Internal Linking for Mobile-First & Mobile-Only Indexing

Three years ago, I wrote a post for the Moz Blog advising how the latest news on mobile-first indexing would impact internal linking strategies, particularly for larger sites.

“By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing”, I joked in my introduction. Little did I know.

Only now — in the summer of 2021 — are Google, supposedly, maybe, finalizing the rollout of mobile-first. Even as of August 2021, Google is still very much actively crawling sites with Googlebot desktop*.

As with the recent delays to the Core Web Vitals rollout, the issue here for Google is that they can’t push changes which make their results worse. As Mike King pointed out back in March over at iPullRank, there’s still a big disparity between the mobile and desktop versions of the web, especially when it comes to links.

I don’t need to persuade most SEOs that they should care about links, but I maybe do need to remind you that internal links are, for most pages, a much bigger part of how they get their strength than external links. On an even vaguely established site, it’s not unreasonable to think that including a landing page in your top nav is going to generate more impactful links than most digital PR campaigns could ever hope to. And yet, sites tend to focus disproportionately on the latter, which is perhaps what brings us to this conundrum today.

In this post, I’m going to point out some of the common causes of disparities between mobile and desktop internal linking, when you should care, and what you can do to fix these issues without throwing UX under the bus.

*(thanks to Dom Woodman and the wealth of data at his fingertips for confirming for me that this is still the case!)

A brief history of mobile-first

Back in 2015, SEOs had two months’ warning to prepare for what the industry nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”. This wasn’t the first time that Google had factored mobile friendliness into its rankings, but it was probably the first time they tried to make a really big deal out of it as a way of steering webmasters — a sign of things to come.

About 18 months later, in November 2016, we got the phrase “Mobile-first indexing”. Over the next few years, SEOs with access to multiple Search Console properties became familiar with the routine trickle of emails informing them of sites moving over to the new paradigm.

During this period, some SEOs, including the late Russ Jones, myself in the aforementioned post on the Moz Blog, and my old boss Will Critchlow, started to voice concerns about the potential impact on the linkgraph:

The overall impression at the time was that Google was using a hybrid index for now, but that “mobile only” was already on its way.

Fast forward to March 2020, and Google warned we had six months to prepare for the final toll of the desktop index. This initially suggested a September 2020 rollout, then that became March 2021, and then, as I’ve mentioned above, that date too seemed to pass without incident.

We should assume, though, that this is still coming, or perhaps largely already here, and as such that our mobile sites need to present the version of truth we want Google to see.

The roles of internal links

Internal links, like all other links, fulfill multiple vital functions:

• Allowing search engines to discover new URLs

• Passing on clues as to topical relevance, via their anchor text, and source URL

• Passing on authority, via PageRank or equivalent

That’s of course without even getting into their roles in user experience, which is a topic for another post. (Although if you want to learn more about internal links, I recommend this Whiteboard Friday.)

A disparity in internal links between desktop and mobile versions, then, is likely to have far-reaching implications. (This also goes for any other two versions, such as rendered and raw HTML.) In most cases, one of the two versions will be the one that the site’s SEO practitioner(s) were happy with, and as such the other will not be.

At this point it’s common best practice, at least for your major templates, to routinely produce a list of links from both versions of the page and look for discrepancies.

That said, some differences are more impactful than others. For illustrative purposes, I’ve compared the desktop and mobile versions of five homepages, and in the rest of this post I’ll discuss some of the more interesting differences I noted, and what I’d recommend to the respective sites. Just to be clear: I am not involved with, or indeed pitching, any of these sites.

The five homepages I looked at were:

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/ — the UK site of the global e-com juggernaut

• https://www.optimizely.com/ — the well known CRO software

• https://www.ebuyer.com/ — an electronics e-commerce site

• https://www.zoopla.co.uk/ — a UK real estate site, similar to the US’s Zillow

• https://www.nytimes.com/ — an American broadsheet newspaper

Interestingly, of these, two had no differences at all for us to discuss — congratulations to Optimizely and Zoopla for paying attention back in 2018. For the other three, read on...

Less harmful examples

Anchor links within a page

The Amazon UK homepage links to itself no fewer than six times, with anchor text such as “back to top”, “see product details”, and “next page” (within a carousel). These links are all unique to desktop, although the mobile version does have a “Top of page” link instead of the “Back to top” link.

Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)

You probably don’t need to be too concerned about links like these from an SEO perspective. There’s no dramatic difference in optimization or targeting implied by the different text, and pages linking to themselves probably aren’t going to reshape the linkgraph.

Links to non-indexed pages

Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)

The main nav link to the “Pet supplies” category on the Amazon UK homepage comes with different internal tracking tags on mobile vs. desktop:

• Desktop: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/browse.html?node=340840031&ref_=nav_em__ps_t2_0_2_14_24

• Mobile: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/browse.html?node=340840031&ref_=navm_em__pets_0_3_17_11

From a general SEO perspective, this isn’t an ideal way to handle internal link tracking — both of these URLs have a canonical tag pointing at the actual indexed page, but there’s still unnecessary dilution and wasted crawl budget here, compared to just tracking the link click using a JavaScript event listener.

However, from a specific mobile/desktop parity point of view, this isn’t a big deal. As I said, they both share a canonical tag pointing to the same place, so we end up with equivalent behavior.

A similar rule applies when linking to pages like “my account” or “basket” — there may be differences in desktop and mobile implementations, but as both pages are noindex and/or robots.txt blocked, it isn’t a big deal.

Anchor text

Ebuyer has a few instances of the same element using different anchor text on mobile vs. desktop:

Ebuyer desktop (top) vs. Ebuyer mobile (bottom)

Note the longer anchor text on mobile(!). I also noticed something similar on the New York Times site, although that may be due to them rapidly testing different headline variants.

Either way, I don’t think this is a huge deal as long as the behavior is intended and the implied topic is largely similar, which it is in these cases.

Common problems & solutions

Device-specific elements

One of the most common causes of disparity is navigation elements that are desktop-only. The example below is from Ebuyer, and shows a bunch of links that I was unable to find anywhere on their mobile homepage.

