Nowadays, it is very important to have an online store if you sell your products. In this way, you can have another channel (more global and with fewer limits than a physical location) through which you can get your products to a wider audience. And Prestashop, along with other CMS, is a great option to develop your online commerce and take it to another level.
In this post, I want to talk to you about how to improve the SEO of your Prestashop if this is the platform you have chosen to have your online store. Why? Because having only one store and not working it is like opening a store in an unknown place and not indicating it anywhere. That way you couldn't have a clientele. However, working on organic positioning in your e-commerce would allow you to have visibility in search engines when users looking for a specific product or type of product find you if it is what you offer. How? Here I will tell you!
Why is it important to consider SEO in a Prestashop?
Working on SEO in your store, be it a Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, or whatever, is really important since it will allow you to make yourself known to an audience that does not yet know of the existence of your store, reaching potential customers who could make purchases on your website. In addition, it will not only allow you to publicize your online store, but you can also promote your physical location if you have it.
All you have to do is to be constant in your work and have some patience. SEO does not get immediate results, but it is like a small plant. If we sow the seed, and we water it, even if at first we think that it is growing slowly, as soon as it bears fruit, we will see how all the time invested has been worth it. So we are now going to explain those points that you should take into account to optimize the main points to improve the organic positioning of your Prestashop.
Optimize SEO points in Prestashop categories
What points should you keep in mind when optimizing your product categories? Here is a list of the 3 that I consider most relevant:
Navigation architecture
It is important that your category and subcategory structure of the Prestashop store are as clear as possible. Users need to be able to navigate perfectly through them without any problem, being able to find the type of product they are looking for.
Create subcategories that you think can help users, don't be afraid. Reflect them well in the menu, so that users know what you are selling.
A mistake is usually to leave only one category for products as generic as, for example, 'Men's sportswear. A user enters there and can find T-shirts, sneakers, pants, accessories, etc. If there is no type of extra categorization and, in addition, we have many products, the only thing we are going to do is confuse and overwhelm the user in the search for the desired product. We are going to make it easy for you and offer you the products you want on a tray.
Review titles and meta descriptions
Since it is one of the few free SEO points options that Prestashop gives us, we are going to take advantage of it. Optimize each title of your categories based on long-tail keywords as much as possible to allow it to position for searches of interest as less competitive as possible.
The meta-descriptions should be optimized by focusing on the conversion, making sure that you convince the user to enter your result and not that of the competition. You will have to hook him in a few words. Use your best tricks and words to make him click on the result of your website.
Filtered out
In addition to categorization, creating an effective filtering system will allow the user to find THE product. Create filters for colors, sizes, brands (although it may happen that in this case, it is better to create categories), price, etc. It will allow users to choose to show only the results that may really interest them.
This filtering system must be configured through the attributes and characteristics section of your Prestashop.
How to work SEO in Prestashop products
To optimize the products of your store in Prestashop to the maximum, you should not only take into account the most basic SEO points but also points related to the user experience and conversion, since they are URLs focused directly on the purchase.
Quality images
The point that will attract the most attention and the one that users will focus the most on is the products. Therefore, make sure that all product images are of high quality that accurately reflect the product, and visually describe it perfectly.
Make sure the image names are descriptive (containing the product name) as well as their ALT tags. And it also prevents these images from being heavy (ideally they should weigh less than 100 kilobytes) so as not to compromise the loading speed of these URLs.
Quality and original content
The content must perfectly describe the product, solving all doubts and questions that users may have, so that, reading it, users understand everything perfectly. And avoid that it is the description that the provider gives you; You must differentiate yourself and stand out from the competition, offering unique, valuable, and quality content.
It is important that, when writing this content, you do it thinking about SEO using relevant keywords, but it will also be so taking into account the conversion, trying to attract and give users confidence by reading it. Tell them all its benefits and why they should choose this product and not another from the competition.
Microformats (Schema markups)
Prestashop, by default, marks the products with structured data, so it will be important that you make sure that these are filled in and work correctly. In the end, microformats(Schema markups) help crawlers more effectively understand the type of content that will be found at that URL.
To do this, you can try the structured data tool to see if your product has a bug or warning that you should try to fix.
CTAs (call to action)
As I mentioned before, the product sheets are very transactional parts in which your main objective is to attract the user and add that product to the cart (and end up buying). Therefore, make sure of several points:
- The add to cart button stands out and is quite visible.
- The text on the add to cart button is perfectly understood.
- Contact forms are added in case the user has doubts.
- On mobile, the add-to-cart buttons look good too. And it would even be nice if they can follow the user as they scroll.
- In case you have to choose between different options, these options are clear and well explained.
Other top tips for positioning a Prestashop
In this section, I want to tell you about other more generic points that you should also take into account when working on the organic positioning of your store made with Prestashop.
