There’s no doubt that online selling is a competitive arena. If you’re looking to boost your website traffic and increase your sales, more than just having a reliable PrestaShop support team, you need to employ strong SEO tactics.
“If you build it, they will come” is a common belief among internet marketers, but it does not always translate into increased foot traffic and revenue for e-commerce shops. That’s why PrestaShop merchants put a lot of effort into digital marketing tactics like SEO (search engine optimization).
In this in-depth SEO for PrestaShop guide, you’ll learn many things about SEO while seeing a – 15 Points checklist to follow and boost your PrestaShop website traffic.
For those who don’t know! Say ‘Hi’ to PrestaShop
PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce platform that enables you to set up a complete online store to sell your items worldwide. It has more than 600 features that help you market and acquire consumers for your goods.
PrestaShop does charge a monthly fee for the platform. There are no commissions on your sales, and you don’t have to pay for PrestaShop’s software licensing. To put it another way, it’s “open sourced,” which means you can use it for absolutely free.
To get started with PrestaShop, download and install the program, choose a shop name, and add a theme. Then you may upload your items and set up payments and delivery. You’ll probably want to include add-ons like coupons, abandoned cart emails, and product recommendations in your store. Incredibly! Over 3,000 add-ons on PrestaShop’s marketplace can help you personalize your store, increase traffic, and create customer loyalty.
Sounds intimidating, setting up a fully functional PrestaShop? Get a PrestaShop certified developer for your help, and you can rest assured of a complete eCommerce store that’s ready to sell internationally.
However, as we said before, simply creating an online store doesn’t guarantee sales. That’s why it’s critical to understand what SEO means for PrestaShop.
PrestaShop SEO – Explained
PrestaShop SEO (search engine optimization) is a group of marketing strategies that help make PrestaShop sites appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
The better your site ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs), the more traffic you will receive. This translates to a more significant number of long-term consumers at a lower cost than traditional advertising. Furthermore, SEO can provide compounding ROI over time with little upkeep.
Importance of Meta Data
Getting metadata correct is the key to SEO for PrestaShop. This is the data you provide Google to “read” your page. The meta title and meta description are two pieces of metadata you’ll focus on when optimizing a page. When someone searches for a specific product, these text sections show up in search engines.
Because search engines use the meta description to decide whether or not a page should be included in a user’s search results, it’s crucial to optimize the content for keywords. That’s why you should include your target keywords in your metadata.
Google uses this information and 200 other criteria to determine whether your site is trustworthy and valuable. Users are more likely to visit a page ranked at or near the top of results if it is both reliable and useful.
Where to include your relevant keywords
Customers and search engines dislike clicking a link and discovering that it isn’t relevant to their needs. If you want to get SEO for PrestaShop right, don’t just include your keyword in your title and description. Include it in the:
- Product description, ideally within the first paragraph of your content.
- URL – for example, PrinstonCoffee.com/Green-ceramic-color-Shifting-coffee-Cup
- Image alt text for search engines and people who use screen readers (Mostly due to cognitive disabilities).
Be careful about overusing your target keywords. This is known as “keyword stuffing,” and Google can penalize you for it. Make your content on these pages readable, engaging, and informative for your clients. Then optimize lightly for search engines only.
One Keyword for One Page
Optimizing just a single page for each keyword is generally the ideal method to go. Each page should have a distinct title and description from all other pages instead of using keywords in the URL or meta tags.
Copying and pasting your product description across all items may be a quick solution, but if you do, Google will have no idea which page to send someone looking for your products. One page per keyword ensures that search engines always rank the correct page.
Struggling to make your pages unique? Outsource PrestaShop developer with experience in Digital Marketing to guide you on strategies to include the brand name, colors, sizes, and other features in your metadata. That way, if someone is searching for a particular product and Google lists your page in their search results, the user will know you have exactly what they need before they click through.
We hope you’ve got the basics clear, right? Let’s move toward the – 15 points checklist to boost your PrestaShop website traffic
1) Choose the right domain
Even if you already have a single Prestashop e-commerce website with a single domain, you must decide between the two versions: www or non-www. The two versions are considered two separate sites by Google. They will detect the same content, but they will identify the pages as duplicate content, resulting in a penalty for your e-commerce. However, you may overcome this problem by redirecting Canonical URLs to the preferred version.
2) Subscribe to the right hosting Service
The host, of course, is often the most neglected component, but using a Good Hosting is one of the most crucial factors. A sluggish website turns potential customers away and damages the site’s reputation within search engine results.
3) Use keywords that are relevant and related to your niche
Several rivals like you are dedicated to breaking into the crowd of goods and deals on the internet. Another approach to set yourself apart from the competition is to focus on a specific market niche so that consumers looking for those items can locate you more quickly and efficiently while conducting their research. Several online solutions for this, such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Besides, when you upgrade PrestaShop 1.6 to 1.7, you receive a pack of utility tools embedded to promote your online marketing efforts.