These links all point to URLs that also feature in the top-nav, so the impact on the link graph may not be huge. However, Google is likely to place different weightings on a prominent homepage link like this vs. a link buried in a navigation, so there are SEO implications to this disparity. Ebuyer’s desktop site implies that these are some of the most important subcategories on the site, whereas their mobile site gives them a more equal footing with other subcategories in the mega-menu.

Happening across millions of sites, this is the sort of issue that might impact the quality of Google’s results. Ebuyer has presumably featured here the categories that are core to their business, and if they rank slightly better in these cases than in other cases, that means Google is slightly more likely to show people results from a business that is highly competent in that area. That, from Google’s perspective, is surely a win, but one they miss out on by exclusively using the mobile version.

From Ebuyer’s point of view, the choice of what to feature in this element is a strategic lever that is lost when Google stops counting their desktop links. The only real solution here is to develop a mobile equivalent to this element, but one can be creative. It could be somewhere slightly different on the page, for example, or it could be a carousel on mobile but static on desktop. Alternatively, you can accept that this is a desktop-specific UX element that should be disregarded in any SEO consideration, and instead must justify itself through its benefit to conversion rates.

Mega-menus & subcategory linking

Many sites, especially e-commerce, handle internal linking by having a huge mega-menu on desktop that collapses into a hamburger menu perhaps four layers deep on mobile. This leaves users very many clicks from anything they might hope to find, and the ironic thing is that super-exhaustive top navigations aren’t necessarily optimal from an SEO perspective either. Sure, they get a lot of pages crawled and pass on a little equity, but they do nothing to concentrate relevance around subtopics, and they don’t allow you to focus your strength where it’s most needed.

Some sites improve on this with a section-specific subnavigation, for example these links on Amazon that only appear within the Grocery section:

This is a great alternative to a mega-menu in general, in that there are fewer sitewide links (meaning that each remaining sitewide link is a little stronger), and, proportionately, more links between closely related pages.

However, of course, this element doesn’t appear at all on mobile. D’oh.

Similarly, Amazon has these featured subcategories on desktop, performing a similar role:

Again, I’d say this is a great idea from an SEO perspective, but these links don’t exist on mobile.

Zoopla handles the same issue much more neatly:

Sidebar links to relevant subcategories

They similarly have subcategory links that only feature in the relevant category, but then on mobile, they retain them — just moving them to the bottom of the page instead of a sidebar:

Sidebar links shuffled to bottom of content on mobile

This isn’t hugely attractive, but it doesn’t matter — few people will scroll to these depths anyway, and Zoopla’s SEO strategy is robust to the mobile-only index as a result. Plus, because of the focus on interlinking only relevant subcategories, the volume of links here isn’t extreme.

SEO copy & hidden content

A similar argument could be made for Ebuyer’s treatment of SEO copy here:

It’s right at the bottom of the page, so perhaps this is an opportunity for internal linking? Indeed, there are a couple of links at the end of this block of text.

Without going too much into the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of copy in general, I’d say this is a little excessive for the bottom of an e-commerce category page (you can only see a fraction in the screenshot above). Instead, Ebuyer could do something similar to what they’ve done with their footer:

Collapsed or tabbed content can be a great way to handle bulky internal linking structures on mobile

On desktop, all of these footer sections are expanded by default, and all visible. On mobile, they’re hidden in these expandable sections. This is generally a good way to handle SEO elements on mobile, as Google has said repeatedly at this point that there’s no downside to doing this.

Conclusion: On-page linking, but tastefully

I’ve tried to explore here some of the common issues that sites face when aiming for mobile/desktop linking parity.

To quickly recap, the main issues I recommend sites focus on are:

• Missing navigation elements

• Opportunities for deep-linking without resorting to mega-menus

And my suggested solutions are:

• Pushing linking widgets to the bottom of the page on mobile, rather than removing them altogether

• Using tabs, carousels, expandable sections and other creative solutions to make better use of on-screen real estate

I’m keen to see more examples in the wild, though — how is your site handling mobile-first internal linking? Tell me on Twitter!

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

• How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

• How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

• What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

• How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

• Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

• Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

• Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

• What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

• How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

• How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

SEO and Google Discover

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz’s own SEO expert, Tom Capper, talks about the untapped organic traffic opportunity that is Google Discover. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is going to be Google Discover. 

Now this is a massive opportunity that I think a lot of sites have been sleeping on. It's been out for about three years now, and the sites that are taking it seriously, I've seen quite a few recently that are now getting more traffic from Google Discover than they are from organic.

What is Google Discover? 

So hopefully that gives you some kind of idea of what you're missing out on. But in case you have been sort of living under a rock, completely oblivious to this, this is what Google Discover is. 

This is what it looks like. So basically, if you open up the Google app on Android or on iOS, you'll see, yes, there's a search bar that you normally expect with Google, but there's also, if you scroll down, by default at least, there's this list of recommended articles, very heavily personalized.

You can sort of scroll infinitely. They're based on your interests and sort of what Google has seen you searching for and looking for in the past basically. They're all articles. This isn't e-commerce or something like that for the most part.

How to be featured

Now I'm going to talk a little bit about what you need to do to be featured here. Indexing, at the basic level, works the same as regular Google organic.

There's no sort of special process like you might see with Google News or something like that. But there are a few hard requirements that you're going to need, and there's also a few sort of myths that I'm going to talk about. 

1. Schema markup

Now the first big hard requirement that I've seen completely ubiquitously is schema markup. So in my own Google Discover feed, everything that I've seen recommended to me is either marked up as schema in an article or schema in a news article. When I've looked at the analytics of sites I have access to and what they're getting featured in Google Discover, it's the same. It's all either article or news article markup. 

Now it might be possible that people are succeeding with maybe recipes or something like that and I've just not seen that. But definitely some kind of schema markup is required here. 

2. Unambiguous, broad topics

Now there's also sort of, like I say, a very heavy topics layer here and what people are being recommended based on their interests and so on. This is kind of surprisingly unsubtle as far as I can tell, or at least surprising if you're used to Google's organic algorithm and how sophisticated it is. 

So basically Google will cotton on very heavily to a few broad topics of things you're interested in, and sites that I've seen doing well and articles that I've seen doing well are very unambiguously about one of these sort of broad topics.

