10 ways to promote SEO in Prestashop

Nowadays, E-commerce has become very popular, and most new entrepreneurs dream about a store with a massive amount of traffic that can be converted into buyers later.

So, you have built your online shop on the Prestashop platform but after several months it only appears on the 20th page of Google or even worse?

Don’t worry! Your store’s rank will go up if you follow our 10 ways to promote SEO in Prestashop.

Now, let’s explore them one by one and see what magic would happen to your E-commerce store on Prestashop.

I would divide these 10 ways into 4 separate SEO categories and in chronical order that you should follow.

I. Do Keyword Research Wisely

In terms of SEO, we can not help talking about keywords. At first, inserting some relevant keywords into your webpage sounds to be easy.

However, selecting great keywords that have a high search volume, but a low competition rate has become extremely difficult nowadays.

And targeting the right keyword that leads to the right visitors, which can be converted into buyers later is even harder.

Let’s learn the baby steps.

1. Create a keyword plan

In the “keyword war,” you must have the right strategies for every combat. Choosing less competitive keywords might bring about many visitors but hardly any potential customers.

However, unless your Prestashop store is big business, you can scarcely win with highly competitive keywords.

So what can you do?

Let’s find the loopholes of your rivals – the blanks on the markets.

Aim long tail or body keywords that your opponents miss in their strategies and you can win in many niches.

And what tools you can use to create an effective keyword plan?

2. Use appropriate keyword tools

You should try to take advantage of online and free tools like KWFinder by Mangools, Google trends, Google Keyword Planner, or Google auto-complete feature, etc. If possible, you should also try paid Prestashop tools such as AUTO KEYWORDS GENERATOR Module and META KEYWORDS Module.

These tools can support you dramatically in creating an unlimited list of crucial phrases around genesis keywords. However, you ought to choose only the best phrases from the list above.

II. SEO starter pack

1. Performance and Interface Optimization

1.1. Increase Site speed

Loading speed is important to both customers’ experience and SEO. The faster your website loads, the more search engines and web users appreciate it.

Let’s try to optimize your PrestaShop store’s speed by combining JavaScript files and decrease http requests.

Moreover, using CDN, Image Optimization and add Expires Headers also improve the loading speed dramatically.

If possible, let’s invest in high-speed hosting servers and Prestashop add-ons such as Page Cache Ultimate Module, Minify HTML Module,PrestaSpeed – Image/site/database optimization Module, etc.

1.2. Create a good interface

According to researches, nearly 50% of your website traffic comes from smartphones and tablets.

Moreover, Google PageSpeedInsight even indexes the mobile version of your PrestaShop website before the desktop version.

However, most Prestashop store owners here may pay relative attention to their website’s layout and appearance on PC while missing out mobile-friendliness.

Try to make your website’s interface clea, easy to use, and appealing to all PC and mobile users. Here are some great SEO Prestashop modules for you to do this: Prestashop Christmas Effects Pro Module, [Free] Prestashop Quickly Categories Tree Preview Module.

2. Make your site crawlable

2.1. Create an XML sitemap

Establish an XML sitemap to let the crawlers understand the structure of your PrestaShop store.

It is necessary for search engines to know about the position of products, categories, and CMS pages in your online shop.

An XML sitemap can be known as a ‘table of content’ while search engines are readers, and thus it is good for Prestashop SEO. You can create XML sitemap here.

2.2. Adjust Robot.txt file

There are search engine bots such as Googlebot that often visit and index all the content on your PrestaShop website.

And the robot.txt file is like a tourist guide who leads these robots in exploring your store.

Thus, if you do not want them to go to any specified parts of your website, you can tell your “tourist guide” robot.txt to disallow them to do so.

Unless you want to restrict crawlers from particular pages, you will need to ensure the file is correct, available, and allow valuable content to be indexable. You can try to edit robot.txt on your Prestashop store by PrestaShop robot.txt Module.

2.3. Integrate your store with Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an excellent but free tool for all entrepreneurs!

Let it verify and index your website, and you can see all the indexing status, penalties, search queries, and crawling errors on your website.

This can help you to fix your website’s current errors and have measures to prevent them in the future.

3. Take advantage of Google Analytics

There are many SEO metrics for you to notice, and this work will become easy as pie with the help of Google Analytics.

You can have all kinds of information from your Prestashop store such as age, gender, and nationality of visitors, their behaviors on your store, real-time data about your website traffic, sales, and conversions, etc.

With these valuable statistics, you can choose the right group of potential customers to focus on and have further SEO Prestashop tactics for the future.

III. On-page SEO

1. Write good On-page content

“Content is king.” No matter how much traffic your Prestashop store gets, it will be useless if your website’s content is poor and lack of information.

Find out how to write content that reaches SEO standards and provides full information about the benefits of your products to customers.

This not only converts visitors into buyers but also create passive advertisers for your Prestashop store. It’s SEO Prestashop free! However, you can get help from contentBox – HTML module for PrestaShop.

2. Adjust automatic URLs

URLs provided automatically by the system are difficult to read by both users and search engines.

Customize them manually, ask a specialist to moderate the code of your E-commerce site or get help from a PrestaShop SEO module like the PrestaShop Pretty URLs module will quickly bring about readable URLs such as:

“https://…/products/example-url”

instead of “https://…../products/7_AqPRXIB2rOqsUGfCtXQhWLZC_SDXz240ocb.”

3. Configure Title, Meta and Image ALT tags

3.1. Meta title

Try to make the most out of the 55 characters meta title of your product pages. Use the main keywords in the titles and make it appealing with emotional words such as awesome, the best, premium, free, etc.

Numbers and statistics can lead to a higher click-through rate. If you do not know how to edit the meta title, explore it here.

3.2. Meta descriptions

A meta description should contain 156-160 characters and provide comprehensive and attractive information about your products/categories/shop. This helps customers to know what your pages are about right from the result page. In this case, SEO Meta Tags Manager Module can be a good supporter.

3.3. ALT tags

Adding keywords to product image caption and alternative text also helps to promote SEO on your Prestashop store significantly.

If you have a great store with hundreds of products’images to edit, you should use PrestaShop Modules like SEO Alt Image Tag module instead of wasting time on this work.

IV. Off-page SEO

1. Earn good backlinks

Earning premium backlinks by sharing top content that draws the attention of reputed people and companies in your field. Writing convincing content is the best way of earning not creating mention of your products, service, or store.

Try to have news websites, magazines, blogs, or business-listing companies mentioned about your PrestaShop store and it can get both direct reputation and sales in addition to SEO.

2. Watch backlinks of your rivals

You must take a step ahead and avoid your competitor’s faults in the past. Take your keywords competitors in comparison to your stores with information from the top 10 searches.

With the help of useful tools such as SEMrush or Moz SEO, you can get a list of internal and external links of your rivals’websites and request for backlinks exchange from another list of websites.

Final words

In general, PrestaShop SEO tips are similar to any other website. However, all of what we have shared are only free methods. To multiply SEO’s effectiveness, apart from following the “10 ways to promote SEO in Prestashop” guide above, you should also try to invest in paid ads and Presta add-ons wisely.