How to improve SEO in PrestaShop: EVERYTHING you should take into account

Digital Marketing, SEO

You have created your online store with PrestaShop and now you need customers to find you. A website without customers can’t make money, so now you need to work on SEO optimization in PrestaShop.

Developing a PrestaShop website can help you create an intuitive, fast and modern e-commerce website that captures users’ attention and converts them into satisfied customers. All you need is visibility.

And that’s why SEO techniques have been invented, to give more visibility to your online store and increase your potential customers. Now you just need to know how to implement them.

This is where we come into play, today, at Rodanet we want to provide you with 11 tips that can help you rank. Ready?

11 tips to optimize SEO in PrestaShop

SEO, acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is a set of activities that allow you to optimize your website and pages for search engines. This will be your best ally!

Organic search, which is the search that users perform when they type a word or phrase in Google, represents 44% of the total traffic that reaches e-commerce. Think about it, almost half of your potential customers could come from search engines!

It is very important to be able to index your website in the best possible way to increase sales and, consequently, revenues. But how do you do SEO?

SEO optimization is achieved by working on many aspects, such as keywords, such as
keywords
the metatypes of the pages, the
alt texts
of photos, URLs and many other small pieces of data and information that you can provide to the search engine to indicate that your site is relevant.

Do all these concepts sound new to you? Don’t worry, throughout this article we will go through them all and show you how to achieve better SEO in PrestaShop.

Improve the positioning of your online store and increase your revenues.

SEO agency for ecommerce

1. Start with a keyword study

To start, perform a thorough search for
keywords
that your
buyer persona
uses to search for products like the ones you offer in your online store. Once you have a list of the most relevant keywords, divide them according to the user’s search intent:

➡Informative key words.

These keywords show that the user has a specific question or doubt about a topic. For example: “what are protein shakes for“. The results often include articles or general information on the topic, indicating that the user is looking for information and is not yet ready to make a purchase.

➡Transactional key words.

These keywords indicate a clear purchase intent. For example:“protein shakes“. The results show online stores selling this product, indicating that the user is ready to make a purchase.

transactional keywords

2. Optimize labels

What are labels? First of all, it is important to understand what they represent within your website, then we will explain which ones you should pay attention to.

Tags are nothing more than small pieces of text in html code that Google and other search engines read and analyze.What are they for? They help to rank your site and let search engines know what it is about, with what terms it should be found by users.

To help you manage this important part of SEO optimization in PrestaShop, there are plugins. The most popular one is called Yoast and, once installed on your e-commerce, it will show you all the important information you need to complete in order to better index your website. It is like an assistant that follows you step by step and shows you the right path.

For example, one of the most important tags that cannot be missing when creating a page is the Tag Title.

The Tag Title is the title in blue that you see when you search in Google, and it provides very important information to the page visitor because it should arouse his curiosity.

On the one hand, it helps search engines to understand what your website is about, but on the other hand, it also helps users to feel intrigued and to awaken in them the desire to discover the content you have published.

The title should include a detailed description of the product or theme because, along with the description, the product name is crucial for SEO optimization in PrestaShop and, consequently, for search engines to understand what the product is about.

Above all, remember that each page must have its own title!

3. Pay attention to the URL scheme

After creating a good title, you will have to take care of the url, i.e. the characters that identify your web page in search engines.

The creation of the url should not be left to chance. It should not even be identical to the title.

To be optimized, the url must contain meaningful words. These should be separated by the hyphen, this will help to make them much more recognizable, as well as to make the whole look more orderly.

As urls are very important when doing SEO optimization in PrestaShop, avoid randomly chosen numbers or acronyms. Nor should they be too short or too long.

Again, Yoast can help you create the right url.

4. Avoid cannibalization and duplicate content.

There is one thing Google does not like at all: seeing two identical contents in two different urls.

As soon as it recognizes duplicate content, it perceives it as of little value and penalizes you.

Cannibalization occurs when two different pages in your store compete for the same keyword, which can confuse Google and hurt your ranking. And, obviously, we want to prevent this from happening.

What does Google know about your website?

Your website has many pages, but does Google know all of them?

Periodically checking the pages of your e-commerce that are found in Google allows you to see if there is any problem why certain contents are not shown while others appear duplicated.

To identify duplicate pages you can use
Screaming Frog
or one of the many similar tools.

Once the duplicate content has been identified, it is necessary to understand the error causing it and eliminate it.

Optimize the
sitemap
robots.txt links and navigation links

These are three fundamental aspects of PrestaShop SEO optimization.

Creating a complete sitemap helps Google understand how the pages are laid out and what the complete structure is.

In doing so, you can give importance to different contents.

More importantly, the sitemap helps Google understand how many elements your e-commerce website is made up of without having to rely simply on indexing.

This job is also done by robots.txt links. These are files that allow search engine spiders to know which web pages or sections of a website should not be crawled.

Particular attention must be paid to the creation of these files, otherwise they may prevent Google from accessing certain parts of the site that should be indexed.

Finally, each page of your site must be accessible via a link.

How to use the no index and canonical tag

There are two very useful methods, if used well, that can help Google better understand the pages that make up your website.

These are systems that can be used during SEO optimization in PrestaShop.

The tag
no index
tag instructs search engines not to index a page, while the
canonical
tells Google which of several identical pages is the most important.

