When it comes to e-commerce SEO, I have worked with the majority of popular platforms over the years, as well as many custom bespoke systems. However, over the past four years one platform has overtaken the competition, both in the UK and internationally.
That platform is Magento, and since being purchased by eBay in 2011 it has become the most popular choice of platform for many online retailers. I previously worked at a specialist SEO & Magento agency for 3 years, allowing me to do many experiments and tests to see how best to optimise Magento.
I’ve worked on some of the largest UK-based Magento platforms, for some of the UK’s biggest brands such as Jewson Tools, and if there is one thing I’ve learnt it’s that out of the box, Magento is not optimised for organic search.
Moved to Magento only to see your organic traffic drop off a cliff?
Sadly this is a very common problem, and although Magento isn’t always to blame for all the issues caused by this traffic drop (especially if the correct technical SEO migration wasn’t carried out by a competent ecommerce SEO consultant), it has fundamental flaws in the platform which can lead to issues specifically with the Google Panda algorithm.
The Google Panda algorithm looks for ‘thin’ websites, which typically have lots of pages with low quality content. The theory behind this is that these sites are not good for the user experience. Whilst your website might not fall into this ‘SEO trap’ on other platforms, the layered navigation (also sometimes referred to as faceted navigation) in Magento is often to blame for huge indexation bloat.
From my experience, no matter how competent a Magento developer is, they lack the specialism for understanding how to solve technical Magento SEO issues. So, if your traffic has plummeted following a move to Magento, why not get in touch and see how I can help you recover?
Moving to Magento? What you need to know to keep your organic search traffic
If you’re planning on moving to Magento then you will need a Magento SEO migration to ensure that the move goes smoothly, and you don’t lose all your traffic. The majority of people I talk to were never told that they should do an SEO migration when moving to a new website, and only learnt afterwards that they needed it, when the traffic for organic search fell off.
So, if you are reading this and you have a new website coming soon, then now is the time to get in touch about your SEO – the sooner the better. The longer you leave it, the greater the risk of your free traffic dying and your revenue stream fading away.
Magento 2 SEO
In 2015, we saw the release of the long awaited new version, Magento-2, and if there is one thing which many people found out from the original version of Magento, it is that Magento is not SEO friendly out of the box.
My initial opinions of Magento-2 are that it is certainly a powerful platform and offers significant improvements regarding SEO from the original platform, but like its older brother, Magento-2 isn’t SEO friendly without the correct analysis and configuration.
If you are at all worried about your Magento site and would like some consultancy, please get in touch. I work with businesses of all sizes, in countries across the world.