4) Write engaging product descriptions
Describe your items: helpful, complete, and engaging. Make sure your product pages appeal to your users and search engines by optimizing them. Write honestly and without exaggeration, and concentrate on a few keywords for each piece. Product descriptions are your first and last chance to explain your offering to your webshop visitor. Hence, it is necessary to get it written by a professional copywriter or self-industry researcher.
5) Focus on intent
A user looking for a “travel backpack” is probably seeking to purchase one. Many product pages will come up as a result of this search. On the other hand, a user searching for “backpacking across the US” is most likely searching for a blog post or article that provides information about backpacking throughout the United States.
To put it another way, the searchers’ objectives are distinct. One person wants to purchase something, while the other wishes to learn more. To make content that ranks on search engines, you must first understand SEO’s different types of search intent.
6) Improve webshop page load speed
Google has admitted that page speed is a ranking factor, so you should take it seriously. There are several methods to enhance page speed. Using a cache, compressing CSS files, minifying JavaScript, and creating pages with AMP are the most common ways to improve page speed.
To improve the performance of your PrestaShop site, go to “Preferences,” then “Performance,” and then…
- Smarty section, set Force to compile to “No” and Cache to “Yes.”
- CCC section, enable all points except “High-risk HTML compression.”
7) Develop a proper site structure
Your page must prioritize the searcher’s experience. That is, it should be simple for visitors to your website to locate what they’re searching for quickly. Your content should start broad and become more specific as it goes, beginning with the home page and moving down to a category, subcategory, and product pages.
8) Take the best advantage of – Social Media Marketing
Backlinks are an essential aspect of SEO strategy. According to studies, the more social media links a piece of content has, the more backlinks it receives. Sharing your material on social networks puts it in a system that encourages content promotion. Tweets and shares from followers help you spread your material before those who may wish to share it with their own networks and link to it from their website.
9) Prevent content duplication at all costs
You may have duplicate content or similar versions of the same information available from multiple web addresses (URLs) on your Prestashop e-commerce site. There is a straightforward and quick remedy to avoid duplicate content and fines. Consult a reliable PrestaShop support agency that will deploy canonical URLs. Pages that were previously considered “duplicate content” (different URLs with the same content) are then evaluated by search engines as one page.
10) Label with Schema Markups
Schema is a data-labeling method that may help you rank higher in search engine results by organizing search results, including product reviews, photos, and deep links on SERPs. The PrestaShop SEO module “Structured Data Schema Markup & Rich Snippet,” for example, can assist you in constructing a schema for your site.
11) Create SEO Friendly URLs
An SEO-optimized URL helps search engine crawlers and website users easily navigate through pages. To make a search engine-friendly URL, make it secure (use SSL), brief, informative, and include your focus keyword. In PrestaShop, make sure you visit “Preferences,” then “SEO and URLs,” and change the option for Friendly URLs to “yes.”
12) Use the Robots.txt file
There are certain pages on your website that you’ll want Google to crawl in a certain way or avoid from search engine results entirely – such as admin and shopping cart pages. A robots.txt file can be used to communicate these things to Google.
13) Integrate dedicated SEO modules
Now that you have a basic understanding of SEO for PrestaShop, we’ll show you some modules for this platform that can help you boost your position even more.
- SEO Expert: This module lets you programmatically fill your title and meta descriptions and build SEO-friendly URL tags. It’s handy for large product catalogs.
- SEO Images: It takes care of adding the appropriate (and automatically optimized) keywords to your ALT tags.
- Page Cache Ultimate: This module can assist you in improving the load speed of your eCommerce store as a whole.
14) Get consistent with publishing unique content
The least you can do best is regularly publish unique and helpful content. Regular posting will keep your customers updated on the most recent information in your niche. As a result, your blog will receive more traffic, and your revenue will improve. Write completely original descriptions about your products, and also do mention the keyword in your meta title/description. In addition to publishing and promoting new products, Start a blog and optimize it for search engines.
15) Submit XML Sitemap
XML sitemap has all of your store’s pages indexed in it now. An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of a website’s essential pages so that Google can crawl and index them. It is critical to maintain up-to-date with your sitemap and submit it to the search engine on a regular basis.
A sitemap can help you find content. You don’t need to submit a sitemap to the search engine if you use Yoast SEO or RankMath PrestaShop plugin. These plugins may automatically add your pages to the sitemap. It also aids search engines in comprehending the site’s structure. You want Google to crawl all of your website’s essential pages. However, certain pages are constructed without internal links, making them difficult to discover.
Final thoughts
So there you have it, our SEO guide to boost your PrestaShop website traffic. We hope you’ve found this helpful information and that it helps you achieve better rankings in the search engines and increased web traffic.
The tips we’ve shared in this SEO guide are just the beginning. If you want to take your traffic and sales to the next level or need help putting any of these tips into action, outsource a PrestaShop developer from an established agency. These certified professionals will be more than happy to assist you.
Happy PrestaShop!
