Magento 2 SEO & Search

But hold on a minute. Before jump right into the main topic, let me introduce you something first. And yes it is Magento 2 SEO extension from Mageplaza. Well, technically you can do SEO just fine without it, it’s definitely up to you to download it or not. But hey, SEO extension is FREE and it has a lot of awesome which can save you from a ton of manually works. Why not, right?

Websites, particularly eCommerce stores, are no different from a big supermarket with multiple web pages and product attributes for shopping. It comes as no surprise that you will get lost along the way without a well-organized navigation system.

Layered Navigation in Magento 2 default is designed as a convenient sitemap on your Magento 2 store. The navigation is usually placed on the left of the category page with a list of categories and price range to filter the options.

In this post, we will discuss how to configure product listings in Magento 2. Setting the effective way to show your product listings will help encourage customers to buy more and customers will conveniently and easily find their preferred products. You can set the default number product listing to appear as a list or in a grid. In the backend, you can also determine the selection number of products appearing per page and select which attribute is used to sort the list. Moreover, you can even set to allow customers to view all products per page or not. Build a product recommendation system like Amazon such as “You also may like” feature, frequently bought together, who bought this also bought is also a good idea. Now, let’s start with Configuring Product Listings in Magento 2.

In this post, we will introduce how to configure Search or Catalog search in Magento 2. Setting the minimum and maximum number of characters that can be submitted in a query is an important part when you adjust the Catalog Search configuration. For example: you can choose the minimum number 1 and the maximum number 148.

The Pagination Controls provides another way to display the product listing. You can set the number of links that appear in the control, and configure the Next and Previous links. To show the pagination link, it is required when the number of products that need to be shown is greater than the permitted amount in the product list settings.

Adding more Search Terms is a necessary thing to make the customers’s finding any items with ease. With constant research and updates, you can identify their search trends and add keywords accordingly. This can improve customers’ experience and may shorten the searching process. Moreover, it is also possible for stores to use search terms and search results as a way to promote current products.

Search Terms are configured by admins on Magento 2 stores, that means customers need to type the keywords of the needed products and get them on the search results. And interestingly, you can make an small survey of the customer demands via the search terms by tracking what the clients are looking for in your store. When the number of searches for an unvavailable product are large enough, it is time to add it to your catalog.

To online stores, it is difficult to handle the product catalog when the database is large. Using Flat Catalog will help you speed up your product collection instead of managing the catalog data in many tables by the Entity Attribute Value (EAV). When your store applies the Flat Catalog, the new tables on the fly are generated and they will store all necessary data related to your products or categories.

Support the Search Terms Report is one of the most helpful utilities from Magento 2. The report will show the number of results as well as the number of times a term is used. Moreover, any data will be stored and filtered by terms, stores, results, and hits. Export them as you need for further analysis.

From Magento 2 backend, store admins can auto-generate a permanent product redirect whenever the URL key of a product changes. To apply the URL Redirect, let mark Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL checkbox that apppears beneath the Search Engine Optimization section. At that time, your store is already ready to set for the automatic product redirects as updating the URL key.

Configuring the sitemap in Magento 2 Admin allows you to apply an awesome Magento tool with a document file which contains all of website’s URL and possibly direct people to any page on Magento stores quickly. In addition to the utility of direction, Magento 2 sitemap is also an easy way to point what pages are ready for crawling to any search engines, that is very useful for your better SEO.

SEO Friendly URL indicates links that are short but full of keywords. It can help your store site rank higher in search engines, which drives more traffic and builds higher trust. Besides that, visitors find it easier to remember and navigate with a short and concise URL. Hence, it is one of the first steps to make your store SEO optimized.

With the URL Rewrites tool, you can create both Product Rewrites, and CMS page even Category Rewrites in order to redirect the visitors to another URL instead of the previous address if there is any change in the category. It removes concerns about any category changes, helps retain customers and brings higher search engine rankings.

Beside Product and Category, CMS Page is one of three elements store admins can redirect the visitors to another link if there is any change on the CMS page. With URL Rewrtie tool from Magento 2, the URL of content page or other page can be set for the rewrite.

Creating the Product URL Rewrite means you can change the product link for better SEO and make your site more friendly with the visitors. However, during the rewrite process, you should know what Target Path and Request Path are.

As you take visitors from the old pages to the new ones, there is a chance of traffic decrease since the old address is not linked to the new address of the page. Hence, if these problems arise, you need to reactivate the URL Rewrite, which is the default option offered by Magento 2. This option allows you to edit your URL so that customers clicking on the old link will be taken to the new link. Thanks to it, you can see your page with better SEO results, higher traffic and better conversion.

The canonical meta tag in Magento 2 is a very important meta tag in SEO and using the canonical meta tag can improve your site ranking and concentrate pageviews. It helps a lot in solving duplicate content problems when there are multiple URLs containing identical or very similar content so that the search engines can index exactly your preferred URL. Scroll down to see the steps to enable Canonical Meta Tag for your Magento 2 store.

A sitemap is the optimized solution helping index your store to search engines, simultaneously, the sitemap is designed specially and friendly in order to that web crawlers can find pages without any difficulties. Thus, let’s follow this tutorial to learn the steps to enable and submit the sitemap to search engines in Magento 2, and let’s learn how to configure the sitemap in our next post.

Google Adwords and Google Universal Analytics are both the awesome Google tools that help you optimize your content, analyze your traffic, and connect your catalog to shopping aggregators and marketplaces. In fact, Google Adwords is the biggest search advertisement provider with more than 65% market share (Statista).

Google Universal Analytics and Google Adwords are both the awesome Google tools that help you optimize your content, analyze your traffic, and connect your catalog to shopping aggregators and marketplaces. All data can be fetched automatically and timely, which can reduce your workload significantly. In addition, understanding how your store is operating via updated data helps you make better decisions for future improvements.

As you know, configuring robot.txt is important to any website that is working on a site’s SEO. Particularly, when you configure the sitemap to allow search engines to index your store, it is necessary to give web crawlers the instructions in the robot.txt file to avoid indexing the disallowed sites. The robot.txt file, that resides in the root of your Magento installation, is directive that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing can recognize and track easily. In this post, I will introduce the guides to configure the robot.txt file so that it works well with your site.