Are you planning to set up your e-commerce store on PrestaShop? Perfect! Although this platform is SEO-friendly, this does not mean that you won’t have to put any effort into making your store visible. In this article, we look at what you need to do, including PrestaShop link building and general SEO tips. Interested in learning more? Then keep reading!
All you need to know about PrestaShop
Before we get to PrestaShop link building, let’s describe this platform in a nutshell. It is an open-source content management system (CMS) similar to WordPress, Magento, or Joomla. However, what makes it stand out (from WordPress and Joomla) is that it is designed specifically for e-commerce stores.
PrestaShop is adjusted to the needs of both small sellers and large e-commerce companies. This is mainly due to its intuitive interface and customizability. What is more, there are numerous support materials available on the web (Presta Forum, YouTube tutorials, etc.), thanks to which you can learn how to use its more advanced features even as a beginner.
PrestaShop advantages
The main perks of using PrestaShop include:
- SEO-friendliness – the platform is designed with the changing SEO principles in mind,
- Intuitive interface – it is user-friendly even for beginners.
- Scalability – PrestaShop scales easily, making it a perfect platform for kick-starting your e-commerce business.
- Customizability – apart from hundreds of plugins and apps, you can customize the platform using the PHP coding language.
PrestaShop pricing
PrestaShop comes in three packages:
| Classic | Hosted | Custom |
| Free | €24/mo+ | Custom |
| – Shipping services (eShip for PrestaShop) – Payment processing (PrestaShop Checkout with PayPal) – Marketing automation,Classic template (customizable) | – All Classic package perks Gandi hosting (50 GB) – Automatic VAT calculation GDPR compliance and consent mode compliance – Technical support (6 days a week) | – customized solution for your specific e-commerce project |
PrestaShop link building strategies: How to effectively acquire links and improve SEO?
Backlinks are an essential part of any website – they are the indicators that your store is trustworthy and/or offers relevant information to the users. Moreover, they drive human signals, the real entries to and purchases in your store, which further boost your SEO and fulfill the ultimate goal of any business: drive sales. How to acquire them effectively? What link-building strategies will work for a PrestaShop store? Here are our recommendations:
Plan your link-building strategy from top to bottom
One of the most important things you need to consider when planning your link-building strategy for your PrestaShop store isn’t where to get the links from but rather what to link. How should you approach this?
- Start from your homepage – this is the most important subpage on your website, and strengthening it will strengthen all your categories (if you have proper internal linking in place!). Hence, you should begin by acquiring backlinks leading directly to your main page.
- Proceed with product categories – another crucial (and general) area is your product categories; focus on them when you’ve acquired enough links to your homepage. You may start linking to your main (most profitable) categories even at the beginning of your store’s existence – it all depends on how much resources you can pour into your link-building process.
- Products? Rarely – acquiring links for specific products makes sense only if all of the below conditions are met:
- the product comes with a high margin,
- you’re certain that the product will remain in your store as it is (no new versions; the producer won’t remove it from the market) for 3-4 years,
- the product is popular,
- you have the resources to reach a meaningful position in the SERPs.
What about blog posts? Well, it all depends on the potential profitability. If the post is popular and brings meaningful traffic to your website that later turns into conversions, you can strengthen it with links to ensure it’s top 1 in the SERPs. But how often does that happen? Exactly – in most cases, it will be better to focus on the homepage and product categories.
Buy links using link-building marketplaces
First on our list is the simplest, easiest, most cost-effective solution: using a link building marketplace. Why do we recommend it?
- It’s fast – you have numerous available domains within a hand’s reach, with all their most important parameters on display. You no longer need to analyze each domain in Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, contact the webmaster and negotiate the rates.
- It’s reliable – you know that the links acquired will be created with quality and best SEO practices in mind.
- It’s relevant – high-authority backlinks are placed among relevant content. Thanks to filters (over 75 in Linkhouse!), you can easily locate such content and ensure you get links that truly pour the SEO juice into your store.
Create a blog
Blogging is an important SEO strategy, but it’s also helpful for link-building for PrestaShop stores. All you have to do is conduct keyword research, list topics related to your products, and start writing the articles. How can this impact your backlinks?
High-quality articles will get reposted, quoted or shared by the users, generating backlinks without any additional effort on your site. An additional perk will be boosting your site’s topical authority, which will strengthen the impact of all your SEO-related efforts, not only link-building.
