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SEO15 min

Tutorial: How to improve SEO for Prestashop and rank

If your store needs to improve its SEO positioning in your prestashop website and rank in google searches, you're in luck, here we'll explain how to improve your…

I'll tell you everything you need to know about this CMS so you can optimize your prestashop for SEO and web positioning. I advise you to choose a quiet day to learn everything I'm going to tell you about prestashop, seo, keywords and the tips that will make your store take off in the way it deserves.

This tutorial on SEO in Prestashop is focused on those people who are starting, but also for those who have already started and want to learn everything about the platform that hosts their online store. Pay attention to all the SEO Prestashop Tips!

Prestashop: Is it the best CMS for your SEO?

Today, Prestashop is one of the best developed and prepared e-commerce platforms in the market. It's quite simple to install and also has a very intuitive interface, so you don't need to be an expert. Ranking prestashop will be easier than ever.

Compared to CMS like Wordpress, it has the advantage that you can include, customize and manage a much larger product catalog. The most tedious part is configuration, but after reading this article that won't be a problem. That said, to improve SEO in Prestashop you'll need to know the platform as well as possible.

Concepts to take into account to improve Prestashop SEO

Positioning your store in prestashop and starting to sell is what you most want, but before that you must consider the following: Do you know about web hosting? Marketing? All these details need to be taken into account if you want your SEO in prestashop to be the best possible.

Choose the ideal hosting and domain to rank prestashop

In this fight to reach the top of google and sell progressively, your biggest enemy is yourself, and specifically, your rush for everything to work "right away". That's why before anything else you must be clear about the name of your web domain, and find a hosting service that suits your needs and goals.

In our experience, it's better to have too much than too little, so don't skimp and get good web hosting. Also make sure your web provider doesn't make it difficult for you to make a change in your hosting plan if your project and its catalog start to grow.

As for the domain, the most efficient is to find available a name related to the search intent of your potential target audience, without a doubt this will improve your SEO in Prestashop from the start.

Your prestashop store theme also influences your SEO

In the case of themes, choosing a theme that's more optimal for your store isn't an easy task if what you want is to rank prestashop. The best will always be to make a custom one of what your project requires, to focus all resources on it. Don't hesitate to consult an SEO-focused web design expert if necessary.

How can I improve On Page SEO of my Prestashop?

For your e-commerce products to be successful and you to grow your online store, you must know how to position your prestashop products with a good SEO strategy. But there are also a few tricks, which we list below:

1. Periodically review the project

In search of possible crawling problems, and if found, optimize them.

2. Review the URL of your online store

This url should be as clean as possible, and on top of that, it should contain keywords with which you want to rank.

3. The main page of your store, cared for like a child.

Offer relevant and quality information, optimize your store's keywords assiduously and try to make it an experience for the user that makes you stand out from the rest.

4. Internal links.

They must be correctly structured, whether they are links to categories, products or your blog posts, using the main word as Anchor text.

5. Optimize headings, titles and descriptions.

Capturing users' attention in an original way, and taking care of meta-title and description characters.

6. Optimize categories and product listings.

They must be in "Index" if you want Google to include them in the search engine and result index. Add in an optimized way everything that's of interest to the user (Images, heading, tags and text). Above all, try to add useful information in product descriptions.

7. The images of your online store, always optimized.

Always use images of the highest possible quality for your store. Avoid using the same images as your competition.

8. Keep your store's blog updated.

This will help you not only keep regulars updated, but through SEO you'll be able to bring new customers to your prestashop store**.**

9. Multi-device

Above all, to rank prestashop, make sure your store is responsive for mobile devices, since today we use the internet much more on phones than on PCs.

10. Loading speed.

Periodically review this aspect, whether with speed tests or so-called "stress tests", which analyze the performance of your prestashop. You'll also need to review the configuration to give it the highest possible performance.

11. Configure the performance of your prestashop 1.7.

This will serve not only for the already mentioned loading speed, but also for cache, CCC, image optimization and removing modules you have unused.

12. Blog content

Having a blog complementary to your e-commerce is vital. Not only to maintain communication with your audience, but it's also an excellent tool to reach potential customers of your product or service.

13. Discontinued products.

Keep an eye on all those products that for one reason or another you won't have in your sales catalog. Here you have several options, like redirecting this listing to a similar product, hiding it while it's out of stock, or removing it until you have stock again.

