The Magento CMS platform is great for managing product stock levels, quickly adding and removing product categories and processing orders, but it’s not so good when it comes to ranking in Google.

The Magento developers made their platform easy on the user, but hard to find in the search engines.

Here are some of the things you can do to improve your rankings.

1. Check your HTML structure

Some Magento themes have poorly coded html structures. This means they aren’t utilising the full set of heading tags (for example) throughout the page properly.

It’s easy to check your code, just hold ctrl and press the U key. This will bring up the code that loads on the front end of your website.

Next scroll down and check that you have a h1 tag on the site first, then look for h2 tags and h3 tags.

To be correctly marked up, your h1 tag should be first, with h2 tags as children. H3 tags should only be used as children to h2 tags and so on.

Failing to structure your page in this way is frowned upon by Google, so check and potentially hire a developer to amend if it’s not done right.

2. Research keywords in your industry

Finding the keywords customers actively search online before purchasing will make all the difference to your websites overall sales.

You can use a tool like SEMrush to find these keywords by inputting your top competitors website into the tool. This will bring you back the keywords they get traffic from.

Once you have a list of keywords your competitors get traffic from, you can target those keywords on your Magento website.

3. Write unique content for the pages

Since Google’s panda update, you can no longer add pages to your website that are thin on content.

In most scenarios, the more content you have on a page for the better. This is especially true for your product pages, but be careful not to harm your conversion rates.

Also if you add content to your category pages, you can increase their rankings for additional long tail keywords.

4. Have clean URLs

One of the most important ranking Factors in Google is having clean, easy-to-read URLs.

Most Magento websites don’t have these however, as the default settings do not not produce friendly URLs.

Creating SEO friendly URLs in Magento isn’t too difficult to achieve, but remember to create 301 redirects from the old ones to ensure you don’t lost any links you’ve acquired etc.

5. Feature most searched products on your homepage

If your industry has products that get frequently searched for in Google, you should pull them into your Magento websites home page to pass pagerank through to them.

This will increase their chance of ranking in Google for product keywords, which are always great at converting highly.

6. Install a HTML sitemap

Without a site map it’s difficult for Google to know which pages you have on your website.

There are various Magento plugins that will help you create an automatic sitemap of all your products and pages. We highly recommend you install one for best Magento SEO results.

Further Read: SEO Tips to Increase Organic Traffic