SEO isn’t just about writing great content. It’s about making sure search engines understand your website, index it properly, and rank it where it deserves to be. When you’re managing a large eCommerce site with thousands of pages, even small technical issues can snowball into major SEO setbacks. While most teams rely on third-party plugins or custom development to meet their SEO needs, we took a different approach—building our internal SEO extension.
The Background Story – Magento’s SEO Limits
Magento is a powerful eCommerce platform, but its out-of-the-box capabilities are very limited when it comes to advanced SEO setup. It provides fundamental settings like canonical tags and meta robots controls for products and categories—but our vision of technical SEO goes far beyond that.
For larger stores or those aiming to scale, Magento lacks granularity and falls short on advanced SEO features such as meta tag rules, enhanced canonicalization, or more flexible meta robots management. This makes it challenging to implement a robust and scalable SEO strategy.
In such cases, turning to third-party extensions may seem like a logical choice. However, our experience with this approach wasn’t always ideal. They were often restrictive, resource-heavy, and hard to customize. These extensions offered generic SEO features but lacked the flexibility and precision needed for a scalable, advanced setup.
While these challenges had been on our radar for years, the actual execution of our own solution happened almost by accident.
Building Our Solution
It all started with a high-pressure project and a tight deadline—sound familiar? We needed to implement a comprehensive SEO solution, fast. We initially tried customizing existing extensions, only to realize that the effort required was nearly the same as building our own.
With time running out and no perfect solution available, we made a bold decision:
Let’s build our own tool!
Our goal was to build a solution that would give us full control over technical SEO and bridge the gap between what Magento offers and what modern SEO actually requires.
What Is Inchoo SEO Manager?
And we made it happen!
The Inchoo SEO Manager is a complete technical SEO solution, built on industry best practices and our deep expertise in Magento. This extension gives managers full control with an intuitive, user-friendly interface, making complex SEO tasks easy to handle.
What makes it truly special is its accessibility – even users without deeper Magento knowledge or development skills can configure a solid SEO foundation, something that was previously extremely difficult. In addition, Inchoo SEO Manager significantly enhances Magento’s default SEO capabilities, enabling a high-quality setup that includes canonical and meta robot tag control, sitemaps, advanced meta rules, and more. Most importantly, our extension operates independently of third-party providers, making it a standalone solution.
Key Features: Powerful, Purposeful, Practical
Over time, we continued to refine and expand our solution. We added new features and enhancements based on a detailed competition analysis and the real-life examples that gave us a clear understanding of what we needed.
Today, we’re proud to say that every feature in our extension is carefully thought out and built with purpose. Instead of overloading the extension with unnecessary and often low-impact features, we focused on what we consider crucial based on our long-term experience in eCommerce.
Inchoo SEO Manager enables you to:
- Manage canonical tags for all page types, including layered navigation, URLs with parameters, and custom URL paths.
- Control meta robots directives for all page types, including layered navigation, internal search results, sorting options, and custom URL paths.
- Customize metadata and other key elements for category pages by applying dynamic meta rules, enabling large-scale updates.
- Customize metadata & H1 elements for different product types by applying dynamic meta rules, enabling large-scale updates.
- Create custom pages for specific combinations of category + attributes and/or attribute values.
- Add custom canonicals, meta robots, category descriptions, and other key elements for custom pages.
- Generate an XML Sitemap, separated into multiple files per entity type and storeview.
- Submit custom pages in the Sitemap XML file.
Demonstration Time!
Time to stop talking (writing 😄) and start showing you how Inchoo SEO Manager works:
We hope this video gave you a better understanding of SEO Manager’s capabilities. Let’s keep going and walk through another example, where we’ll set up a more specific rule:
Free And Available
If the videos sparked your interest, here’s some good news: the Inchoo SEO Manager extension is now free and available for everyone. What started as a solution to Magento’s SEO limitations is now a tool we’re proud to share with the community.
Download it to see how it works:
Whether you’re a developer, store owner, or just exploring SEO, we hope it makes your work easier and your store stronger. And if you’d like a hands-on look before downloading, you can check it out in our free Hootify admin demo!
Inchoo SEO Manager & Hootify
Speaking of Hootify, it’s the perfect companion to the Inchoo SEO Manager. Here at Inchoo we focus on creating integrated solutions to deliver faster, better, and more efficient eCommerce experiences. This is precisely where Inchoo SEO Manager connects with Hootify, our new eCommerce solution build on the foundations of Magento Open Source.
Of course, a modern eCommerce store isn’t complete without a solid SEO foundation. That’s why Inchoo SEO Manager is a key part of Hootify’s ecosystem. By combining Hootify’s ready-made eCommerce framework with the advanced SEO capabilities of Inchoo SEO Manager, we’ve created a fully optimized, scalable, and high-performing solution that allows businesses to focus on growing their online store.
Whether you’re launching a new store or migrating an existing one, Hootify + Inchoo SEO Manager ensures you get the best of both worlds: speed, flexibility, and top SEO performance – right from the start.
Technical SEO, Done Right
What began as a solution for one project has become a cornerstone of our approach to technical SEO. The Inchoo SEO Manager now powers every site we optimize, giving us full control and flexibility we need to optimize websites exactly the way we want.
Built from experience and driven by necessity, it’s not just a tool—it’s the embodiment of how we believe technical SEO should be done. Purposeful, precise, and proven. This is our standard. This is how we do it.