14. Watch out for canonicals, take care of them!

Your canonical url is the most representative of your project, the most important. It's the one we want to appear in search engines, therefore we must avoid at all costs that it gets duplicated, in prestashop you can avoid this through a module, which will help you optimize your SEO.

15. SEO in each product category.

Everything revolves around SEO when you want to rank prestashop, so each category must be focused on covering the search need of those potential customers, don't neglect this section, you could be losing money.

16. The product listing.

It's as important as the category. Once you have your keyword research ready, you'll know how people are searching for these products, therefore, the product listing and description will revolve around those keywords, try not to be generic, differentiate yourself from the competition. This is a vital part of web positioning for Prestashop.

17. HTTP SSL.

Without this, forget about selling. This certificate confirms that your website is secure and that future customer data will be handled legally. Normally people flee from websites that don't have this certificate, which you can get through your domain provider.

18. Import your supplier's catalog into prestashop.

Through a CSV document you'll be able to massively import the entire product catalog.

18. 301 redirects in Prestashop.

Daily bread in e-commerce. It's the most frequent solution, since it's common for there to be URLs that are removed or moved frequently, and a 301 redirect is the most common.

19. Languages in prestashop.

Through prestashop 1.7 you can import new languages, currencies and much more.

20. The importance of your Sitemap.xml.

You can create it through a module or manually, but what's important here is that it's configured to guarantee the indexing of your website in the most optimal way.

21. Take care of your Robots.txt.

Vital to avoid crawling problems. Decide well what you want to be indexed and what not, so that Google's spiders don't waste time on irrelevant content.

Are you enjoying the SEO Prestashop tutorial? Do these SEO Prestashop Tips seem interesting? Leave us your opinion in the comments!

How to improve Off Page SEO of my prestashop?

We're facing another vital element for the organic positioning of your online store. Off Page SEO encompasses those links that point to your domain externally, that is, by third parties, whether through other websites or users on social networks, video platforms, etc.

The disadvantage of this section is that it's something impossible to control. Your role in this section is to generate and share relevant content, providing quality solutions to those users' searches. It's also fundamental that your website is totally optimized, since a slow website could ruin your SEO strategy for positioning your prestashop store.

Let's first start with what you should not do to improve your Off Page SEO:

1. Don't generate spam links.

If you want to rank prestashop, it's better to have few quality links than to have hundreds of messages created by ourselves and ruin our brand image in front of Google, and it can also seriously affect the web positioning of your Prestashop.

2. Focus on your topic.

Don't seek to be linked anywhere, for Google it's very important that there's a match in topic, look for blogs and websites in your topic.

How to do good Off Page SEO on my prestashop store?

1. Identify your SEO strategy

Keyword research, analyze competition.

2.Make a Link-Building strategy

Determine the link profile you want to link, but naturally, do collaborations with influencers in your topic so they share your brand.

How to rank your prestashop store?

As always, the answer is SEO. Positioning your prestashop store isn't that different from positioning a Wordpress website, or rather, positioning a store isn't that different from positioning a blog.

Prestashop is one of the best platforms in this sense, because it has practically everything necessary for your E-commerce to be completely optimized, so through SEO, your prestashop store can reach the top pages of Google. These SEO Tips with key!

Now then: How can and should we do it?

1.Do a Keyword Research.

This is essential, and you'll have to do it periodically if you want to be in the top search positions to optimize the web positioning of your online store in Prestashop.

2. Position the categories of your online store.

Establish a strategy to position this set of products, and make sure that if the user searches for "A", they only find "A" in that category.

3. Position the product listings.

It's a process similar to that of categories, only at this point we should focus on the product. Here we recommend making a video explaining how this product works, or linking customer reviews, it works quite well.

4. Optimize the Prestashop homepage.

It's the part where many customers usually land and fail to rank prestashop for this reason.. Do you have a dirty house when guests arrive? Well this is the same. You must take care of the title, the keywords that appear on the homepage, the headers (H2, H3. . .), the images, the text and the metadata.

The best SEO tools for prestashop

All this work, for which you need a lot of patience, would be practically impossible if you don't have SEO tools that help you position your online store, in this case, you'll have to use all your SEO weapons to rank your prestashop store.

What are the best tools?

1.Module 301, 302 and 303 redirects in URLs

With this module you can do redirects in product URLs, prevent users from falling into 404 errors and send them to functional URLs.