So, for example, the Moz Blog actually does quite well in Google Discover. I think that's because it's very unambiguously about SEO, and it's never really dangerous to recommend a Moz blog article to someone who's interested in SEO. Similarly, on some sites the articles I've seen doing very well are ones that prominently mention and clearly are about maybe a celebrity or a car brand or some other sort of broad topic like this. So this sort of unambiguous topic seems to be very important. 

3. Click-worthiness

The next requirement is more something you might be familiar with if you've optimized for YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or something like that, and it's this clickiness. And to be honest, I'm sorry to say kind of being click-baity. The articles that do best on Google Discover are ones that sort of hint at something salacious in the title but don't reveal it. So they're really drawing in that click, and it seems to really reward that. 

Now it's worth mentioning this title. This is not a title tag, like you might be used to from SEO, and it's also not an Open Graph title, like you might be used to from social media optimization. This is part of that schema markup. It's the headline in there. This needs to be no more than 110 characters. Ideally pretty close to that. There's also this image. This image needs to be 1,200 pixels wide, and again it's referenced in that schema markup. Again, that can be a very important way of drawing in that click. 

4. Speed

The last sort of big requirement that I noticed is speed.

It seems much more important for Google Discover than it is for Google organic to have fast loading pages, to such an extent that I've seen a lot of people out there sort of claiming that AMP is a hard requirement. 

Google Discover myths

Now we sort of get into the myths section or the urban myths. 

1. AMP

AMP is definitely not a hard requirement for Google Discover.

There are sites out there doing very well without AMP, even smaller, lesser-known sites doing very well without AMP. But you do need to be very fast. So I can see how people come to have that idea, and sure enough if you look in your own Google Discover, you'll probably see a lot of AMP pages. But it's definitely not a requirement. Indeed there are even some sites doing well with slower pages, but they tend to be more a household name or very authoritative brands within their space, which possibly compensates.

2. Link building

I think that's what leads people to think about this next myth, which is I've seen a lot of people recommending that you should do link building for the benefit of Google Discover. Maybe that does help. But compared to organic, I've seen sites DA 20 something doing very, very well, six-figure daily traffic through Google Discover. It's definitely not a hard requirement to have any substantial amount of links.

So maybe it helps, or maybe there are other ways that Google is measuring brand here, but this is not something I would focus on for Google Discover to start with. 

3. Knowledge graph

The last sort of myth that I've seen is I think it comes about because early on in Google Discover you could follow certain sites or brands if they were featured in the Knowledge Graph, and then you would supposedly see more content from that site.

That's no longer possible. But in any case, like I say, I've seen sites doing very, very well that not only have very few links, but also as a brand or as a site or as an entity are not in the Knowledge Graph. So what I think probably is working trying to get your brand featured in the Knowledge Graph and probably your brand already is featured in the Knowledge Graph if it's well-known.

This is definitely not something that's going to be a hard requirement for you to perform very, very well in Google Discover. 

Measuring success in Google Discover

Now the next step you're probably going to want to think about is how do you actually go about, once you're optimizing for Google Discover, how do you measure how well you've been doing so that you can sort of iterate and improve.

Now sadly this is a little bit messy. The most accurate data source you're going to have is Google Search Console. Similar to Google News, if you're getting any Google Discover traffic at all, you'll get this extra tab appear in Google Search Console that shows you your Discover traffic as separate to your web search traffic or your Google News traffic if you have that.

Again, the Google News thing only appears if you're getting Google News traffic. Obviously, Search Console data isn't ideal. It has some limitations. It's not tied up with data from your other channels. It's not tied up with your conversion data or your on-site analytics. But if you want to actually debug this in something like Google Analytics, it's very messy. 

So what I've seen when I found articles that according to Google Search Console are only getting Discover traffic, zero web search traffic whatsoever, they're just getting Discover traffic, and then I look at how that Discover traffic appears in Analytics, it sadly very spread out.

There used to be some ways of capturing this through basically a typo in the referral that Google Discover was sending. Sadly, that's no longer the case. So what you tend to see is the Google Discover traffic appears mostly as Google organic, sort of blended in with your other organic data. Then a good chunk of it, in my experience about 17%, will appear as direct.

So 15% to 20%. Seventeen is probably overly precise. Then you'll get a tiny sliver which is appearing as this googleapis.com referral traffic. Now if you're getting anything with googleapis.com referral as the source and medium, then you're definitely getting some Discover traffic, but it's a lot more than you would think from this green slice. This is just sort of the tip of the iceberg.

So hopefully you found all of that useful. I'd love to know your own tips if you can share them on social and tag me or tag Moz. This is an area that I think right now is relatively little explored by SEOs and by the industry. So yeah, I'd love to see what other people are doing and what's working for them. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Data Visualization: Win Friends and Influence People with Accurate Data

Marketers love graphs. Oftentimes, however, we visualize complex data in a way that can be unintentionally misleading. The graph trends upwards but is the data the right metric to be plotting? Are we choosing data that genuinely conveys the state of play, or just information that supports our case?

We have reams of data at our fingertips, and using that to support business cases or budget increases is paramount. How do you do this in a way that conveys truth to a less-knowledgeable audience?

When presenting results to stakeholders, marketers will often find themselves talking to people who don't understand the metrics to the same degree. Let’s make smart choices in how we choose and display data. From cleansing data and choosing the right metrics, to visualizing them in a way that helps build support and omits bias.

Winning friends with reporting

Marketing reports are about communicating a message through data. Often that data can be fairly complicated — augmented by segments, audiences, time periods, and campaigns. The message is usually much more simple. There is a key thought, implication, or decision that you want to leave the reader with. The key to good reporting is making sure the data elicits those thoughts in an unbiased way that is easily comprehended.

Consider your audience

The first step in ensuring your reports are useful to other people is putting yourself in their shoes. Go back to basics with your report and ask yourself this: who is the audience of this report? 

The audience is central to the reporting process. After all, you’re trying to convey a message. So, when designing your reports, you may want to conduct some research first — that is, speak to the people who will be receiving your report. This might be a client, your line manager, a colleague, or an outside stakeholder. Whoever it is, they’re likely to have a different set of questions they want to have answered by the data than you.

Ask them some of the following:

What questions do you want this report to answer?

