keep an eye on auto rewrites (-1 appended to category name etc)

Orphaning products & pages

• Cross-sell products and avoid 404s• Maintain rankings and traffic

• Add links to related pages• Be clear with the status of the product, brand

or collection (eg: out of stock, redundant range etc)

404 Case Study

• Jewellery retail client with over 100k pages• Client removed lots of relatively new

collection pages• Very few links to these pages• Around 1,000 pages removed• Rankings dropped considerably across the

board

URL Structure

• Top-level products• Use directories and file extensions to help with

GA filters & rewrite rules• Redirect generic catalog pages to search-friendly

pages or remove them:

– fredperry.com/catalog/product/view/id/15940/s/spot-print-cycling-shirt/category/156/

– fredperry.com/men/shirts/multi-tipped-shirt.html– paulsmith.co.uk/shop/paul-smith-wallets-443/paul-smith-wallets-damson-

saffiano-leather-billfold-waller-agxa-1032-w270-d/product.html

Trailing slash canonical issue

• Tried to resolve it and failed – several times!• Use the canonical tag to point search engines

to the right page• We implement manual redirects if there is a

problem• Lots of potential transferrable value

Catalogue Search Pages

Disallow the /catalogsearch/ directory in the robots.txt file and do a removal request for the folder in GWT

Dynamic pages being indexed

Dealing with dynamic pages

• Add meta robots rules to apply noindex, follow tags to dynamic pages

• Start submitting removal requests in GWT

Indexation Case Study #1

• We did 1,000 removal requests per day

• Rankings improved very soon after we removed the pages

• Organic traffic improved by over 50% within six weeks

Message in GWT

Indexation Case Study #2

• No message in GWT• Around 70% of the pages in the index were

caused by layered navigation• Very little organic visibility• Once we removed the pages organic traffic

increased considerably• Rankings improved massively for generic

terms

Turning Dynamic Pages into Static

/brands/breitling-watches.html?gender=17052

/brands/breitling-watches/mens.html

/brands/breitling-watches/navitimer-collection.html

Turned valueless pages into static landing pages

Categorisation module on the way!!!

Case Study

• Turned well over 1,000 dynamic filter pages into static pages

• Added content to each page• Gradually built some links to the pages• Generated around 50,000 extra organic visits

over 12 months• Accounted for around 8% of all incoming

search traffic over 12 months

Be careful with internal links

Internal links to category pages and collections

Pagination

• Use rel=next and rel= prev to prevent Google from indexing paginated versions of pages

• You can use our SEOpack plugin to implement this

Sitemaps

• I would recommend having xml & html sitemaps

• Video sitemaps• Brand / segmented sitemap pages

Mageworx extended sitemap module

Be aware of reviews

• Review pages are duplicate content (as content is also on product pages)

• Lots of extra pages being indexed (and they’re valueless)

• Would recommend blocking with meta robots rules

Performance / Speed

• Jpeg Mini – super image compression• Minimizing CSS & JS• Using Mod_Pagespeed• We’re looking into full-page caching – Inviqa

have already done this so contact them for questions

Schema markup

Markup for products with videos

Price markup

Schema module for Magento

Retargeting > product-level

• Module about to be released• Retargeting for specific products gets better

results

Use the Magento app

• Magento has a pre-made mobile module that allows you to create a generic mobile phone app

• You can also create a mobile site – styling required

• Research The North Face’s example

Magento Mobile Module

Links

• Get Elastic Guide to Rating Schema for Ecommerce – LINK

• My Magento SEO Guide – LINK• Blueglass’s visual guide to rich snippets – LINK• The SEOpack Plugin – LINK• The Mageworx Sitemap Module – LINK• Magento Mobile Module - LINK

Thank you for listening!

Feel free to email any questions to paul@gpmd.co.uk!

Our SEOpack Module:magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/gpmd-seopack-9820.html