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Today, more consumers are making their purchases online. Experts forecast that 95% of purchases will be made online by 2040, which means more opportunities for countless entrepreneurs.
Even though this means more business, it also means more strategy needs to be put into your online presence. One of the best solutions that has worked for many years now is SEO. As one of the best ways to get free and organic traffic, White Hat SEO practices can increase visibility along with sales.
Want to know how to increase organic traffic on your customers’ Magento websites?
Keep on reading!
1. Conduct Keyword Research
The most important step to increase organic traffic is keyword research.
Keywords are phrases that your target audience use to find information or products online. Therefore, higher ranking is based on well researched and optimised keywords. So, if you want your customers’ Magento websites to rank higher on search engines, research and optimize the keywords.
Keyword research is continuously evolving as SEO experts try to keep up with Google’s latest algorithm updates. Also, keyword research informs your content strategy by helping you build a keyword list you want to rank for.
It is also important to keep track of your competitors and find out what keywords they are ranking for. This is where competitive intelligence tools are useful. Tools to use include Google Alerts, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush and Ahrefs among others. Using these tools, you can track your rankings, and how they change in relation to your competitors.
Additionally, don't hesitate to look beyond Google and seek for alternative traffic sources. Not sure where to start your SEO journey? This complex SEO guide will help you become a search engine optimization expert!
2. Include Descriptive Page Titles
Descriptive page titles enable online visitors to find and quickly understand a webpage content. Page titles are critical because they are the first-page element to be announced by any screen reading software.
Without a descriptive page title to define the topic, establish relevance and context, your online visitors have to do extra work. You will force them to click on the link to read or view the entire page to learn if it's valuable and useful.
Want to skyrocket your customers’ ecommerce site conversion rate? Use descriptive page titles!
For instance, let’s use examples of the following product categories – clothes, shoes, and watches. You can create page titles for each of the categories. Take it a step further by having a specific title. For example, Men’s Suits, Ladies Shoes, Kids Bags and so on.
If selling a brand product, you can optimize the page title by including brand and product name.
3. Incorporate Meta Keywords and Meta Description
Search engine bots crawl web pages to index the site. These bots gather a lot of information that includes links, page titles and web page content. It is important to know that the bots only index what they can find. The rest, they ignore.
Magento is SEO friendly but you will have to tweak a few things to ensure it works. By doing so, you can make your clients’ Magento websites bulletproof! If stores' product pages are focused on flash, frames, and images, search engines will ignore them. This is also true if the descriptions and products are buried in databases.
To make the e-commerce pages more visible, optimize the following:
- Meta Keywords
- Meta description
- Headers and content
Meta keywords are tags added in the HTML code of a webpage. They help to describe the content of the webpage. Meta keywords should be no more than 10 keyword phrases. For instance, if your clients sell wooden furniture, they can have meta keywords such as: wood, garden, furniture.
A meta description is essentially an extra line of explanatory text added after the page title, which appears in the Google search results page.
4. Avoid Duplicate Content
One of the most common issues that affect Magento websites' owners is duplicate content. There are several reasons why duplicate content occurs in Magento stores. You have:
- Product sorting
- Pagination
- Same product in different categories
- Product filtering
Duplicate content is not technically a penalty as many people assume. Despite this, it can impact your search engine rankings. For a search engine, duplicate content presents different issues. They include:
- Search engine bots don’t know which version to include and which to exclude
- Search engine bots don’t know which version to rank
To deal with duplicate content and provide the best search engine experience, Google and other search engines will not show multiple versions. Instead, they will select one version that will be the best result. Link quality will also be affected which means in the end, you will have content unable to achieve search visibility.
The good news is, with Magento 2.0, there is a way to get rid of duplicate content from your customer’s site. Here is what you need to do:
Go to Stores>Configuration>Catalog and scroll down to Search Engine Optimization. Set the Canonical LINK Meta Tags for Categories and Product to Yes.
5. Optimize Product Images
By optimizing Magento websites' product images, you give them a legitimate chance to improve their page rank. This can lead to more visitors, who in turn can be converted into buyers, increasing sales and revenue.