2. Canonical URLs module

This module serves as the identified of that URL you want Google to identify in search engines, preventing it from being duplicated**.**

3.Pretty URLs

This module makes the URLs of your website as optimized as possible for SEO, discarding those elements that are irrelevant in the process.

4.SEO Expert

It's the equivalent of Yoast SEO, but in prestashop. Specifically it's a great ally, since through meta-tags it helps search engine robots understand what your website's content is about, helping it achieve greater visibility.

5.SEO images

This module is responsible for generating and customizing content uniquely for the ALT attributes of your images. This is another type of positioning, by images, which helps a lot.

6. Page cache ultimate

Ideal to ensure that your website has the shortest possible loading time. This is something Google looks at a lot now, so it will be vital for the web positioning of your Prestashop.

7. Multi-language sitemap generator.

This module makes your website's sitemap more easily read by web browsers.

8. Customer rating and review + Google Rich snippets.

This module groups your customers' opinions, that rating is displayed through Rich Snippets, this will increase your store's traffic over time, thanks to the trust this method generates. In summary, you can increase sales and trust in your brand. Ideal for ranking prestashop.

9. SEO Noindex, follow.

The ideal solution to choose which URLs you want to index and which you don't. It's a way to boost URLs through search engines.

If you have these SEO tools for prestashop at hand, you have many opportunities to succeed. With great power comes great responsibility. Optimize!

Everything about URLs for prestashop

It's of capital importance that the URLs of your online prestashop store are maximally optimized. Why? Because they're vital for the position of your post in search engines. The secret lies in making these URLs as friendly as possible to Google or the search engine you use.

This is quite an art, and nothing is clear, but the key is knowing how to choose the structure of keywords we introduce in that URL, since that will help us or harm us if done badly.

How to configure friendly URLs for prestashop?

You'll need to access the Prestashop 1.7 control panel and activate them through these commands:

  1. Enter the Dashboard.
  2. Go to store parameters.
  3. Then to traffic and SEO.
  4. Check "yes" in the "Friendly URL" field.

Find the perfect URL for your prestashop store

The appropriate URL for our online store should meet the following elements:

1. Have an appropriate structure.

Limit yourself to introducing solely and exclusively the most relevant data (Domain name + product name + product category)

2. Use characters and separators appropriately.

Without special content, capital letters or numbers, as "clean" as possible for correct Prestashop web positioning.

3. Implement the SSL certificate.

To be able to show users that they're facing a trustworthy domain. A secure connection is one of the bases Google uses to position websites.

4. Must be readable.

The shorter a URL, the more readable for search engines**.**

With these tips you'll achieve notable improvements over time.

Position your prestashop store with a good choice of domain and your store name

We're facing one of the most complicated choices, since the name of your project must not only capture its essence, but you should also pay attention to the opportunities SEO positioning offers you.

Our recommendation is that you include keywords within your domain. For example, if you're looking to create a refrigerator store, the ideal would be to include a keyword in the domain name, such as: www.refrigeratorsmadrid.com. Why? Well, if they live in madrid and want to know something or buy a refrigerator, maybe they'll search for that term. And boom! There's your online store, so selling options have just grown exponentially.

In short, the SEO strategy of your online store should start from its name itself, since in the long run you could make a difference compared to the competition.

Mini free SEO audit for prestashop: How should I do it?

Whether because from minute one you have your SEO strategy clear, or because you want to improve your prestashop store's SEO, you'll have to help yourself with different analytical tools, where you can interpret this data, the most common tools for Prestashop web positioning are:

1. Google page Speed.

To measure your website's speed.

2. Google Search console.

Google's free service with which you can monitor, maintain and troubleshoot the appearance of your website in search engines.

3. Screaming frog.

This paid tool is used to do comprehensive audits of your website. But you can crawl up to 500 URLs for free.

What happens if you don't know how to use and interpret data from these tools? Honestly, nothing happens, here you have two options: Either you can learn on your own through free SEO courses, or you can entrust yourself to an SEO manager for your Prestashop, an expert who will take your Prestashop page to the top of search engines.

If you think this SEO Prestashop tutorial is missing something, don't hesitate to leave us in the comments what you would add to this teaching module.

Related reading


Shall we work together?

If you want to apply this in your company with a team that combines technical SEO, GEO and paid acquisition measured against the income statement, request a no-commitment audit. You can also check real case studies or read the public GEO baselines that Elevam Labs publishes every quarter.

By

Asier López Ruiz

April 8, 2022 · 15 min

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