Semrush, the best tool for improving PrestaShop SEO?

How to tackle SEO in PrestaShop

You often ask me for advice on how to improve your site's SEO. I'm not an expert on the subject, to each his own. But it's true that tools like Merlin Backoffice Flex are invaluable for filling in SEO fields quickly, en masse. For example, batch-copying product names into Meta Title tags is child's play.

But that's not the whole story. SEO is a set of techniques, know-how, experience and patience. But above all, it's important to understand that good SEO can only be achieved by relying on a large amount of data, analysis, various information and by using tools to understand them.

Everyone has heard of "keywords" and meta fields. It's not just that, the data set required is far more extensive. Competitor analysis, trends, traffic history, social network influence, site ergonomics, bounce rate, pricing policy, backlinks, internal linking, copywriting and the list goes on. Among all this, the primary difficulty for beginners and even experienced SEOs is knowing how to prioritize their actions.

The price of audits and their limited interest

To be honest, we must add to this title "... if we stop there".

I'd like to tell you the story of an e-merchant friend who was seeing his sales drop month after month. He consulted various experts, only to hear the same old story: Google is king, rework your SEO... Yes, except that even without any particular knowledge of SEO, he couldn't see any significant drop in traffic to his site, and therefore no logical explanation.

He paid dearly.

He paid dearly for an audit of his site. Received a report that taught him next to nothing, and 90% of its recommendations focused on SEO improvement areas, with lists of keywords he was already using.

He paid a lot of money for an audit of his site.

The best approach

Having already been through this kind of experience, I advised him to 1/take SEO training so as not to swallow any more bullshit, as in my opinion it's mandatory to succeed in e-commerce, without spending fortunes and 2/take out a Pro subscription to Semrush, which I was already using a little, in its free version.

This tool provided him with historical, current and factual data, not only on his site, but also on his competitors. It also includes as standard a rich palette of analysis aids, far more digestible than Google analytics. Not theoretical stuff, nor the umpteenth list of SEO tips that you never know how to apply in practice, no, real data that helps you understand what's going on and act on the essential things.

Semrush has enabled, among other things:

• To confirm that its pages were well referenced, but had nevertheless lost around 20% in positioning over the last six months.
• To understand where this drop was coming from. Which pages and key expressions were at fault. And which competitive ones were taking off.
• To see what no expert had shown him: at the same time as his site was plummeting, his main competitor's traffic and sales were soaring:

And most importantly, Semrush helped him understand what his competitor had done to cause this dramatic rise, and what to do about it!

Semrush also enabled him, for example, to see and understand just how far behind he was in everything to do with the use of social networks.

He corrected this as a matter of priority and almost overnight, his sales began to take off again.

But not enough. So he continued his work, this time on the editorial content, using the daily progress reports provided by Semrush.

Semrush is a great place to start.

At this point, he realized that a big limiting factor was the display speed of his pages, due in part to the version of PrestaShop (1.5) and above all to its budget hosting.

As is often the case in such cases, I recommended that he switch to PS 1.6 and PHP 7 and migrate to my own hosting provider at the time, which specialized in shared hosting solutions (so very reasonably priced), but very high-end technically and performance.

[Edit]: since writing this article, I've left this host, as I wasn't satisfied with their customer relations. So I won't name it.

Two months after this migration, he had made up his losses. When he came back to me to tell me about this success story, it reminded me a lot of the story of our Sitolog site in 2017, we were also struggling, like many, to understand Google's mood swings and the experts were looking in vain for SEO problems when we were in fact mostly having a problem with the look of the site, which was using the default PrestaShop theme, barely modified and also suffering from various usability issues.

• I constantly have new and updated information, to improve our visibility.
• I can see the impact of modifications I make to my pages.

Conclusion

So yes I claim the catchy title of this post. I really recommend Semrush as if not the best, at least an excellent SEO help solution.