First and foremost, it is important to understand that the primary element for the natural referencing of an online store is its product catalog. Without a quality catalog, it will be very difficult (if not impossible) to lead your online store to success on search engines, particularly Google.
The advantage of PrestaShop is that it provides you with a multitude of tools to enhance the natural referencing of your catalog, and this largely involves the use of these tools available in your Back-office (the administration area of your PrestaShop). To introduce these tools to you, we will take the example of a product catalog from a store to help you better understand these concepts.
Local SEO for an online store
This aspect should not be overlooked in order to reach individuals who use your online store as a catalog before coming to purchase in-store. This 'e-local' vision of natural referencing is very important for many e-commerce merchants who also have physical points of sale. This is what is called click and mortar, translate "clicks and mortar" for companies that have both of the following sales channels: the web and one or more physical store(s).
Nevertheless, this view of natural referencing must be independent of the catalog; understand that it is not necessary to add local mentions multiple times on all your product sheets.
"Sublime Youth Night Cream 77", "Sublime Youth Night Cream Achères la Forêt", "Sublime Youth Night Cream Seine-et-Marne", "Pure Lean Cocoa 77", "Pure Lean Cocoa Achères la Forêt", "Pure Lean Cocoa Seine-et-Marne", etc.
Opt more for the presentation of your store(s) and your brand in the CMS pages of PrestaShop (Menu Design and then Pages) or in your blog.
These tools will allow you to establish your local legitimacy by promoting your point(s) of sale, while maintaining a national legitimacy for online sales!
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💡 If you have points of sale, consider marketing tools such as click-and-collect (order online, then pick up your products in-store). |
Be careful, this is not an absolute truth. If you use your PrestaShop to sell products/services only in a well-defined geographical area, it may be beneficial to annotate the localities in your catalog.
The natural referencing of your PrestaShop catalog.
Your catalog consists of two distinct elements: categories and product sheets! Please note that these two elements are equally important in the SEO strategy and they have similar tools under PrestaShop to optimize your visibility.
Regarding the keywords to be used, we will adopt a funnel-shaped strategy: categories will target more general and representative keywords of the displayed products (for example: "Men's Christmas Costume") and product sheets will focus on so-called "long-tail" expressions (more precise expressions generating less traffic than general expressions, but more qualified). In our example: "Cheap Santa Claus Costume".
SEO optimization of your catalog.
Here are the tools offered by Prestashop for the success of its catalog:
The product name.
Only present the product name and, if possible, include a keyword that highlights the intrinsic qualities of the product (pay attention to the presentation; the product name must always remain readable and understandable for the internet user). This product name is one of the essential elements of your natural referencing, as in most PrestaShop themes, it corresponds to the H1 tag (for example, it corresponds to the main title of a newspaper article).
Unoptimized product name:
Santa Claus
Optimized product name:
Discount Santa Claus costume
The title tag (or Title)
This is another major tool in natural referencing. This is the clickable link that will appear in the search engine when users search for the relevant page. Present the product in a few words, including the main features that users may search for (between 55 & 60 characters on average). As much as possible, avoid conjunctions and illogical keyword sequences.
Unoptimized product title:
Father Christmas - Ref : KJ74859
Optimized product title:
Inexpensive Father Christmas costume for men
The description tag
It does not have an impact in terms of organic search ranking, but it significantly influences the click-through rate in search engines. Indeed, these are the two lines of description that appear under your link in search engines. We advise you to create a marketing hook to encourage the internet user to visit your page. If it is not provided, the search engine will select the phrases it deems most relevant from your content (it is often a lottery).
Irrelevant meta description:
Santa Claus - KJ74859
Relevant meta description:
The Santa Claus costume for a successful New Year's Eve is the discount Santa Claus costume from LLD! Order it now and receive it tomorrow!
The simplified URL
Much more pleasant to read than an encrypted URL, the simplified URL of PrestaShop has the advantage of allowing the inclusion of representative keywords of the product, thereby enhancing your relevance in terms of natural referencing.