Find out from the report receiver if there is a specific question they need answered by the data you're presenting. This might well be something along the lines of needing to know if the campaigns being run are generating ROI. It might be wanting to know if the budget is being assigned efficiently. Perhaps they need to know whether the new marketing channel being trialled is bringing about results, or if the test you’ve been running should be rolled out across more pages of the website.

If you don’t know what the report needs to answer, it'll be hard for you to write one that’s useful to the people you’re presenting it to.

Who else needs to see this report?

Your key stakeholders may not be the only people who will pick up the report and draw conclusions from it. As an agency account executive, you may have a key contact who you send the reports to, but find out from them if they then send them on to others. If it goes to your contact’s colleagues or boss, they may have different needs.

Perhaps you send the reports to your line manager, who then discusses it with the board of directors. Is there key information the board needs that you can include front-and-center in your reports?

What insights do you want to be able to pass on?

The marketing report you provide might be useful in helping the recipient communicate ideas to their stakeholders. For instance, if the report is designed to show the performance of SEO for your company, might your line manager like to be able to argue for a bigger budget? What can you include in your reports to make this decision clearer?

What do you already report on that you would also like to see in this report?

There’s often a lot of duplication going on with marketing reports. Each marketing channel will be commenting on their impact on the website, or how they’re improving brand awareness. Can you help to simplify the reporting process by bringing some of these other reports into yours? If your report’s recipient is already reporting on metrics of their own, find out if they’re aligned enough to include in your reporting. You'll instantly be adding value to the report you’re creating.

What are your key objectives and performance metrics?

Ascertain what metrics actually matter. Marketing reports can end up cumbersome, and unfortunately, skim-read as a result. Are there any pertinent metrics that your report recipients really need to know? What are the KPIs they're being measured on? How does your work impact those? Include these metrics directly into your report so your stakeholders can see how your activity is benefiting them.

How much of what I report on are you already familiar with?

It’s not an easy question, and requires some tact, but it’s important to understand your report recipient’s level of understanding about what you’re reporting on. Are they marketers themselves, or are you their main touch-point within your marketing department? Are they seasoned SEOs who have seen every iteration of an SEO report under the sun?

Once you know their level of understanding on the subject, you can decide how to format your report to aid in explaining details more clearly, like including a glossary or notations.

An example email to a stakeholder designed to help understand what a marketing report needs to cover.

Learn to use your reports for your own marketing purposes

Let’s not forget that we’re reporting on marketing data because we want to show how our work is paying off. That means there will always be an element of showing our successes and failures. How we communicate those through our reports is important.

What do you want to communicate?

Are you looking to prove that a concept works or that a campaign has been successful? Are you wanting to share an update on the general trends of an account?

Consider your marketing reports as a marketing tool in their own right. Once you have a better understanding of their audience, you can use them to present data to clearly convey your message.

Your reports can help you get sign-off

Your marketing reports will serve to sum up the successes and room for growth in your previous marketing endeavors. Done well, they'll help to show off your skills and achievements. This can pave the way for future buy-in from your stakeholders. “Referral traffic to the website has increased by 50% due to the last digital PR campaign you ran? Of course you can run another!”

Your reports prove the worth of your work

Along with showing off all the good you’ve achieved, your reports should also cover what you’ve learned. That might include projects or campaigns that have not performed as you hoped. Being honest about what didn’t work and how you would change that in the future can help to solidify your reputation as a diligent, accountable marketer.

Not everything will go to plan all of the time, and our reports should reflect when they don’t. Only giving one side of the story through reports can lead to some awkward conversations later down the line when stakeholders want to know where their budget has gone or why goals haven’t been met.

Summarize effectively

The unfortunate truth about marketing reports is that they don’t always get read. You may spend hours putting together an intelligent, thought-out commentary to go alongside your carefully crafted graphs and charts, only for it to lie attached to an unopened email for weeks.

One of the ways our reports can be off-putting to their audience is length. Send a Data Studio document consisting of 15 pages to a busy executive and they may never click “open” again. A way around this, and to make sure the pertinent information is definitely being read, is a succinct summary.

Add the main message to the first page of the report. Write it after the rest of the report has been constructed and take from that analysis the most salient points you want your audience to know. Summarize the key points and include only the important data on that first page. If the recipient reads nothing else from the report they should be able to take away the key information you need from this one page alone.

The rest of the data, tables, charts and commentary should be backing up that first page. This can be where the deep-dive analysis of the data is carried out, but not where the important information is first raised.

Continually review your report structure and tone

Your reports might need to go through several iterations in order to get the right level of “comprehensive” and “clear”. Don’t be afraid of asking for feedback on your reports. Think of them like marketing collateral – you may need to refine the messaging to make sure it's resonating with your target audience. Reports shouldn’t be a case of “set-it-and-forget-it” — they may need to be adapted to new team members or stakeholders.

Share insight, not just intelligence

There's a difference between insight and intelligence. In this instance, intelligence is the sharing of data. It's valuable in its own right, but not necessarily the best way to communicate through your reports. 

Instead, consider insight to be the goal. Insight should come from a place of analysis. When reporting on your marketing campaigns, dig deeper to look into trends, seasonality, social, and political factors that might be having an effect.

Your expert take

If you're producing marketing reports, chances are you're a skilled marketing professional with a broad or deep knowledge of marketing disciplines. Your opinion matters.

Depending on the type of report you're creating, and the audience who's receiving it, you may need to go into quite some detail explaining what the data shows. Guide the readers to the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. This way, the reports become useful decision-making tools.

Evaluate how this report backs up your other comms

It's likely that your marketing reports aren't the only source of information about the campaigns or channel your stakeholders are receiving. You may be updating them on progress through meetings, dashboards, and emails. Progress might be frequently discussed by other members of your team. Your reports need to be cohesive with these other communications. If they aren’t, how do stakeholders know which one is the source of truth? 

There are many of ways in which the results may be misunderstood or miscommunicated. When creating your reports, it's imperative that you're aware of what other discussions around the report-subject are being held so you can ensure you're providing the data that evidences and reiterates those discussions.

Keeping data accurate and unbiased

Using your reports as a marketing tool makes sense when you think about them being a reflection of your hard work. However, this approach could lead to some distortion of the facts.

