Amp up the SEO for Magento 2

Salmat’s Head of Digital & Performance Marketing Andrew Lane discusses how to make sure search engines find your new eCommerce site.

Maintaining your website’s relationship with search engines is, like any relationship, all about effort. You’ve already spent many hours and budget optimising your eCommerce site for search engines and marketing campaigns. The last thing you want to do is lose all of that work the moment you migrate your website to Magento 2.

Not sure where to start? Don’t panic, let’s start at the beginning.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is all about placing content and signals into your website to help search engines understand it better.

A search engine like Google indexes everything on the internet by feeding it through an algorithm. It then matches search queries to websites according to its algorithm.

You can increase traffic to a website by improving its position within the search engine results page (SERP). Getting it close to first position in the search results will usually drive the best volume of traffic.

How exactly the algorithm works is a closely kept secret, but you can make your website attractive to search engines by, for instance, optimising photos and using relevant content to demonstrate your aurthority on particular topics throughout the site.

Key SEO ranking factors include:
• On-page optimsiation (Page titles, meta descriptions, tags)
• Content (keyword usage, content length, content quality)
• Performance (site speed, HTTPS, site security)
• Links (internal, backlinks)
• Structure (XML, HTML, URL structure)

Search Engine Marketing uses similar principles. It most often refers to strategies that pay search engines to increase your site’s visibility and are also known as pay per click (PPC) or paid search ads. Google Adwords is a prime example.

SEM channels include:
• Google AdWords
• Bing Ads
• Yahoo: Search Ads

SEM can help prospective customers find you using location and language targeting. For instance, if you’re an ice cream shop in Byron Bay, you don’t want to pay for ads in Melbourne.

You can use a lot of the same keyword identification work you did for SEO as the basis for your SEM campaigns.

Simple, right?

Yet according to our SMMI 2017 research, only one in 10 online businesses are invested in search engine optimisation. So, even though you’re migrating to a top-end platform with Magento 2, how are your customers going to get there? There is no point in having the best website if customers can’t find it, especially when we know that 90 per cent of people don’t click after the first page of results on Google.

From our research, we discovered that the lack of investment in SEO and SEM had more to do with lack of skill and understanding than a lack of desire to use these channels. Luckily, Netstarter can shoulder nearly all of the SEO work for your flash new Magento 2 site with the SEO module wrapped up in our Netstarter Stack.

The Netstarter Stack is the streamlined solution to complete the Magento 2 migration. It features eight modules essential to the modern eCommerce experience, including a robust SEO module. It considers keyword research, and what content needs to be where on your website in order to provide the best visibility to search engines and therefore your customers. You can find all the technical details of the SEO module in our comprehensive Magento 2 migration eBook.

Most importantly, the module makes optimising your website’s SEO a core component of the build.

Do not wait until after you migrate to think about search. It is possible to lose up to 40 per cent of your traffic upon migrating to a new site and to spend the next six months trying to recover lost ground.

SEO is something that needs to be discussed upfront and in parallel through the design and development phase of a new website.

The best part is Netstarter can do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Our team will look at your website’s Google Analytics and Search Console, and do a gap analysis to understand where there is content missing between the old website and what you want to achieve with the new site. This research will inform the structure and content you include on your website.

Once everything is running smoothly on your classy new Magento 2 site, it’s time to refine your SEM campaign strategies. A lot of the foundation work Netstarter does for SEO can be used post-launch in SEM.

Where SEO is more of a long-term approach, SEM can be more flexible for your short term marketing tactics. It allows you to promote specific messages to an audience that is actively looking for your product or service.

SEO and SEM are crucial, but it’s only one aspect of your online business. Do you get the feeling you’re only getting part of your digital story right? Check out how all of Netstarter’s products work together in our eBook, Digital Story, to find out how to get the most out of your eCommerce site.

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