Shopware SEO - What beginners should know

Are you planning to create a Shopware store or already have one? Are you a beginner or do you already have some experience in SEO?

At this point, we would like to give you an overview of successful measures for optimizing your Shopware store so that more users find their way to your store in the future and you can increase your sales.

As an agency for e-commerce, we at EXWE not only have a special focus on the technical optimization of Shopware stores, but also support you with other onpage and offpage measures, which we will explain in more detail in the course of this article.

Reading time 4 min

1. A brief introduction to the topic of Shopware SEO optimization
2. How to start Shopware SEO and which tools will help you with this
   1. Keywords and the search intent of your potential customers
   2. The basic rules for creating content
   3. Software to support your work
3. What you should do to achieve long-term SEO success for your Shopware store
4. Why you should use these techniques to increase your visibility in the long term
5. Find suitable keywords
6. More visibility through backlinks
7. Social media
8. Google Shopping
9. Quality of user content

A brief introduction to the topic of Shopware SEO

The first thing you should internalize is user behaviour, or rather the user journey of your potential customers. Try to understand how your potential customers search for your products or services on the internet. Since the internet is a so-called pull medium, search engines like Google have a significant influence on the behavior of users and how they find and use content like your store. This also means that potential customers can only access your store in a few ways that are free for you. Either they know your brand and enter the URL of the store directly, click on a link on another website or in social media or enter a search term in a search engine.

This should make it clear to everyone what fundamental importance search engines have for traffic to websites or web stores and how important this topic is for an online store.

How to start Shopware SEO and which tools will help you

We would now like to give you a brief overview of what can help you implement Shopware 6 SEO in your online store. You can use these tools to get started, even if you are a complete SEO beginner.

Keywords and the search intent of your potential customers

As you probably know, keywords or search terms are the words that a user enters into the search bar of a search engine. What many people don't know, however, is that the terms or the search intent that arises from them can be used to deduce clear differences in where the user is currently in their "search journey".

You can recognize this difference from the keywords "online store" or "online store agency", for example. Online store is a search term that aims to query knowledge. So what is an online store and what can I do with it? Online store agency, on the other hand, means that the user is specifically looking for a service and would ideally like to make an inquiry. The same can also be applied to goods such as "shoe" or "buy shoe" and should therefore be taken into account when creating a blog page, product page or category page in the store.

Of course, you first need to find the right keywords. A keyword analysis, which you can carry out beforehand, often helps. The article from Sistrix explains very well how you can carry out such a keyword analysis.

The basic rules for creating content

As Google's algorithm is getting better and better at interpreting texts, basic rules that were established in the past no longer necessarily apply today. Nevertheless, it makes sense to create web pages and texts in web stores in a structured way so that users and Google can understand the content as quickly as possible.

This includes, among other things

• Optimizing titles & descriptions for articles, categories & blog posts
• Using the right keywords in the URLs
• Describing the images in Shopware's Media Manager
• Creating rich snippets
• and much more

Software to support your SEO work in the store

Search engine optimization for Shopware stores is not rocket science, but rather the processing of many individual small steps. This means that time will always be your biggest challenge. We therefore recommend the use of various software tools to carry out certain tasks much faster.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Google Search Console
• Sistrix
• Screaming Frog Spider
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Searchmetrics
• Xovi

You can find a comparison and reviews of various SEO tools at OMR

What you can do to successfully implement SEO for your Shopware store in the long term

SEO optimization of your Shopware 6 store is a long-term project that you cannot complete immediately. In order to carry out the project in a targeted manner, you need to consider a few aspects, which we have briefly listed for you here.

These include

• Plan your work. SEO is like writing an article or a master's thesis. Take enough time to structure the individual tasks. Place them on the timeline. Collaboration tools such as Asana, Trello or a simple Excel list can help with this.
• Focus on the important things: ask yourself what you or your team can do yourself or what should perhaps be done in advance by an agency.
• Always put the user at the forefront of your work. Try to think like your customer or use user tests to analyze this if you are unsure.
• Make your work measurable and check the results regularly, e.g. with the tools mentioned above
• See search engine optimization as an opportunity to bring users to your workshop and present them with exactly what they were looking for.

And if you need help with this, please get in touch with us. Our colleagues at EXWE will be happy to help.

Why you should use these techniques to increase your visibility in the long term

Improving your visibility in search engines, also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is an important point to consider. You can use the following techniques to improve this:

Find suitable keywords:

In order to find suitable keywords for your website, it is particularly important to include relevant information in the search. You can also include your own products or services in the search to highlight your specialization in this segment. Customers can also help to find the right keywords with the help of surveys. The aim of the survey is to gain insights into how the target group searches for your products or services.

More visibility through backlinks:

Another way to increase visibility in search engines is by placing relevant backlinks on reputable websites. Backlinks are links that are redirected from other websites to your own. They usually serve as references from other websites, so search engines assume that the website is informative and of high quality. This can lead potential new customers to your website.

Social media:

Social media can help generate more reach and therefore more traffic to the website. It is therefore important to regularly fill social media with new content for the desired target group.

Google Shopping:

If you combine Shopware and Google Shopping, you can generate more sales and by placing Google Shopping Ads you can generate more reach. We have already provided information and frequently asked questions about Google Shopping in one of our blog posts.

Quality of user content:

The quality of user content must always be a given, which means that you should plan your content well in order to offer the target group added value. By linking internally to similar topics, further questions from interested users can be answered. The aim behind this is to increase the time spent on your website. What is also promoted is the search engine ranking, which is why high-quality content can achieve a better ranking in the search engine.

It is important to check these techniques regularly and keep them up to date. It is not only topicality that is crucial in order to meet the needs of the target group. It should also be ensured that the topics reach as many potential new customers in the target group as possible and thus increase relevance.

About the author:
Gunnar Terrahe works as an independent consultant/freelancer in online marketing and supports companies such as ABUS in online marketing and project management.