magento seo - thinkvis sept 2012
DESCRIPTION
My slides from my ThinkVis presentation on Magento SEO.TRANSCRIPT
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 [email protected]!
Our SEOpack Module:magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/gpmd-seopack-9820.html