Non-optimized URL:
product=213?ref=111 & p=2 & DG=1134
Simplified URL of the product:
cheap-santa-claus-costume.html
The accessories
In the Associations tab of your PrestaShop product sheet, you have the option to add accessories. This is the PrestaShop cross-selling module that allows you to sell additional products alongside the one you are offering to the customer. Beyond the fact that it will help increase your average cart value, this tool will also enable you to improve your internal linking (connections within your website), which is another key factor in natural referencing.
Suggested accessories for the product:
Santa Claus hat, Santa Claus beard, Santa Claus shoes, etc.
The images
The images are important from a marketing perspective. They allow the internet user to clearly visualize the product they are about to purchase. This is not the only advantage of images. They will also allow you to appear in image search engines such as Google Images. It is important to know that there is a significant number of individuals (depending on the field of activity) who conduct their searches using this tool. It is therefore essential to provide as many visuals of the product as possible and to accurately fill in the caption available in your back office. It will be used for the rewriting of the image URL, but also in the alternative text, an element currently taken into account by search engines for the positioning of images. Like Title tags, be clear and precise about the content of the proposed image.
The declensions.
Having many product sheets is an advantage for natural referencing, if and only if you have unique, rich, and interesting content for the search engine and consequently, for the internet user. It is essential to propose added value that will allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition on all product listings (we will return to this in the next point) and thus, as far as possible, to avoid duplicate content which is prohibited by search engines. Product variations will enable you to create selectors for products that possess the same intrinsic qualities, but have a different characteristic.
For example, instead of creating a product listing for a Santa Claus costume in size L, followed by a second listing for a Santa Claus costume in size XL, it is more prudent to create two product variations in L and XL that will vary the price. This will prevent having two listings with the same content and thus, will reduce the duplicate content on your online store.
Note: Duplicate content is an issue whether it involves copying and pasting from another site or even within your own site. If two of your pages contain the same content, they will also be considered duplicate content and will devalue your e-commerce site.
The descriptions
This is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of your product listing. Textual content is to search engines what water is to man: an absolute necessity! It will be impossible for search engines to correctly position your site if the textual content does not meet the expectations of internet users and the product you are selling. On the internet, the presentation of your product must serve the role of packaging, sales argument, and highlighting the strengths of your product! You will easily understand why it is essential to be innovative, interesting, unique, and consequently to avoid at all costs doing exactly what the competitor does (for example: duplicated content)!
To succeed in selling online, one must start from the premise that the internet user has made the effort to enter your store among hundreds of online stores at their disposal, and that everything must be done to reassure them about the quality of the product and the service that you are able to offer.
To achieve this, do what you know how to do, in other words: provide a unique presentation of the product you are selling, add your expertise, present your sales arguments, dare to address your customers' inquiries, provoke curiosity among your visitors, and above all, eliminate any doubts that a customer may have regarding your product!
The management of unavailable or out-of-stock products.
PrestaShop offers the possibility to manage unavailable products. When a product is no longer available, it is not necessary to keep it online. For natural referencing, it is not sufficient to simply remove the product. In your product sheet, when you deactivate a product, three options are available to you in the "Redirect when inactive" section:
No redirection (404): to be avoided.
Permanent redirection (301): allows redirecting a product when it will never be available again.
Temporary redirection (302): allows redirecting a product when it will not be available for a period (for example, stock issue).
We advise that when the product is no longer permanently available, to implement a 301 redirection to a similar product. This will allow the user and the search engine to land on an available product and thus, not lose the SEO efforts and rankings achieved on the unavailable listing.
If your product is temporarily unavailable, we advise you to implement a 302 redirect to a similar product. This will allow the user to land on an available product and inform the search engine that the product is temporarily unavailable, thus preventing the loss of ranking for the temporarily unavailable product.
Brands and suppliers
In the editing of your product sheet, you have the option to add a brand and suppliers. In addition to the fact that your products will be accessible on the pages dedicated to brands and suppliers, this allows you to enhance your internal linking and your presence on queries related to these brands and suppliers.