One key takeaway from this article is this: keep your reports honest and unbiased.

This is hard to do. There’s often a lot riding on your reports — new budgets, recurring revenue, your promotion opportunities, etc. To help, the following are ten tips for making sure you're presenting the data in the best way possible for your audience to see the true message.

1. Choosing the right data set

What data do we need to report on? This might seem like a simple decision to make, but it’s actually more nuanced than you might expect. 

Consider what you're trying to demonstrate through your reports. If it's the success of a marketing campaign, then the data you need to report on might go beyond the data you have a direct impact on.

For instance, if you're tasked with driving converting organic traffic to a website, then it might not be enough for you to just report on the Google Analytics organic channel traffic and conversions. To create a truly useful marketing report, you may also need to include data from what happens after the traffic completes a conversion on the website. Can you include data from software like Salesforce or Hubspot, which gives an indication of how much of that traffic actually became a marketing qualified lead, or even a customer?

Your data should be chosen based on the overall goals of the marketing initiatives you're reporting on. Rarely is that simply to drive more traffic to a website or generate more awareness of a product. It usually comes down to revenue. To really identify whether the work you're carrying out is making an impact on a company’s bottom line, then you may need to include that revenue data in some way. Doing this gives a much fuller picture of how effective your marketing is, and keeps you accountable to the role that your marketing activity should be playing in the success of the business.

2. Reporting on the key goals

Think about the big picture of the company. What are the overall KPIs it's working with? How can the information provided in your report tie into those KPIs?

Say, for example, your company has released a new line of sneakers. The overall goals of the new campaign are to have sold 20,000 units of this new stock by the end of the year. How can your SEO report include information that might help identify whether that launch has been successful?

By including references to wider company goals in your report, it will stay more relevant to a wider audience. It also means there's a direct correlation to be drawn between the activity you're carrying out and the success of the business.

This might mean that your report structure needs to change seasonally as the goals of the company change. You may have a page of your report dedicated to data that tracks the success of the sneaker launch until the end of the year. As a new product line launches and the focus of the company changes, so may the focus of that page of the report.

3. Keeping the integrity of that data set

Our reports ride on a lot of trust that the data we’re using is… actually right. Consider: Who has access to your Google Analytics data? Your Search Console account? Who can add filters, delete views, change custom groupings, delete properties?

It’s really important to lock down who has the ability to make changes to your data that could drastically affect its reliability. It’s even more important to build processes that will reduce the risk of it happening. Even the most seasoned Google Analytics user will not necessarily be aware of how adding a traffic filter to the account may affect the integrity of data that someone else in the team is reporting on.

You may well be trying to clean up your data source by better attributing channel data, or filtering out bot traffic. These are all good ideas. However, unless it's carried out in conjunction with other people who are using that data, properly noted and even annotated within your data source, it can cause a loss of integrity.

Even outside of the data source itself, there can be factors that affect it. For instance, Google Analytics channel data relies on people using UTM codes correctly. Make sure you invest time in creating training programs that inform stakeholders of how their actions can impact data. Create processes that limit the effect of those changes. Consider keeping a centralized document of UTM codes used on marketing campaigns and develop a system for creating them consistently. This way you can limit the poorly attributed traffic polluting your marketing reports.

4. Avoiding bad data

To reiterate: Our marketing reports should be useful to their recipients. Safe reports — ones that just cover basic metrics or cherry-pick data— do not add value.

When writing your reports, avoid just choosing data that is “bad”. That is, data that obfuscates truth and hides issues. This can be through choosing metrics that, on the face of it, look good (like a low site-wide bounce rate), but in reality do not provide sufficient information to base decisions on. For bounce rate to be a metric on which to base decisions, a reader would need to know what the bounce rate of individual pages were, or the type of content they contained, or even just whether the low bounce rate is coupled with a high engagement rate.

Bad data can also be data that has been highlighted because it's positive, but at the expense of showing data that might reflect badly on the marketing activities. Showing that traffic to a webpage is growing may look great. Not including the fact that conversion rate has steadily been declining could hide the issue of the decreasing quality of that traffic.

For example, look at these two charts. They show the same organic traffic data to a webpage:

The first image shows just the organic traffic to the page. If an agency presented this image to a client, it would suggest that their work over the past year had been successful. Organic traffic has almost doubled during those 12 months.

This second image uses the same organic traffic data, but adds in the leads generated by that traffic during the same time period. By adding in the leads generated by that organic traffic, you see a different story emerge of the success of that campaign. The traffic has increased but leads have decreased. There could be several reasons as to why that has happened, but this image would not suggest the recent SEO work has been successful in adding to their client’s business goals.

5. Giving a clear picture of the data

Your report needs to analyze, detail, and display the data in a way that tells a story. This is the insight that adds value. Think of your report like a journey. You want to draw your reader into the data in a way that helps them to understand the context, the results, and the conclusions.

Consider starting your report broad: What is the context of this data? Depending on your niche, this might include all sorts of related information like political background, weather data, economic factors, societal restrictions, COVID-19 case levels, etc. 

Your report should then narrow down to what is being reported on, looking specifically at the business. Perhaps this will include some of the more business-focused KPIs we discussed earlier. It might be the wider marketing team’s goals and metrics.

Next up should be the KPIs that your work has directly impacted. For instance, SEO traffic data, conversions, or content engagement.

From there it would be worth narrowing down further to look at the results of activity that has been carried out during the reporting time period. For instance, detail the results of that link-building campaign, or demonstrate how the changes to the webpage copy impacted bounce rate and dwell time.

6. Using the best visualizations for the data

Choosing the best way to display your data can make or break a report. You can take data from a confusing mess to being easily understood by simply changing the scale on an axis.

It's also very easy to mislead your audience by using an inappropriate chart or graph. Consider what you're trying to demonstrate. Is it the changes in data over time? Then perhaps a line or bar graph is the best bet. Need to show the relationship between the parts of a whole? Then a pie chart might be a good choice.

Whatever you do, make sure you avoid these common ways of skewing the data visually:

Manipulating the axis scale: Not starting at zero is a common way of making data look more significant than it is. A scale going from 1,000 to 3,000 makes the comparison of two data sets that differ by 500 look huge. Similarly, the axis not being labelled in the right increments can be very misleading. Too big a gap between increments and differences between plots on the graph look small. Too small a gap and the differences look very significant.