Harvest the power guest posting for most important keywords
Guest posting is an effective way to gather links of the highest quality, one that will pump tons of SEO juice into your website. The idea behind them is pretty simple: you find a site with relevant content, write a text for such a website, publish it there and include a link to your own domain. Here, you can focus on:
- general links to your store (including brand anchors and naked URL),
- posts optimized for your product keywords with anchors leading directly to a given product or a category.
What is more, you can conduct this strategy effortlessly. How? All you have to do is buy guest posting from us at Linkhouse. Our experienced copywriters will prepare the articles for you while we find the perfect domains to publish your content on.
Optimize your whole strategy with our Link Planner
Finally, we have one more link-building tool that we want to share with you: our Link Planner. It will help you climb the SERPs with your PrestaShop store. What is it and how can it help you?
Linkhouse Link Planner is an AI-powered tool that enables you to create whole link-building campaigns for your PrestaShop store quickly. Your effort is minimized, as the tool requires you only to select the parameters of your campaign. Then, it automatically:
- selects the best domains for your links,
- enables you to purchase said links.
You can even set it up for recurring campaigns to maintain consistency in your link-building efforts. Hence, it’s the perfect tool if you want to embrace efficiency combined with effectiveness.
SEO optimization for your PrestaShop store: General tips and tricks
While we’ve shown you the best e-commerce link-building strategies for PrestaShop, you cannot rely purely on them. Instead, you should combine them with technical and on-site SEO. What do you need to know, and what common mistakes should you avoid? Here are our tips and tricks!
Optimize your site for the right keywords
People use different keywords when searching for anything on the Internet. What matters is that behind each of them is certain difficulty and intent.
Short-tail keywords, like “shoes” or “boots” will generally have higher search volumes, but it also means that you’ll have more trouble ranking up for them. That’s why, you should embrace long-tail keywords, ones that are a bit more detailed.
Instead of “boots”, optimize your products using keywords like “red boots for women” – you’ll have higher chances of getting in the top3 search results. The same goes for all the other pages, so avoid getting too general. Also, remember about content cannibalization: don’t use the same keywords for two different subpages or products; instead, try to get to as much detail as possible to differentiate them.
Embrace the power of PrestaShop modules
There are many tools for PrestaShop link-building, and so is on-site SEO. Dedicated modules will help you ensure that your website is well-optimized. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to use them, even if they require some initial investment.
For instance, the 1-Click Upgrade module enables you to update your PrestaShop to the latest version, making the process easy and quick (though you should remember to do this in a test version first). Or, the SEO Image module will help you create alts – alternative descriptions for photos on your website. You can create a helpful module stack that will improve your efforts, so consider what you need and get down to it!
Remember to enable the SSL Certificate
The SSL certificate is crucial for your customer data security and for SEO in general. So… don’t forget to enable it. To do this, you’ll need to:
- Click “Configure”, then “Preferences” and “General.”
- Enable SSL and save.
Configure your menu
PrestaShop offers multiple solutions for your menu design – the amount of customizability is, indeed, impressive. However, don’t get lost in all of the choice; the navigation needs to be simple and intuitive.
For starters, ensure that all the elements in the menu are not misleading – the user knows where they are getting to. You should also implement features that show the users what subpage they are currently at so that they can easily navigate back or forward to narrow/broaden their product searches. Don’t make the menu too long – too much of a choice might lead to hesitation or even overwhelm the user and lead them out of your store.
Regarding SEO, the menu is crucial for showing the bots the right direction for crawling and transferring the SEO juice. This is why you should include all the important categories and subpages in it. Otherwise, all your SEO efforts may be less effective.
Conduct an SEO audit
If your store is still underperforming in the SERPs, or you are simply looking for more search engine optimization tips regarding your particular store, you should conduct an SEO audit. This is a thorough, objective analysis conducted by a third party that looks into all aspects of your SEO, from technical to content and link-building, finding areas to improve in your PrestaShop store.
An SEO audit is the one exception where we don’t recommend using external auto-auditing tools. Instead, contact a professional agency or SEO specialist, as they will be more thorough in the process. After all, an SEO audit is a considerable expense, but you also do it only once in a while, so you want it to be as detailed as possible.
The takeaway
PrestaShop is a good platform for e-commerce stores, and its link-building strategies do not vary that much from the general e-commerce approach. You can quickly build a rich backlink profile just by using a link-building marketplace, and with a good strategy, you shall rise in the SERPs in no time. So, what are you waiting for? Explore our link-building solutions and see what possibilities they can open for you!
