SEO Optimization in Prestashop for Textil de Casa

Textil de Casa is an online store specializing in bedding, flex mattresses, Nordic fillings, Massana pajamas ... and the whole world of home textiles .

In it you will find a wide catalog such as clothing or textiles for the bathroom, for the kitchen, for kids, for women...

The online store manager used was recently changed, and we started using the popular Prestashop e-commerce CMS. From an SEO point of view, a web change is already a challenge in itself for positioning. If we add to this the use of Prestashop, with its SEO optimization peculiarities, we must be very careful not to lose the work done in terms of positioning. In this sense, we are going to explain how we optimized (and continue optimizing) SEO in Prestashop for Textil de Casa.

How to optimize SEO in Prestashop?

In the case of Textil de Casa we previously had a custom-made online store. For this reason, SEO optimization tasks in Prestashop focused on 2 axes:

• Maintaining the positioning of the previous website
• Optimizing new website SEO taking into account the characteristics of Prestashop

For the first, to maintain the positioning of the previous website, we carried out a series of tasks that included:

• 301 redirects: as in all SEO migration, if the URLs of our new website change in relation to the old ones, we must redirect them to their new versions to avoid losing positioning. In Prestashop we can choose to use a module to manage redirects or directly modify the .htaccess file to add them.
• Internal link structure: with a migration that includes a CMS change, the internal link structures of our website will surely change (menus, product listings, related product blocks, etc.). In this case we can imitate as far as possible the internal linking of our old website and introduce improvements in it, either through Prestashop's own modules or, if our online store does not have too many products, manually editing the contents and incorporating links.
• Content migration: the weight of the positioning of an e-commerce will normally focus on its catalog (leaving aside informative content, buying guides and blog). With the Prestashop Import functionality we can massively upload all the contents of the catalog of our previous online store (products, brands, products, etc.)
• New Sitemap: with the change of website, new URLs were generated. In addition to the redirects mentioned above, in order to make it possible for Google to find the canonical URLs of our website, we can send a Sitemap.xml file through Google Search Console.

On the other hand, Prestashop itself does not incorporate some SEO optimization options on its core or they have to be configured. To position terms such as home textiles, bedding, flex mattresses, Nordic fillings, Massana pajamas or bedding at Textil de Casa we carried out the following actions:

• Page speed: under the Performance section, Prestashop incorporates some options to improve the loading speed of the website. Depending on our website, theme, modules and other variables, we will have to choose one configuration or another.
• Canonical URLs: depending on the version of Prestashop that we use, we will have to configure which URLs we mark as “canonicals” for Google and other search engines. Especially if we will work with products with multiple variations or filter systems.
• Rich Snippets and Google: some Prestashop themes incorporate Schema data markup for the catalog that does not respect the guidelines established by Google. This implies that, unless we correct it, we will not be able to appear with rich results or Rich Snippets on Google's results pages.
• Category descriptions: Many of the themes and templates for Prestashop do not have a good implementation of the categories’ descriptive text, with problems such as duplication in the HTML code of a short and long version, hiding part of the description, or hiding it completely on mobile devices. To avoid this, we must modify our template files and, going one step further, add another text field to our categories focused on SEO.
• Management of Titles and Meta-Descriptions: by default, Prestashop does not allow mass editing of the Title and Meta-Description fields of our products. This implies that we will have to add them manually one by one, something that may not be feasible if we have a large catalog. To do this, we can choose several options: use a specific module, use the Import option to upload massive changes to these fields, or insert the changes directly into the database.

These are just some of the actions we have done from a technical SEO point of view in Prestashop for Textil de Casa. The SEO optimization work never ends, so we keep adding improvements to the project to make it grow.