Magento (Adobe Commerce) gives you all the control. The downside: it makes it easy to ship SEO problems at scale. This is the 2026 checklist we run when we audit a Magento store.
1. URL hygiene
- Confirm rewrite rules are on and producing clean URLs (/category/, /product/).
- Disable category paths in product URLs — one product, one URL.
- Set canonicals on category and product pages, including layered nav pages.
- Audit redirect chains and clean up legacy 302s and chained 301s.
2. Layered (faceted) navigation
This is Magento’s biggest SEO trap. By default, layered nav can generate thousands of attribute-combination URLs Google will happily crawl and devalue.
- Write a layered-nav rule set: which combinations are indexable, which canonicalized, which noindex’d.
- Use robots meta on facet URLs, not just robots.txt — Google can still index disallowed URLs from links.
- Pick a small number of high-value facet combos to actively rank (e.g., colour + category).
3. Multi-store + multi-locale
- Hreflang implemented in sitemap or HTML — not both.
- Canonical URLs aligned with hreflang — no silent self-conflicts.
- Per-store-view URLs structured so each market has its own crawl path.
4. Schema & rich results
- Product schema on PDPs with name, image, description, brand, sku, offers (price, currency, availability).
- Breadcrumb schema matching the visible breadcrumb on the page.
- Organization schema sitewide with sameAs links.
- FAQ schema on supporting category content (carefully — Google deprecated some FAQ rich results, but the structure still helps).
5. Core Web Vitals on Magento
Magento storefronts are notoriously heavy. Hot spots:
- Layered nav JavaScript — reduce or defer.
- Hero images — serve next-gen formats with explicit width / height.
- Varnish + CDN tuning — static assets and HTML pages cached aggressively.
- Third-party modules — audit and remove anything blocking render that you don’t need.
6. Catalog & content
- Category templates with introductory copy (200–400 words) above the product grid.
- Internal linking from category pages to related categories and supporting content.
- Product descriptions written for intent (not auto-generated from supplier feeds).
7. Migration risk awareness
Many Canadian Magento stores are quietly evaluating moves to Shopify Plus or Adobe Commerce Cloud upgrades. Both are major SEO projects. See Migrations & Platform SEO for the redirect-mapping and content-parity work that decides whether traffic survives.
If you’d like us to run this checklist on your store, ask for a Magento SEO audit — it’s free.