If you discover that you have duplicate content, the canonical tag is the tool you need.

Remember, however, that these are two methods that should never be used together.

5. Define the structure of your website

Use keyword research to design the structure of your website and focus on transactional keywords to generate more sales. Organize categories, subcategories and product sheets according to these keywords.

Optimize category and product pages with descriptive text to improve the user experience and help with search engine optimization.

Decide which keyword you will use on the home page: you can focus on your brand or on a transactional keyword that represents the products you sell.

6. User experience for satisfied customers and better positioning.

The
user experience
(UX) is crucial for the SEO positioning of your PrestaShop store. A good user experience increases the time visitors spend on your website, which in turn can lead to a lower bounce rate and more purchases, which positively influences Google rankings.

Some key aspects of improving the user experience include site usability, loading speed and
loading speed
and the implementation of an internal search engine to facilitate navigation, etc.

7. Create a blog

This can be one of the most fun parts of managing your e-commerce because, within the blog, you can unleash all your creativity.

But that’s not all! A blog is an extremely important resource in PrestaShop SEO optimization.

Firstly, creating a corporate blog can differentiate you from your competitors and, secondly, because it helps you to create a large amount of content that will boost the indexation of your website.

The blog is a really simple tool that you can use to produce content and add value for users who decide to visit your e-commerce.

Content of this type is the most popular among search engines. Having content with a lot of words means that you can also add many keywords
keywords
to index the page in search engines. It doesn’t matter if the user will land first on the content of a blog before a product card. What matters is that they have entered your ecosystem.

Besides being the perfect PrestaShop SEO optimization tool, it is also a great way to communicate with your customers. From the blog pages they can understand more about your business and can get useful information about the products they are potentially interested in. It’s a win-win system.

8. Optimize images

So far we’ve talked about text, so it’s time to move on to photos.

Photos also play a very fundamental role during PrestaShop SEO optimization. As for the images, the first thing to consider is the title. It seems obvious, but the name is very important for content optimization!

Have you ever downloaded a photo you liked from the Internet and read a caption composed of a series of random numbers? Or the abbreviations automatically set by the cameras, such as IMG_? We are sure it has happened to you. That’s wrong!

Like any other content, photos should also have captions that tell something about the subject. Google is increasingly trained to read images, but the process is not yet fully perfected. So,what information do you take into account about a photo?

First, the title. You must remember, before uploading the photos to your website, to rename them with a word or phrase consistent with the text. A good strategy is also to include keywords within the titles and tagsthat refer to the photos.

9. Register your e-commerce in directories

Directories are, to all intents and purposes, portals that group together a large number of websites divided into thematic categories.

Registering your site in directories is important to get links, the more links you have, the more your digital presence and visibility will increase.

Remember that
linkbuilding
is vital to improve your SEO and for Google to rank you higher in search results.

But back to us, there are many directories of more or less good quality. These are ordered by domain authority (DA), so the higher the authority of the site, the better the quality of the link you are generating to your website and the better consideration Google will have of your SEO.

It is important to choose the right directories during PrestaShop SEO optimization to avoid the opposite effect, i.e. that Google perceives the link as being of poor quality.

Therefore, first make a list of keywords for which you want your website to be indexed in search engines and create a description.

Each directory is different, so it would be advisable to create ad-hoc content.

Increases the number of internal and external links

If you want to improve the ranking of your e-commerce, it is necessary to increase the number of links on your pages.

A good method of SEO optimization in PrestaShop is to include bothinternal links to other pages of your website (
interlinking
or internal linking) as well as external links to third parties.

As for the links, make sure they point to sites with authority and not to pages perceived as negative by Google.

10. Use PrestaShop modules

Now, how can you make your e-commerce even more charming?

While working on SEO optimization in PrestaShop, you should never forget that the platform offers you a wealth of resources. You can decide to use PrestaShop modules to your e-commerce.

What exactly are they? Extensions that allow you to customize many aspects of your website to make it easier to use, integrate it with other platforms and, why not, even make it more secure.

There are modules that take care of logins, others that connect social networks… With the modules you will be able to give free rein to your creativity and perfect your e-commerce.

11. Measure results

After you have done a thorough SEO optimization work on PrestaShop, all that remains is to monitor the results of your work.

To do this, you can use Google Analytics, the best tool to know the weight of your e-commerce in a specific search engine.

From this tool you can obtain data such as the number of user visits, where they come from, how long they stay on the pages, which links they click on, etc.

Use all this information to define even more precise marketing strategies and increase your traffic!

Improve PrestaShop SEO with Rodanet!

As you may have noticed, SEO optimization in PrestaShop is a real universe, if you want to be sure that you are setting up all your data and information in the right way, Rodanet can help you achieve this goal with a tailor-made SEO consultancy, such as agency specializing in Prestashop and in the SEO for ecommerce

Don’t settle for an e-commerce with no visitors and get the most out of it by improving SEO in PrestaShop. Discover the power of your online store with Rodanet and get ready to make your e-commerce stand out from your competitors.

Copy & Content Strategist en Rodanet | tamara@rodanet.es | + posts

Tamara es redactora #seo y la boxeadora de la oficina. 🥊
Siempre escribe textos con gancho 😉

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