You have started your business online and your online retail website is powered by one of the multiple open source carts scripts out there like Prestashop, Magento, Woocommerce or Opencart.

How can you increase your turnover if you simply cannot find any customers? Search engine optimisation is crucial for you to increase the traffic on your website. It is the process for improving the visibility of your shop in the main search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo or Yandex. Indeed, users only click on the 2-3 tops results, the higher your links are on the result page, the more they will get visitors.

Today SEO is not a science; you would need to set an SEO strategy and Action plan. However, all the indicators show that search engines like genuine and rich content. You would need to improve the quality of your website to improve their presence in the search engine result pages.

Here are 5 ultimate SEO tips.

Avoid content duplicate

Don’t repeat yourself and don’t copy other people content. These are really simple statement to stay on the top of the search result pages. However, as a product page is generally listed in many places on an e-commerce website, retail websites including Prestashop powered webstores are more likely to break these golden rules.

Therefore it is essential that e-merchants apply a clever strategy to reduce the amount of duplicate content on site. For example, a careful use of the meta tag rel=”canonical” can help avoid this issue.

Outside of a website, it is crucial that online store owner rework the product description they get from their suppliers. If many website including the one from your suppliers, or manufacturers have the same content as your website along with other retailers online, you are more likely to get penalized by the search engines out there. Any way your chance to rank better than your competitors is just ridiculous.

 

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Use individual meta title and meta description

Meta tags like meta title and meta description are used to display the links to your store in the search engine result pages. You cannot afford to use the same one for all the products.  You should write the meta title and meta description in a user friendly way  with the ultimate objective of helping your items to get clicked once they shows up in the SERP. For Prestashop use our module SEO Manager to generate unique SEO tags for your product pages, your category pages and more.

Spend money on paid advertisement

Elaborating a content rich inventory is the key to providing enough information to your customers. Remember you should not write your product description for Google. After all it is not your target. Your audience should remain the humans. In most of the e-commerce forums, online shop owners complaint that they don’t get any sales although they spend some time to generate quality content for their website.  You should give a boost to your shop right at the beginning with pay advertisement. You have few options, Pay per click systems like Google AdWords, selling on marketplaces (they charge a mix of fixed rate and a percentage of sales), going on the street and giving away flyers. Emailing remains one of the most effective ways to target your huge number of customers.

In addition to SEO, a website owner should pay for commercial advertisement.

Optimize product images

20 percent of online traffic comes from Google Images, facebook or Instagram. Image search has become a very popular way to navigate to websites. E-commerce websites are no exception. You should publish attractive quality images. Search can retrieve an image from your website. However they cannot tell if it describes a red t-shirt, or a place. You should populate their ALT tags in order to provide keywords to search engines. Prestashop does not provide a user interface for editing the image ALT tags. Unlike a common believe, although ALT tags are usually empty, in the front shop, they are filled with the product title. In the next version of our module SEO Manager, e-merchants will be able to customize the ALT tags for the product images.

 

Include customer reviews

Why don’t you let other customers convince new ones. They will generate quality content on your website. By the way, Google likes fresh content. Webpages that get updated at a regular basis are more likely to rank higher.  Prestashop includes a native customer comment  addons.