The On-Page SEO Checklist for Modern PrestaShop Stores

A lot of new shops worry about building links before they’ve even taken care of their own pages. The good news: there’s a lot you can do inside your PrestaShop store that helps ranking, traffic, and conversions long before you think about “classic” SEO campaigns.

1. Start with how your shop appears in search

Before anything else, search your main keywords and brand name and look at how your pages actually display in Google:

  • Is the meta title clear, readable, and clickable?
  • Does the meta description quickly explain what the page is about and why someone should click?
  • Would you click your result if it belonged to another shop?

Tuning titles and descriptions is one of the fastest on-page wins. It directly impacts click-through rate, which feeds the “this result is useful” signal back to search engines.

2. Treat visitor experience as your main SEO signal

Search engines watch what happens after the click. That’s why visitor experience is effectively an SEO metric:

  • How many pages does an average visitor view?
  • How long do they stay on the site?
  • How fast does the important “above-the-fold” content render?
  • For e-commerce: what percentage of visitors actually buy something?
  • Which pages do people most often exit from without purchasing?
  • Do abandoned-cart visitors come back and finish the order?

At the end of the day, SEO is determined by visitor experience. If people enjoy using your shop and find what they need quickly, search engines see that and adjust accordingly.

3. Learn from successful competitors

Don’t guess in a vacuum. Identify competitors who rank well and clearly know what they’re doing:

  • Study their category structure and navigation.
  • Look at how they write product titles and descriptions.
  • See which content they put on product pages vs. separate guides or FAQs.
  • Note how fast their pages load and how clean the design feels.

You don’t copy them, but you absolutely should learn from them. If several successful shops in your vertical share similar patterns, it’s usually not an accident.

4. Use PrestaShop’s faceted search the right way

One of the best built-in features for visitor experience is PrestaShop’s faceted search (filtering). It only works well if your catalog is structured correctly:

  • Give products meaningful features and attributes that your customers actually use to decide.
  • Enable filters on category pages so visitors can narrow down without constantly changing pages.
  • Make sure filters are readable on mobile and don’t feel overwhelming.

Done well, a visitor can land on a category page and immediately filter down to the exact products they want – without leaving the page. That’s a huge UX and SEO win.

5. Check your Google rich snippets (structured data)

Recent PrestaShop versions and themes include some basic structured data, but it’s often incomplete. It’s worth doing two simple things:

  • Use Google’s rich results test on a few product URLs and check for missing fields (price, currency, availability, etc.).
  • If what you see is very basic or full of warnings, consider investing in a high-quality Google rich snippets module to complete and clean up the schema.

You don’t need to obsess over every micro-detail, but at least validate that your shop isn’t leaving easy rich-result wins on the table.

6. Build relationships in your product vertical

Instead of chasing random links, think “relationships”:

  • Find websites, blogs, or YouTube channels that already cover your product vertical.
  • Offer to do a short interview, product demo, or expert Q&A session.
  • Send them a sample or some branded merch if appropriate.

Sometimes they’ll write an article or feature your shop. You get relevant exposure, targeted traffic, and yes, often a nice link – but the focus is on collaboration, not spammy link building.

7. Grow your shop organically over time

Good e-commerce is not “set it and forget it.” It’s an ongoing process of removing friction and adding helpful features. Some practical ideas:

  • Add an FAQ section or Q&A to important products (the questions customers actually ask).
  • Encourage and showcase Google reviews and on-site product reviews.
  • Improve product listing pages so customers can select attributes (size, color, etc.) and even add to cart directly from the list when it makes sense.
  • Reduce friction in the checkout: don’t force extra steps like newsletter sign-ups, unnecessary consents, or legal texts that don’t apply to your country (e.g. strict GDPR banners when you’re not in the EU).
  • Make sure terms of service and policies are easy to find but not blocking the buying flow.

E-commerce shops are organic. You start with the basics and, over time, you add features and content that clearly improve visitor experience. Every one of those improvements is also an on-page SEO signal.

Conclusion

When your store is new, you can’t control how fast backlinks appear – but you have full control over your pages, your UX, and your performance. If you:

  • polish titles and descriptions,
  • focus on visitor experience and performance,
  • use faceted search with a well-structured catalog,
  • validate your rich snippets, and
  • keep improving FAQs, reviews, and product listings,

you’ll already be far ahead of most new PrestaShop stores. Traffic and rankings then become the result of a shop that’s genuinely good to use – which is exactly what search engines are trying to reward.