eCommerce

HOW TO IMPLEMENT SEO IN PRESTASHOP

There are various tools available to create virtual shops, such as Magento, WooCommerce or PrestaShop. The latter is one of the best options if you want to develop a professional e-commerce shop with a huge scope and great performance.

PrestaShop is an open-source tool which has been designed to facilitate web positioning. Applying SEO techniques on PrestaShop is a necessary practice in order to optimise your online shop and increase your visibility by appearing in the best positions on search-engine result pages or Google SERP.

What is SEO for PrestaShop?

SEO for PrestaShop consists in applying a series of techniques and actions to optimise your e-commerce site and ensure that Google positions your page better on its rankings, attracting greater web traffic in order to increase your visibility.

To position a PrestaShop store, you’ll need to implement on-page SEO techniques (under your control) and off-page SEO (which cannot be directly controlled). With on-page SEO on PrestaShop, you’ll be able to optimise all internal factors of your online shop so that Google’s bots understand it better and can better position it in its rankings.

Off-page SEO for PrestaShop consists in ensuring incoming links (linkbuilding) to your shop, from websites with higher domain authority, in the hopes of gaining part of that authority for your e-commerce site.

What are the advantages of SEO for PrestaShop?

Applying SEO techniques in a virtual store developed with PrestaShop offers a series of benefits:

Attracting more potential customers. By increasing web traffic, a higher number of interested customers will visit your e-commerce site.
Facilitating the order process. With SEO techniques for PrestaShop, you’ll optimise your shop to offer the best user experience. One of the most important aspects is facilitating the entire order process, from the point at which the user discovers the product, until they arrive at the check-out page and finalise the purchase by making their payment.
Gaining prestige. A shop that functions optimally will create a better opinion among users, increasing the likelihood that they will recommend it to their friends and family.

How to implement SEO for a PrestaShop store

Next, we’ll offer a series of techniques you can apply to your PrestaShop store to achieve greater visibility on Google.

Choose keywords for PrestaShop

SEO efforts should not only attract greater web traffic, this traffic should also fall within the e-commerce business’s target market in order to increase sales. Carrying out a study of PrestaShop keywords is the best way to verify that you are positioning your shop with the most suitable keywords.

With tools like Google Keyword Planner you can carry out an analysis to select the best keywords for your PrestaShop store and therefore increase your conversions.

Install an SEO module on PrestaShop

One of the most interesting advantages why you should choose PrestaShop as the platform to create and manage your virtual shop, is the ease with which you can add any feature via modules.

On PrestaShop, you’ll find a wide variety of modules intended to improve the shop’s web positioning by applying on-page SEO actions. This type of add-on does not require any advanced technical knowledge for their use, allowing you to control various internal aspects of the shop such as image optimisation or site architecture.

Some of the best SEO modules for PrestaShop are:

Canonical URLs.
SEO Expert.
Page Caché Ultimate.

Choose templates with a responsive design

Mobile telephones have become vital tools in our day-to-day lives. Ensuring that PrestaShop functions quickly and accurately on these types of devices is one of the key SEO measures you’ll need to carry out in order to improve your web positioning.

With PrestaShop, you can change the visual appearance of your shop quickly and easily, by selecting a template. You’ll find templates with responsive designs – ideal for boosting web positioning.

Improve user experience

Web positioning today is concentrated on the user and their experience when it comes to interacting with your PrestaShop store. Some of the internal improvements you can implement on your e-commerce site in order to improve user experience are:

Accelerate load time. Optimising caché use and reducing the size of images can make your e-commerce site’s loading time much faster.
Add quality content. Implementing a blog on PrestaShop where you can add quality content will allow you to attract contacts or qualified leads in order to convert these into customers with reduced costs, effort and time.
Delete sites that present with errors. One of the most frustrating things that can ruin user experience is visiting a PrestaShop store URL and finding an error. Deleting all these failed links or URLs is a good way to increase user experience.

Use PrestaShop’s own SEO tools

PrestaShop includes a few options intended to promote search-engine web positioning. One of the most significant is the creation of clean URLs. By activating this option, the links on your PrestaShop store will be much easier to read and understand, both for users and for Google bots.

Other interesting options from PrestaShop intended to boost SEO include the personalisation of meta titles and meta descriptions.

Pay particular attention to the product page

One of the most important aspects of an e-commerce is the product page. In this element, you’ll find all the key information for products and services offered by the shop.

Constructing the perfect product page should be one of your business’s main objectives in order to achieve a better user experience that helps increase sales.

There are many elements on product pages that can be modified to ensure the best performance.

Title. The product title is the perfect space to include text or elements that attract users’ attention.
Description. This is one of the most important parts of the product page, where users can find all the information they need about the item in question.
Images. The visual aspect is vital in any product page. Taking care of your images by considering quality and size is key to ensuring the best results for your e-commerce site’s visibility and sales.

Ensure good category structuring

Order is fundamental in any e-commerce site, ensuring that customers don’t end up getting lost while browsing the shop. Categories and subcategories are a good way of intuitively categorising and structuring an online shop, allowing users to make use of these with less effort.

We recommend opting for a silo structure, positioning a different key word for each of the shop’s categories (therefore avoiding keyword cannibalisation).

Use sitemaps

Sitemaps are XML files that include a list of all the online shop’s URLS. Providing Google with this file through Google Search Console will accelerate the indexing process for your website on Google.

SEO on PrestaShop is a necessary process to attract more organic visits to your online shop. By applying different SEO techniques such as those listed above, you can offer your shop better web positioning – enjoying benefits such as increasing sales, reducing costs, or improving brand image.