Parts not adding up to a whole: The key to a pie chart, or any graph that is meant to represent parts of a whole, is that it needs to add up to 100%. That is, every part should be represented, even if it's included in an “other” segment. 

Percentages instead of actual numbers: You’ll see these sorts of statistics all over social media when marketers are showing off their work. Growth will often be spoken about in terms of percentage changes rather than absolute numbers. Which sounds better: increasing traffic to the site from 10 to 20 users, or a 100% increase in users?

Missing data: Only showing the best quarter of a year of poor results can make the results look a lot better. In reality, the missing context is significant and shouldn’t be hidden.

7. Annotate your charts and graphs

Wherever possible, annotate your visualizations, especially if they're time-based. For instance, did you start filtering out internal traffic in March 2021? If so, that could have caused a dramatic drop in website traffic from that point onwards. Someone new to the business or your team may not know that it happened and will be looking for reasons for this change in traffic.

Equally, when comparing March 2021’s traffic to the previous year, the graph may give the impression of a drop in traffic year-over-year. In fact, this could be masking an increase in the external traffic to the site. Noting significant changes in the context of your data on your marketing charts and graphs can help identify genuinely significant changes.

8. Waiting for the right time to draw conclusions and report on data

It might be tempting to call out successes in your campaigns as soon as you see them. Often, though, it pays to wait before drawing those conclusions.

You may be only a month or two into a six-month campaign. Instead of declaring it a success now, note in your reports how other factors may yet influence it. 

It would be better to wait for a longer period of time to pass before you call a campaign or activity a success. There may still be insights to be gleaned from how successful it is or could be.

9. Showing a clear link between the data and next steps

Remember to be clear about the conclusions you want the reader of your report to take away. These conclusions should result in actions or decisions. Otherwise, the report isn’t actionable and its value is arguably limited.

What would you want someone who is less knowledgeable about the work you’ve been doing, or marketing as a whole, to take away from it? The data you're choosing to report on should be sufficient enough to back-up your analysis, and clearly link the conclusions you've drawn to your next steps.

10. Stay true to the data

Your reports need to be factually accurate in order for you to achieve a good balance of marketing collateral and reliable analysis.

If you gave this data set over to another industry professional with the same level of expertise as you, and with access to the same contextual knowledge, would they be likely to draw the same conclusions? If not, you may have introduced some bias into your analysis.

When analyzing your data, always consider whether another person who is more objective of the situation would be interpreting the data in the same way. This should help you to be more critical of the information, and less prone to highlighting only the positives.

Conclusion

The key aspects of any marketing report is that it needs to be accurate, factual, and clear. It should also show how your marketing has had an impact — whether it be positive, negative, or if it remains to be seen. Reports shouldn’t leave the reader confused as to their significance. Help your audience understand the data's context, and clearly show the actions that can be taken off the back of it.

Magento SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Magento Websites

When it comes to e-commerce platforms, there are few that are more robust than Magento. Due to its power and customizability, Magento is still the go-to e-commerce platform for retailers. This is especially true for enterprise stores. Magento is utilized by many enterprise sites such as American Express, Ford, Puma, Xerox, and more.

In 2019, it was estimated that Magento accounted for 30% of the e-commerce market share. Using BuiltWith data, we can see that 1.04% of the top 1 million sites utilize the platform, and Magento’s share of the market grows to 1.77% in the top 10,000 sites.

If you’re an SEO working in the e-commerce space, it’s going to be important to learn how to work with Magento. Fortunately, there are a lot of really good things that Magento does out of the box from an SEO perspective. However, there are definitely some considerations you’ll need to take into account with any Magento site.

What is Magento SEO?

Magento SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Magento platform. Magento has great features for SEO such as a robots.txt file, sitemap.xml and multiple ways to redirect pages. Magento SEO issues include duplicate content from the faceted navigation, improper canonical tags, and a lack of blogging functionality.

Below you can see our recommendations for improving SEO on the Magento platform:

1. Crawling & indexing

Duplicate content & faceted navigation

One of the biggest SEO issues with any Magento site is likely going to be the faceted navigation. Faceted navigations create huge crawling and indexing issues since their existence exponentially increases the number of pages that can be crawled. As pages in the faceted navigation will only either sort or narrow existing products, these pages create duplicate and similar content. Alsol, if you think about the fact that every single combination of parameters could be considered a unique page, the number of pages a faceted navigation creates can be enormous. In this example, Google showsa video from Google, they indicate how a store with 158 SKUs actually created 380,000 unique URLs that Googlebot could crawl. Not ideal!

If your Magento store utilizes faceted navigation, you’re likely going to need to take steps to control the crawl. While a how-to on controlling the crawl of a faceted navigation could warrant multiple blog posts, I’ll try to summarize steps that should be taken.

1. Audit to find low-quality, indexed pages from the faceted navigation. Identify steps to remove them from the index (noindex, canonical tag)

2. Review the site’s log files to find any low-quality pages that are getting crawled

3. Block the crawl of any low value parameters through the robots.txt

4. Consider only allowing pages with high search potential to be indexed

Of course, the steps taken here are going to vary a lot depending on the site. The overall point is that if you utilize a faceted navigation on your Magento site, one of the most important things you’ll need to do is review how Google is crawling and indexing the pages that are being generated and take steps to remove the indexation and then block the crawl of low quality or duplicate pages.

Product & category page canonical tags

By default, a Magento site’s canonical tags won’t be set for both product and category pages. This isn’t ideal, as it’s best practice to ensure that product and category pages have self-referential canonical tags. This indicates to the search engines that these pages are the pages that should be ranking well.

Fortunately, you can adjust this in vanilla Magento:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Ensure that “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products” are set to “Yes”

5. Select “Save Config”

By adjusting these settings, this should ensure that all of the site’s product and category pages will have self-referential canonical tags applied to them.