Responsive
It is one of the most obvious parts today. There are those who still do not look at the mobile version when they are working on a website, but it is the most important version currently, whether you want it or not.
Your website must be perfectly visible on any mobile device, it must be usable and understandable, it must be easy to navigate, all the elements must be clearly visible ... In short, the mobile version of your online store must be perfect.
Blog
The blog should be another of the hyper-important parts that you should take into account and work on your SEO strategy for Prestashop. Although I recommend you work your blog in WordPress because of the facilities that this CMS offers for the entire topic of posts, you should publish articles periodically so that you can work keywords of interest to your business, which are long-tail and with a search intention informational.
These posts will allow you to attract organic traffic through new interesting keywords that you could not attack in any other way, while you have the option of promoting your products and services. In this way, we target users who are in a more informational phase, whom we will try to attract and attract by convincing them that our store and our products are the best and most suitable for what they are looking for.
Noindex
Although the part of allowing the indexability of the URLs is also very limited in Prestashop with the free options, we can try to take advantage of it.
For this, we can go to the part of CMS - Pages to allow the indexing or not of those pages that we are not interested in positioning (such as the Legal Notice or the Purchase Conditions).
To put noindex to categories or products, we will have to throw payment modules, unfortunately, or pure and simple code.
Robots.txt
It is another of the important parts that you should take into account when optimizing the SEO of your Prestashop.
The robots.txt file allows you to control the crawling of your website by crawlers, determining which pages or resources you do not want them to access. By default, Prestashop creates a default robots.txt, but you can modify it in your own way. Of course, you will have to do it from the FTP.
Sitemap.xml
The sitemap will allow you to indicate to crawlers the most relevant parts of your website and that, therefore, they should take into account especially when indexing the website, providing them with a list of all these URLs to which we give greater relevance at the SEO level.
There is a free module to create your own .xml sitemap, although the options are quite limited. For example, you won't be able to decide which specific categories or products you don't want to appear in this file. The only things you can exclude are specific pages or types of pages based on a list that the module offers by default. Even so, creating a generic sitemap and in a simple way, it is quite good.
Internal linking
Through the categories, subcategories, and posts we should work on an interlinking strategy so that we can link all those parts that are related to each other through links.
For example, one of the easiest ways to work this in the most transactional part is through breadcrumbs, which will allow us to link the parent categories with their corresponding subcategories, allowing users and crawlers to understand much better the architecture of our Online store.
We should also link between clusters so that if there are subcategories in a cluster that are related to some other subcategories in another cluster, we can link them to each other. In the same way, we should try to link from the posts that we are working on in the blog to the categories, subcategories, or products directly related to the subject of the article, offering a solid link, and based on a strategy that allows us to link all those together. Parts that are related to make the entire structure of the web more understandable.
Loading speed
How could I not talk about loading speed? What is SEO without talking about WPO? The online store must be like a bullet. Users are impatient by nature. If your online store takes a little longer to load, not only will it make your potential customers impatient, but it can also generate a feeling of mistrust in them...
In the end, it should be a point that you should work on from the first moment, reviewing all the resources and modules that you are installing, the weight of your images, etc., so that you do not overload your store with heavy resources that you will later have to optimize.
Confidence
Perhaps the most important point that will make us opt for one store or another, apart from the prices, will be the confidence that it transmits to us. It is true that this is not a direct SEO factor, but it will influence your website in one way or another since it can affect KPIs such as the bounce rate, the average duration of the session, or the page views per session.
To begin with, your Prestashop store must have the HTTPS certificate implemented. If you don't have it, stop reading and run to install it now.
It is also important that your website has sections of purchase conditions, correctly explain the returns process, make it clear what the delivery times are the shipping costs ... And without forgetting that the payment process should be simple and straightforward.
Link building
I couldn't forget about link building! Although it is not an internal part of your store, you should try to obtain the odd link from websites that are thematically related. For this, making posts is super important because these can be shared more easily and have more possibilities of being linked in a somewhat more natural way than the more transactional part.
What is a module for SEO and which are the best?
An SEO module is a kind of extension that is installed in the online store itself and allows us to add functionalities that are added to the native ones of Prestashop.
There are free and paid modules, the majority belonging to the latter category. This is one of the most negative parts of Prestashop, and it is that we will have to scratch our pockets if we want to add some of the coolest functionalities that we can think of for our eCommerce in Prestashop.
If I had to recommend the best modules for Prestashop, they would undoubtedly be these:
- Page Cache Ultimate: module to improve the loading speed
- Noindex, follow: to place noindex tags on any page
- Pretty URLs: to make the different URLs of the store friendly
- SEO Expert: to automatically generate titles and meta description based on patterns. Especially useful when we have very large stores.
- SEO Images: this module will allow us to create the ALT tags of our images in an automated way.
