You’re not making the most out of Adobe Commerce (previously Magento 2) if you’re running on its default settings. Around 53% of eCommerce traffic and 36% of eCommerce revenue comes from organic search results. You could be reaching so many more potential customers and increasing your conversion rate by optimising your site for SEO.

Follow this guide to reach your full potential with optimal SEO performance. If you have any questions or need help with optimising your Adobe Commerce store for SEO, whether it’s technical or strategy help, simply get in touch.

(Note: When following this guide, always remember to check you are in the store view that you want to edit before making any changes. Learn more about regional store views here.)

URLs:

URL redirects and rewrites

When visitors are searching for your site using an incorrect URL, it’s important to 301 redirect them to the correct URL so potential customers and search engines can easily reach your site. For example, if a visitor searched for https://www.exampleurl.com they would be directed to the correct https://exampleurl.com or vice versa.

A 301 redirect is usually the preferred redirect status code to apply as this signifies to search engines that the page permanently no longer exists and all requests should be directed to the final destination. Whereas a 302 redirect suggests to search engines that the redirect is only temporary and therefore the page may be indexable in the near future.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “General” → “Web”.
On “Web”, under “URL Options”, find the “Add Store Code to Urls” field. Make sure the default “No” is selected. This makes sure that your site's URLs are descriptive and easy to read.

Under “Add Store Code to URLs” is the “Auto-redirect to Base URL” field. Change this from the 302 default which signals a temporary redirect to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”. This makes sure more of your links to incorrect URLs get redirected to the right URLs.
Further down is the “Search Engine Optimisation” section. Make sure the default “Yes” is selected in the field “Use Web Server Rewrites”. This makes sure your URLs are readable.

Automatic URL redirects

A URL key is an aspect of a product URL that solely relates to a specific product page (like a product name). Therefore a URL key change means that the product specific part of the URL is updated. For example a product might be named (and have the H1) “Black Country Rain Jacket” which is used to generate the product URL: www.exampleurl.com/shells/black-country-rain-jacket/. A URL key change would occur whenever this product’s name is amended as the product URL would also be updated.

When a URL key change happens, your visitors need to be redirected from the old URL to the new URL. To make your life easier and keep your customers happy, we suggest setting up automatic URL redirects.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Catalogue” → “Catalogue” → “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Make sure “Yes” is selected in the “Create Permanent Redirect for URL if URL Key Changed” field. Then click “Save Config”.

Although creating automatic URL redirects is important to provide a seamless user and search engine experience, it can cause issues with your site speed. This can be solved by setting your product and category pages to use canonical tags.

A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that’s used to tell search engines which page to look at and index. This could be in the form of self-referencing canonical tags or it could be a tag pointing from one page (like a product variation page) to a master product without parameters (the page you want displayed within the search results).

“Catalogue” → “Products” or “Categories”.
Select the product or category you want and expand “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Under the “URL Key” field, ensure the “Create Permanent Redirect for old URL” box is ticked.
Update the “URL Key” when needed.
Click “Save”.
Follow the instructions at the top of the page to refresh the cache.

.html

It’s important to only do this step if starting your Adobe Commerce store from scratch. Editing this in an active store creates a URL migration which should be avoided due to the risks associated with migrations. If your store is active, move onto the next section.

You may not stay with Adobe Commerce forever. To give yourself the option of easily switching to another eCommerce platform in the future, set up your store from the start with a URL structure that is transferable to other platforms. By default, Adobe Commerce adds a .html extension to all of your sites URLs. This could cause issues when changing eCommerce platforms. Therefore, we recommend you remove the .html extension and replace it with / which is either optional or mandatory on other eCommerce platforms.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Catalogue” → “Catalogue” → “Search Engine Optimisation”.
In both the “Product URL Suffix” and “Category URL Suffix”, remove “.html” and replace it with “/”.

Doing a migration is risky and can result in significant losses in revenue, especially if it’s done wrong. But sometimes migrations are unavoidable. We can help you through your site migration and help you to mitigate your losses. Simply get in touch.

Shorten URLs

The shorter your URLs, the easier it is to monitor and track organic performance as you’re able to filter categories and products. For example, https://www.exampleurl.com/category/subcategory/product would become https://www.exampleurl.com/product.

Removing categories from your URLs also reduces the amount of duplicate content pages you might have. Otherwise you could end up with many URLs all going to the same content page through different categories and subcategories. This causes keyword cannibalisation as pages with the same content are in competition with each other for SERP rankings. Not only does this mean that only one of the pages will rank for the keyword, search engines like Google also perceive this as a manipulation of the SERPs so may decide not to rank either.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Catalogue” → “Catalogue” → “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Make sure the “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” field is set to the default “No”.