Canonical tags in pagination

When looking at paginated URLs of Magento sites, we can see that, by default, proper canonical tags are not set. In Magento, all of the paginated URLs in a given series have a canonical tag that points back to the root category page. For example, here is how the canonical tag of “Page 2” of a particular category would look:

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category

Technically, this is not best practice from an SEO standpoint. Canonical tags should only be used to consolidate duplicate content. Since paginated content are not duplicates of the root versions (as they contain different products), they should not have canonical tags that point to this version. Instead, every page within the pagination series should have it’s own self-referential canonical tag. This will tell Google that the paginated URL contains unique content and should be crawled accordingly.

URL: www.example.com/category?p=2

Canonical Tag: www.example.com/category?p=2

You might need to have a developer create a custom solution that allows the site’s pagination to utilize self-referential canonical tags instead of pointing to the root category page.

Indexable internal search pages

Another Magento SEO issue is that internal search pages are indexable out of the box. This means that Google can crawl and index these low-quality pages. These pages will generally be in the /catalogsearch/ URL path.

For example, here’s a Magento site where over 4,000 internal search pages have gotten caught in Google’s index:

In order to ensure that these pages don’t get indexed by Google, you’ll want to be sure the “noindex” tag is applied to them. We recommend having a developer implement this for you and providing this article as a reference point for them.

After you’ve implemented the “noindex” tag, you’ll want to be sure that none of your internal search URLs are actually getting indexed. Perform a search for “site:example.com inurl:/catalogsearch/”. If you see URLs appearing in the index, we recommend waiting until Google removes the majority of them. If you don’t see the URLs in the index, you might consider blocking them by using a robots.txt command.

Robots.txt

Within Magento, you can also configure the robots.txt file. You’ll want to utilize the robots.txt file in order to limit how many pages of your Magento site that Google is eligible to crawl. This is especially important to configure if your site utilizes a faceted navigation that allows users to select from a variety of attributes.

Fortunately, Magento does allow you to control the robots.txt of your site. To do this, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Content > Design > Configuration

2. Find the “Store View” you want to adjust and select “Edit”

3. Expand the “Search Engine Robots” dropdown

4. Add your robots.txt commands in the “Edit custom instruction of robots.txt File” field

How you adjust the robots.txt is going to depend on your particular store. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all option here. The main objective will be to block the crawling of any low value pages (that aren’t indexed) while allowing the crawl of high priority ones.

Below are some general things you might consider blocking in the robots.txt:

1. Low value pages created by the faceted navigation and sorting options

2. The site’s internal search pages

3. Login pages

4. The user’s shopping cart

Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml files ensure that Google has a pathway of discovering all of your site’s key URLs. This means that regardless of the site’s architecture, the sitemap.xml gives Google a way of finding important URLs on the site.

Fortunately, Magento has the capability of creating a sitemap.xml file and does a good job of this in it’s default settings. You can technically configure the XML sitemap settings in Magento’s “Catalog” menu. However, most of these should be okay.

While these settings are configured, you might need to generate your sitemap.xml file so it will actually be published on the site. Fortunately, that process is very straightforward. You can do this by:

1. Navigating to Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map

2. Click the “Add Sitemap” button

3. For “Filename” add the text “sitemap.xml”

4. For “Path”, choose the URL path you want to be associated with your sitemap.xml file. This is generally at the “/pub/” URL path

5. Click “Save & Generate”

This should correctly set up your sitemap.xml on Magento. You’ll then want to be sure to submit your sitemap.xml file to Google Search Console so Google can discover your sitemap.xml file.

2. JavaScript rendering

Something else that you’ll want to be mindful of on Magento sites is any content that is loaded through JavaScript. Magento frequently utilizes JavaScript to load key content on the store. While this isn’t inherently a negative thing for SEO, it is something you’ll want to be sure you’re reviewing.

If JavaScript is required to load key content on a page, this means that Google must perform a two-step indexing process where it processes the initial HTML, and then must return to the site to render any content loaded via JavaScript. Where SEOs need to check is in the second stage of the indexing process, to ensure that Google was able to “see” all of the content that is on the page. If any elements are loaded via JavaScript, it’s worth checking whether they’re indexed.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page in Magento where JavaScript is enabled in the browser. We can see thumbnail images, text in tabs, and a related products section at the bottom:

However, most of that content is reliant on JavaScript to load. When turning JavaScript off using the Web Developer extension for Chrome, most of those elements do not render. Notice how we can only see the initial three tabs on the page:

Since JavaScript is required to load a lot of the content on the page, we’ll want to ensure that it’s getting indexed properly. Fortunately, we can use tools such as The Mobile Friendly Testing Tool and The Rich Results Test to determine what Googlebot is able to render on the page.

We also like to manually check the index by identifying content that’s loaded via JavaScript, and then using a “site:” search operator to verify that Google is able to read that text on the page. JavaScript SEO is a very expansive subject and I suggest reading this guide by Pierce Brelinsky for more information. Just understand that if you use Magento, some of your content is likely loaded through JavaScript.

3. URL paths

Out of the box, Magento will add the URL extension “.html” to the end of the site’s product and category URLs. While this isn’t necessarily “bad” for SEO, it does create lengthier URLs that are harder to read from a user perspective. URLs without the “.html” extension will have a much cleaner format for users.

To remove the .html extension from the end of URLs, you can take the following steps:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “Catalog” dropdown, select “Catalog”

3. Select the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown

4. Find “Product URL Suffix” & “Category URL Suffix”

5. Replace the “.html” field with “/”

6. Select “Save Config”

The result will be cleaner and easier to read URLs for your store.

Please note that this is best done for a brand new Magento site. This change will automatically adjust all of the URLs on your Magento store. If your store has already existed for some time, without proper migration planning, changing this field could actually result in ranking drops. Therefore, tores that have been established a while may want to consider keeping the “.html” extension.

In addition, the old URL paths won’t automatically redirect back to the new URLs without the “.html” extension. This means that you might need to implement global redirect rules to ensure that the old pages will redirect both users and search engines.

4. Redirects

Global redirects

Magento does implement global redirects on your site. This means that if your store utilizes a “www” subdomain or “https”, if a user doesn’t enter those attributes, Magento will still redirect the user to the correct destination URL. This is great for the user experience of the site, as users should land on the correct content even if they don’t type in the exact destination URL in those instances.

