What is the biggest SEO problem on Magento sites?
Layered navigation. Magento generates URL combinations for every filter permutation, and left unmanaged a mid-size catalogue produces hundreds of thousands of near-duplicate crawlable URLs that consume crawl budget, dilute category authority and bloat the index. Fixing it is the single highest-value Magento engagement: decide which facet combinations deserve indexation (the ones with genuine search demand), block the rest at robots and parameter level, canonicalise correctly, and stop Googlebot spending your budget on colour-plus-size permutations nobody searches.
How should Magento categories be architected?
As the ranking assets they are: category pages carry e-commerce SEO, not product pages, so each needs a real reason to exist (mapped to search demand), genuine introductory content that answers category-level buying questions, correct pagination handling, and internal linking that concentrates rather than scatters. Deep category trees built for merchandising convenience rather than demand are a common Magento inheritance, and pruning them usually lifts what remains.
Which indexable facets are worth keeping?
Those with demonstrable search demand and enough inventory to justify a page: brand, key attribute (size in fashion, capacity in appliances), sometimes price band, occasionally colour. Everything else, and every multi-facet combination, should be blocked. The discipline is evidence-based: we validate demand per facet before opening it to indexation, then treat each opened facet as a landing page with real content rather than a filtered list.
How do you handle Magento multi-store and international setups?
Magento's store-view architecture is genuinely capable, and genuinely easy to misconfigure: store codes in URLs, currency and language views, and hreflang generated inconsistently across views. We design the locale matrix first (which store views map to which markets and languages), then generate hreflang from a single source with validation, because multi-store hreflang decay is one of the most common enterprise Magento failures we audit.
Can Magento sites be fast?
Yes, with infrastructure and discipline: full-page caching (Varnish), Redis, image optimisation and WebP, JavaScript bundling done properly, and a critical review of third-party extensions, which are the usual culprit, each adding scripts and database queries. Magento performance work is genuinely engineering, not plugin installation, and it pays twice: Core Web Vitals and conversion rate move together on large catalogues.
Is Adobe Commerce different from open-source Magento for SEO?
Not fundamentally: the SEO surface (URLs, facets, categories, schema, performance) behaves the same, and the same discipline applies. Adobe Commerce adds enterprise features and support, plus B2B capability that introduces its own considerations (customer-specific pricing hidden from crawlers, quote-based flows), which we handle as part of the architecture rather than as separate SEO exotica.
What does Magento SEO cost?
Technical audits from £1,800 given the complexity involved. Faceted-navigation and category remediation projects from £3,500. Ongoing retainers from £2,500/month for competitive catalogues including content, technical and link work. Multi-store international programmes scoped individually. These are enterprise-scale prices because Magento is an enterprise-scale platform.