Meta information:

Adding quality meta information tells search engines and site visitors what they can expect from your site. If you use relevant keywords (based on your keyword research), this can positively impact your SERP ranking and click-through-rate. This section will guide you through the technicality of adding your meta information into Adobe Commerce. For advice on writing your meta information, check out our eCommerce copywriting guide.

Prefixes and suffixes

We wouldn’t recommend using site-wide meta prefixes as this would put the specified prefix in front of every title tag, potentially limiting on-page optimisation opportunities. However, we would recommend filling in the suffix field with your Adobe Commerce shop name as this will help with branding.

“Content” → “Configuration” (under “Design”).
In the table, find “Default Store View” in the “Store View” column. Click “Edit” in the “Action” column.
Under “Other Settings”, expand the “HTML Head” section.
The only fields you need to focus on here are the “Page Title Prefix” and the “Page Title Suffix”. Ensure the prefix is empty and add -shopname to the suffix. For example “- Contrast”. This will place your shop name at the end of each of your meta page titles.

Homepage

By default, Adobe Commerce inputs “homepage” as your site's homepage page title. To improve your on-page SEO, we recommend changing this to something more descriptive and in line with your SEO strategy. For example, your brand term or your main service offering.

“Content” → “Elements” → “Pages” → “Home Page”.
Expand the “Search Engine Optimisation” section.
Change the meta title.
Click “Save”.

Product pages

One option for adding SEO boosting meta information to product pages is to manually input the page title and meta description for each product, instead of the search engine assigning their own. But be careful to avoid truncation in the SERPs by ensuring your page titles are less than 55 characters and your meta descriptions are less than 155 characters.

“Catalogue” → “Products”.
Select the product you want to edit.
Expand the “Search Engine Optimisation” section.
Input the product page title and meta description.
Click “Save”.

If your eCommerce store has a large number of products or not enough time to manually input meta information for each product individually, you can create a template. You can set this template to take the title and description from the product page to use as the meta information.

“Stores” → “Configuration” → “Catalogue” → “Catalogue” → “Product Fields Auto-Generation”.
Make a template for the meta title and description.

Category pages

A template cannot be made for category meta information. Instead, category page titles and meta descriptions must be manually inputted. Remember to avoid truncation by using the character limits.

“Catalogue” → “Categories”.
Select the category you want to edit.
Expand the “Search Engine Optimisation” section.
Input the category meta title and description.
Click “Save”.

Crawling and indexing:

Canonical tags

Canonical tags are important for SEO to ensure that, out of duplicate pages, visitors and search engines are sent to the right page. For example, if a product page can be accessed through two different categories, it could have two different URLs. Search engines need to know which is the preferred URL to appear on the SERPs otherwise both URLs will be competing for rankings.

Adobe Commerce doesn’t automatically add canonical URLs meaning duplicate pages are likely to be indexed. Follow these steps to add canonical URLs to Adobe Commerce.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Catalogue” → “Catalogue” → “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Select “Yes” for the “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories” and “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products” fields.

XML sitemap

Creating and optimising your XML sitemap tells search engines which pages on your site return a 200 status code and are indexable. A prioritised list can also be created to apply crawl delays to specific URLs and URL groups, although this is only necessary if you have a really large site. A dynamic XML sitemap is especially important if you have a large eCommerce site with thousands of products and constantly changing content.

Follow these steps to set up your XML sitemap on Adobe Commerce including setting regeneration to keep your sitemap up to date, setting file limits, and enabling robots.txt for the next section.

Site regeneration:

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Catalogue” → “XML Sitemap”.
Select “Default Config” for the “Store View” at the top of the page. This will cause your page to reload.
Expand “Generation Settings”.
Change the default “No” to “Yes” for the “Enabled” field.
Set a “Start Time” that best suits your business. It is best to use your site's quietest time as it can make your site temporarily slower. For example, if 3am is your quietest time, set your “Start Time” for 03:00:00.
Set the “Frequency” depending on how often your site's content changes. For example, daily or weekly.

Sitemap file limits:

Under “Generation Settings”, expand “Sitemap File Limits”.
Check that the “Maximum No of URLs Per File” is set to “50000” which is the default and is best for SEO.
Change the “Maximum File Size” to “52428800”.

Enable robots.txt in XML sitemap:

Under “Sitemap File Limits”, expand “Search Engine Submission Settings”.
Change the default “No” to “Yes” for the field “Enable Submission to Robots.txt”.

Completing your XML sitemap:

Complete all the XML sitemap steps above.
“Marketing” → “Site Map” (under “SEO & Search”).
Click the orange “Add Sitemap” button on the top right.
In the next screen fill in the “Filename” with the XML sitemap name. E.g. “sitemap.xml”.
Fill in the “Path” with the XML sitemap’s path. E.g. “/”.
Click the “Save & Generate” button.

Robots.txt

Maximise your SEO by keeping crawlers away from certain pages on your site using robots.txt. Blocking crawlers from accessing certain pages avoids them from falling into crawler traps, preserves crawl budget (so more of your site is crawled and indexed), and avoids duplicate content which could be caused by parameter pages being indexed. This tells search engines which pages in your site can and can’t be crawled and indexed.