However, Magento does this through 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects:

Back in 2016, there was a famous study by Wayfair that showed that 302 redirects could significantly dilute link equity. While Google has claimed that 302 redirects pass link equity, this argument is still a never-ending debate in SEO. While we believe that 302 redirects do distribute much more link equity then they once did, we take the stance that you should never utilize 302 redirects unless you absolutely need to.

For this reason, we recommend adjusting this in the Magento platform. Fortunately, this is a very straightforward change:

1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration

2. In the “General” dropdown, select “Web”

3. Select the “Url Options” dropdown

4. Change “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”

This should ensure that your Magento website’s global redirects now utilize 301 status codes instead of 302:

Custom redirects

Of course, aside from the site’s global redirects, you’re also going to want to implement 1:1 redirects for individual pages. This ensures that if you ever need to implement redirects for old pages, you can do so. Fortunately, Magento offers this functionality out of the box.

In order to implement redirects for individual pages, you can perform the following steps:

1. In the Admin sidebar, navigate to Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites

2. Select “Add URL Rewrite”

3. Enter the URL you wish to redirect in the “Request Path”. This must be a relative URL

4. Enter the destination page in the “Target Path”. This must be a relative URL

5. Choose the “Redirect Type”. Generally, you’ll want to choose “Permanent (301)”

6. Select “Save”

Please note that in order to implement redirects, the page must be completely deleted from Magento, as you can’t redirect active pages. This makes redirects very “all or nothing”, as they need to be completely removed from the platform first.

Automatic redirects

One thing that’s good to know about redirects in the Magento platform is that it will automatically create redirects when you change the URLs. For example, here I’m changing the URL path of a page:

FROM: dash-digital-watch

TO: dash-digital-watches

We can see how there is an option to “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL”

This is a really nice feature that makes it easier to handle the site’s redirects, and is definitely a best practice if you plan on changing URL paths for any key pages of the site.

5. On-page content

Title tags & meta descriptions

Want to set your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for an individual product? No worries, Magento includes this SEO feature by default.

When you’re on an individual product or category page, simply scroll down and find the “Search Engine Optimization” dropdown. From there you can enter your title tag in the “Meta Title” field and your meta description in the “Meta Description” field.

Related products

Another great feature that Magento allows you to implement is “Related Products”. You can set this on individual product pages. Adding “Related Products” to all of the site’s product pages is a fantastic way to improve several SEO aspects of your site:

1. This can help improve the overall UX and engagement by showing users other products that are similar to the one they’re on

2. This can result in more revenue from showing users upsell opportunities

3. The internal links from these products can help Google easily discover and distribute link equity to them

On Magento product pages, you can manually set “Related Products” for a particular product. To do this, navigate to the product and then find “Related Products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells”. You can then select “Add Related Products” and add any other SKUs you offer that users might be interested in. This should add these internal links to the bottom of your product page!

6. Blogging functionality

One of the biggest weaknesses of Magento from an SEO perspective is that the platform doesn’t contain blogging functionality out of the box. While generally an e-commerce site’s category and product pages are going to be the most important from a revenue perspective, blogs can still be very important for e-commerce sites.

In recent years, there has definitely been a shift towards more informational content ranking for keywords where we would expect a category or product page to rank instead. We can see that, more and more, Google is choosing to rank content such as guides, affiliate sites, or “how to” content above product and category pages. This means that not having a place for informational content to live can limit Magento stores’ SEO success.

For instance, let’s say we set up a store that sells cameras that are great for selfies. Naturally, we might want to create a page to rank for the term “selfie cameras”. However, when we check the SERPs, some of the top ranking results are informational pieces of content.

In the screenshot below, you can see how ShotKit (#2) and B&H (#3) actually rank above Best Buy and Amazon for this query with “Best Selfie Camera” pages:

When we look at the B&H page, we can see how they’ve set up a blog post that ranks the best selfie cameras that they offer. They’ve then intelligently linked to the products in their store. Instead of trying to force a category or product page to rank, they were able to use this listicle-style blog post to improve their visibility for an important query:

A blog allows a natural place for your informational content to live. Without informational content, Magento stores might not be able to rank for some of their target keywords by only using product and category pages.

Fortunately, there are extensions that you can utilize such as the Magento 2 Blog Extension from Magefan. You could also consider setting up a blog on WordPress and creating a subdomain for your Magento store (blog.example.com). We highly recommend setting up one of these options to give your site the ability to host informational content.

7. Structured data

Structured data is code you can add to your site that gives Google a better understanding of what an individual page is about. As Magento sites can be quite large, structured data can be a great way to improve Google’s understanding of the site at scale.

For e-commerce sites, here is our ideal mapping of which structured data types should go on different page templates:

1. Home Page: Organization

2. Category Page: CollectionPage, BreadcrumbList

3. Product Page: Product, BreadcrumbList

4. Blog: Article

This mapping can help give Google a stronger understanding of your store’s content. Below is a little more detail about CollectionPage and Product structured data, as these will be included on the most important pages of your site.

CollectionPage

By using CollectionPage schema, you can signal to Google that your category pages contain a collection of different products, and provide key information about each one. Here are some of the properties you can include about each product:

• Name

• URL

• Position on the page

For example, here is some CollectionPage structured data that we’ve been able to implement:

Product

Of course, Product structured data is a staple of e-commerce sites. Product schema tells Google and other search engines that the page contains information about a particular SKU. Ideally, this structured data will contain key properties such as:

• Name

• Description

• Image

• Price

• SKU

• aggregateRating

One of our favorite properties to include both on-page and within the structured data is the “SKU” property. It’s very common on Magento sites to see queries for SKU numbers appearing in Search Console’s “Performance” report. These are high-intent queries where users could be looking to purchase the exact product that you’re offering in your store. You’ll definitely want to be sure you’re including this in both the on-page content and Product schema markup.

Conclusion

Overall, the good news for Magento store owners is that the platform is built well for SEO. Since it’s open source, store owners have a lot of control over a particular site’s SEO elements such as the robots.txt, sitemap.xml, redirects, metadata, and more. While there are a few SEO issues that store owners might run into, such as duplicate content through the faceted navigation and no blog functionality, Magento does give store owners and SEOs the tools they need in order to fix these issues.

If you have any other strategies that you use to improve the SEO on Magento sites, let us know on Twitter @moz and @gofishchris.