Odoo's focus on e-commerce
Odoo is putting more and more focus on e-commerce. If you’re considering moving your webshop to Odoo, you need to make sure that Odoo can help you succeed in organic search. Google is a major driver of traffic and good SEO can bring you long-term benefits, so it’s your job to be ready for that.
So how does Odoo match up to more established content management systems like WordPress or Drupal? We’ll review the basic SEO-features, as well as some interesting cool features. Let’s dive in!
Indexation
Without being indexable, there’s no way you can rank. Odoo gives you the basic features to make sure your website gets indexed quickly. Sitemaps are generated automatically, you can customize the robots.txt file, and there’s the option to change the indexation settings. It’s not straight-forward to change the canonical URL, but the Odoo app store has apps to help you do that if needed.
Titles and meta descriptions
Odoo generates a page title and meta description, and gives you the option to override that if needed. Additionally, it lets you select images to show up in social media posts. Nothing special, but it checks all the boxes.
Beyond the basics: keyword magic
One of the most interesting things for SEO is the keyword tool that comes with Odoo. You can enter relevant keywords for the page, and the editor checks if that keyword is present in the Headings, text, title and meta description. On top of that, it gives you a number of related keywords to add.
URL structure and redirects
The URL structure is nice and clean, and allows you to customize the URL as needed. One downside: for products, it automatically appends it with the product ID. That makes the URL just a little less clean and short. No big deal, but it would be nice if that can be solved differently..
Unfortunately, there’s no way of removing that 3 at the end.
When changing page URLs, Odoo automatically handles the redirects for you. This means you can safely change URLs without worrying about broken links.
International SEO
If you’re targeting international markets, Odoo has got you covered. It’s relatively easy to set up multi-language websites, and with support for hreflang tags, you can easily target the right audience in search engines.
Structured data
Structured data helps your site stand out in the search results, by showing price and availability details. Odoo takes care of this automatically.
Pagespeed
Ever since 2019, Google has announced that pagespeed and user experience are ranking factors, although they later admitted that their effect is really small. Nonetheless, having a fast-loading website that provides a good user experience is super relevant - and not just for SEO.
Odoo realized this early on, and put a lot of attention to making a fast-loading site. Image are automatically optimized, CSS and javascript is kept small, and the site is responsive by default. Again, it checks all the boxes.
Google Search Console and Analytics
Setting up Google Search Console and Google Analytics (or Plausible) is important to measure SEO performance. Odoo makes that really easy. From the SEO settings, just enter the details and Odoo will enter the right codes for validation and measurement.
The ecosystem
There’s one area where Odoo is a few steps behind the other big names: the ecosystem. Wordpress, being the most popular CMS out there, has a lot of plugins that can make your life as an SEO a bit easier. Odoo also has an App Store, but that’s fairly small compared to the number of WordPress plugins out there. So you may miss some options that are available in other systems.
There’s also a positive side to that: I’ve seen so many WordPress websites that got slow, unsecure, and bloated by adding random plugins. That won’t happen with Odoo..
Conclusion: SEO and Odoo go very well together
From an SEO perspective, Odoo lives up to its promise: it has all the basics you need to have a website optimized for search, while enjoying the close integration with your backend systems.
Is that all?
The technical part of the CMS is a great start, but not sufficient to win in organic search. You’ll need relevant content, build up expertise, and authority through backlinks. Odoo is not going to do that for you, just like no other CMS will do that. SEO will still require a lot of work, but using Odoo as a CMS, you can be sure that from a technical standpoint, nothing is in your way to succeed in Google.
About the author
Rick van Haasteren is an experienced SEO specialist and the founder of SiteGuru. Use SiteGuru to audit your website, monitor your organic visibility and improve your rankings step by step.
Odoo vs. Wordpress: Why Odoo is the Right Choice for eCommerce SEO