“Content” → “Configuration” (under “Design”) → “Main Website” (instead of “Default Store View”).
Scroll down to “Search Engine Robots”.
Don’t change the value of “Default Robots”. Instead, edit the field “Edit Custom Instruction of Robots.txt File”. We recommend barring off the following pages:

Internal search result pages: “Disallow: /cataloguesearch/” and “Disallow: /search/”.
Login pages: “Disallow: /customer/account/login/”.
SID and PHPSESSID URL parameters: “Disallow: /*?SID=” and “Disallow: /*PHPSESSID=”.
Filtering criteria: “Disallow: /*?price=”, “Disallow: /*&price=”, “Disallow: /*?colour=”, “Disallow: /*&colour=”, “Disallow: /*?material=”, “Disallow: /*&material=”, “Disallow: /*?size=”, and “Disallow: /*&size=”.

HTTPS

Using https tells search engines and site visitors that your site is secure with a SSL certificate. This is especially important for eCommerce stores which deal with customer payment information.

“Store” → “Configuration” (under settings) → “General” → “Web”.
Expand “Base URLs (Secure)”.
Change “Secure Base URL” and “Secure Base Link URL” to start with “https”.
Change “Use Secure URLs on Storefront”, “Use Secure URLs in Admin”, and “Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)” to “Yes”.

Site speed

It's important to optimise your site speed to improve SEO. Site speed also affects customer experience with higher bounce rates when your site is slower. On average, with every extra second of page loading times (up to 5 seconds), conversion rates drop by 4.42%.

Site speed can be improved by only installing essential extensions and by following these steps for optimising images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, and enabling caching.

Optimise images

Making your image file size smaller (without affecting the image quality) will likely improve the speed of your site. We recommend using JPGs or advanced image formats like WebP with file sizes under 100kb. This ensures the image remains good quality and search engines don’t need to use as many resources to load the image, resulting in faster loading times.

It’s also useful for search engine crawlers if your image files have short descriptive file names and descriptive alt tags which include keywords. This tells the search engine (that can only see the HTML, not the actual image) what's in the image as well as being useful for people who use screen readers.

“Product” → “Basic Settings” → “Images and Videos” → “Alt Text”.
Add your alt text.

Minify CSS and JavaScript files

To speed up your site, we recommend you minify your CSS and JavaScript files. This ensures that search engines only load resources on the page that will be used, which improves the page’s loading time. However, if done incorrectly, this could damage or remove something essential from the site. Therefore, we recommend doing these changes in a development environment so they can be tested.

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Advanced” → “Developer”.
Expand “JavaScript Settings”.
Select “Yes” for the fields “Merge JavaScript Files”, “Enable JavaScript Bundling”, and “Minify Javascript Files”.

Enabling browser caching

Browser caching is when static assets on a web page are stored based on the initial load. When a user re-visits the same page, these stored resources are loaded onto the page without additional requests to the server, helping speed up page loading times.

Unfortunately the default cache engine in Adobe Commerce is known to be one of the slowest cache engines. Therefore, to speed up your site, it’s best to enable and change the default cache to varnish cache.To do this you’ll need to ensure your server also has varnished enabled.

To enable built-in caching:

“System” → “Cache Management”.
Select all tick boxes on the left. Select “Enable” from the dropdown box at the top left. Click “Submit”.

To enable full page caching:

“Stores” → “Configuration” (under “Settings”) → “Advanced” → “System”.
Expand “Full Page Cache”.
Change the “Caching Application” field from the default “Built-in Cache” to “Varnish Cache (Recommended)”.
Expand “Varnish Configuration”.
We recommend speaking to your host provider on how best to fill out the “Varnish Configuration” fields.

Blogging functionality

A downside to Adobe Commerce is that it doesn’t have blogging functionality. This is a fundamental part of many eCommerce businesses' SEO strategy for driving traffic and revenue to their site. However, this issue can be overcome in three ways:

Magento 2 Blog Extension: Add blog functionality to Adobe Commerce using Magento 2 Blog Extension. Once installed, this extension allows you to write blogs within Adobe Commerce.
Magento WordPress Integration: Have the best of both worlds by linking your Adobe Commerce store with the purpose built blogging platform, WordPress. This lets you create a blog within your eCommerce store.
Reverse Proxy: If you’d rather not install an extension or do an integration, you could create a blog using reverse proxy. This would allow you to use a site like Ghost to create your blog and reverse proxy it to your eCommerce store.

You did it

That's it! You’re all set to boost your SEO and make the most out of your Adobe Commerce store.

Still have questions or need help with Adobe Commerce or SEO? Simply get in touch today.

Adobe Commerce: SEO Guide [2022] (Previously Magento 2)