So, how do you optimize product images on Magento stores for your customers?
The first step is to capture the product in HD quality image. That means relying on the services of a professional photographer to have high-quality photos. Second, have proper alt tags for describing your images. It's extremely important as search engine bots can't read images but they can read alt tags.
Alt tags should be optimized and not stuffed with keywords. Give your images a keyword-rich name. Instead of “IMG00056.JPG” use a name like “Joe’s Whey Protein Powder.JPG.” Remember, alt tags need to be short and clear.
In Magento, you can optimize the product images using the following steps:
- Sign in to the admin side at Products>Catalog
- Click on the thumbnail in configurable Products.
- Navigate to the detail page>scroll down to Videos and Images
- Click on images, add an alt tag and save.
6. Use SSL Certificates
An e-commerce site use of SSL certificates, as evidenced by the HTTPS designation is a boost in page rank. In 2018, Google announced that all web pages without HTTPS certificate will display a “Not Secure” label on its Chrome web browser. As one of the items in a website launch checklist, this impacts the online visitor perception of Magento E-commerce sites you build for your clients.
If you want to rekindle the interest of past customers and build brand authority for your customer’s e-commerce site, use SSL certificates. The secure HTTPS protocol allows authorization and secure transactions. It also enables the exchange of information securely while preventing access from unauthorized users.
Here is how it works. The HTTPS protocol establishes a secure connection between a user’s browser and your customers’ server. As such, it enhances the protection of online visitor's data. What you need to know is that HTTPS uses TCP port 443 and the secure socket layer to transport data securely and safely.
Today, Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. The reason why websites with HTTPS protocol have an advantage over HTTP is that the former offers more security.
7. Speed up Magento stores you build for your clients
In 2010, Google made page speed a rank factor. The company went ahead and set new benchmarks for website owners. The average speed index should be 3 seconds or less and the average page weight in bytes should be 500KB or less. Google is not the only search engine measuring and using page speed as a rank factor.
According to experts, 40% of online visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Research reveals that 52% of online shoppers claim quick page load times are important for their loyalty to the e-commerce site. When online shoppers are faced with slow page load times, they will go to a competitor’s site.
This translates to loss of revenue and traffic. When it comes to mobile sites, those that load in 5 seconds or less earn two times more mobile ad revenue than mobile sites loading 19 seconds or more.
So, how do you improve page speed in Magento? The first step is to test the site’s page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Second, enable all caching features in Magento. To do this, from the admin, navigate to System>Cache Management and Flush Magento cache (as you can see on the image below).
Third, merge your JavaScript and CSS files. To do so, go to Stores>Configuration>Advanced>Developer and select merge and minify. Last, retest page speed. If the site loads in 3 seconds, you are on the right track. If not, make extra adjustments following the recommendations provided by PageSpeed Insights.
8. Optimize Your Customers’ E-Commerce Site Hosting
Another simple way of increasing sales for your customers’ Magento websites is by optimizing their hosting. Hosting and page speed go hand in hand. If your customers’ site is hosted on shared servers, expect slow page load times. But, if its hosted on dedicated or cloud hosting, expect fast page load times.
That means the faster your customers’ Magento websites load, the more sales the site will make. To optimize the hosting, start by benchmarking the performance of the site. The best tool for doing so is Google’s Lighthouse. You have the option of selecting a workflow that suits you best.
Once the app runs an audit and displays the report, make the necessary changes to improve the site’s performance.
How to Increase Sales for Your Customers’ Magento Sites?
There are more ways that can help to increase sales for a Magento e-commerce site. One includes adding products from the LiveChat suite to stores you build on Magento. As a LiveChat Solution Partner, you can either earn referral revenue or resell our software and put your own markup on your services.
Other ideas worth considering are the following: updating local SEO, integrating social media and creating abandoned cart automations. This is still not an exhaustive list, though. We highly recommend checking what your competitors do and align your optimizations to improve the bottom line.
Remember, the key is continuous improvement and learning. Follow the trends and expectations already in place.
