You are looking for a theme for your Prestashop store and you do not know how to choose the best one? The one that will improve your natural referencing, that will be very fast to display but also very customizable so that it sticks to the identity of your brand/shop?

I will try to answer your questions so that you can find the best Prestashop SEO theme for your store.

The basis for choosing your Prestashop theme

The first thing is obviously to check the compatibility of the theme with the version of your Prestashop.

Also check if the theme is still maintained, often I ask the developer a simple question before purchase to see if they respond quickly.

Is it easy to update the theme? Is it well documented? Prestashop does not offer a one-click theme update as it is possible to do with modules, so check if the theme offers one.

All themes are now "responsive" but are not necessarily "mobile first" (designed primarily for mobiles), check that the theme demo displays well on your phone

Make sure the developer has implemented the basic SEO and Core Web Vitals techniques, this should be listed in the theme features at a minimum.

Prestashop themes also come with some modules, this can also help you to choose.

Finally, and this is quite important, how configurable is this Prestashop theme? Will you be able to customize it to your brand's colors and style?

A good Hn markup

The ballises Hn shave essentiehees for the reférencement natural pages. Elles doivent être bien hiérarchisées: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6, afin that the moteurs from recherche like Google puissent compmakesre what your page is about just by analyzing the titles and subtitles.

For a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it is therefore important that they are well positioned in the templates of the pages produits, pages catégories, page d'accueit, etc. but also in the templates of the modules that display content in the pages.

It is also necessary thatThe redacteurs pay particular attention to the pages from continus (CMS, articles from blog, etc.).

He is important from respecter theseelques règthe :

  • a ballise H1 by page,
  • the ballise H1 in first,
  • not from itsuts from niveau (you don't go from an H2 to an H4, you need an H3 between the two),
  • utilisation of mots clS the more importants dyears the Hn,
  • The reading of the Hn must allow toCompmakesre the sujet lineé by the page

H1 tags such as "Welcome to our store" on the home page are to be avoided, we will rather try to propose a text of 400/500 words with a good tagging and containing the semantics of the site.

Personally I use the Chrome extension "HeadingsMap" which allows you to see the hierarchy of Hn tags of a page; use it to analyze the Prestashop SEO theme demo you want to buy.

A silo structure / Thematic siloing

By using a system of silos, it is possible to group the contents of a website according to specific themes. The silos allow you to compartmentalize the different subjects and create an internal mesh that facilitates navigation and indexing by search engines, especially Google.

This type of structure is usually done by offending some links, especially in the main menu (mega-menu), in order to distribute the pagerank of the current page to the "parent" pages.

Optimized internal linking with link obfuscation

The basis of SEO are links, those coming from external sites also called "backlinks" but also and especially internal links, those that link the pages of your store between them. Having backlinks is not easy but as for internal links it is your Prestashop theme that creates them, that's why it is important that it is optimized for SEO!

For example, it is advisable to have only one link on the product thumbnails and not one link on the image, one on the description and one on the product name.

We can leave the links to your terms and conditions, the company description and other generic pages on the home page but we will obfuscate them in the internal pages.

We will obfuscate the links to the other languages in order to separate them.

Tip to know if a link is obfuscated: on a computer, place your mouse on the link, if it appears in the bottom left of your browser then it is not obfuscated, if nothing appears then it is obfuscated. Know that this SEO technique is tolerated by Google and allows to optimize the distribution of the pagerank of a page towards the other pages.

Rich Snippet integration, rich result and featured snippet

All these terms have more or less the same idea, they are additional information for search engines like Google to enrich the results pages.

For an online store it will be interesting to add Rich Snippet for customer reviews, for product sheets, for your stores (location), for FAQs, etc.

These Rich Snippet are inserted in the templates of the Prestashop theme and modules.

A blog module to generate content pages

A good Prestashop SEO theme must offer a blog to improve the natural referencing because without content your pages will not appear in Google search results (or other). The content of the product or category pages is obviously very important but it is also necessary to propose "free" content, which will help the user in his search.

For example, a site that sells swimming pools can propose a series of articles to explain how to maintain its pool. A store that sells wine can write articles to explain how it is made, what the different vineyards are, etc.

All this content is long to write but we must not forget it and, above all, in my opinion, we must not fall into the easy way by generating this text by an artificial intelligence like Openai (GPT-3, ChatGPT). On the one hand because there is a risk of having "Duplicate Content" (AI tools do not guarantee the uniqueness of the content). On the other hand because Google has warned that it will penalize pages with generated content. Finally, because your articles must be sincere, you must write them with a real desire to help Internet users on a subject that you master because it is your job.

Yes, it's free content that costs you time, but it will bring notoriety to the other pages of your store if you include some links (2 or 3 maximum) related to the article.

Super fast display and Core Web Vital optimization

As you know, this is my favorite field! Google likes websites that display quickly, whose loading time does not exceed 1s for the TTFB (response time of the 1st request) and 2.5s for the LCP (display of the largest element), already because it can browse them faster but also and especially because Internet users prefer fast sites. It is also important to respect the recommendations "Core Web Vitals" (Essential Web Signals) because it is the guarantee of a fast display but also of quality: no displacement during loading (CLS) or blocking of the phone (TTI or TBT).

So make sure that the developer of the theme has taken care to implement the techniques recommended by Pagespeed Insights. You can also test the demo of his theme on the Google Pagespeed Insights website.

The Prestashop theme is not everything!

Choosing a good Prestashop SEO theme will not improve your SEO simply by installing it! The hardest part is writing the content! Don't be fooled, there is no miracle method, you'll have to spend time on each product page to make it as complete as possible: title tag and meta description for search engines, title, short description, features, full description, etc. for buyers. And don't forget the pictures with their captions!

A little tip by the way: Google likes features in HTML table form!

In any case, by choosing a theme optimized for SEO, all the time spent writing product sheets and blog posts will not be useless, it will be put to good use by the theme for a better SEO!

Good luck with your research!