Shopware SEO - What beginners should know

You are planning to create a Shopware store or already have one? You are a beginner or 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 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 short introduction to Shopware SEO optimization
2. How to start Shopware SEO and which tools will help you with it
   1. Keywords and the search intentions of your potential customers
   2. The basic rules of content creation
   3. Software to support your work
3. What you should do to successfully do SEO for your Shopware store in the long run
4. Why you should use these techniques to increase your visibility in the long run
5. Find suitable keywords
6. More visibility through backlinks
7. Social Media
8. Google Shopping
9. Quality of user content

A short introduction to Shopware SEO

What you should internalize first is the user behavior or better 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 come to your store via a few ways that are free of charge 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 with it

Now we would like to give you a short overview of what can help you to implement Shopware 6 SEO in your online store. With these tools you can start even if you are still a beginner in SEO.

Keywords and the search intent of your potential customers

As you probably know, keywords are the words that a user enters into the search line of a search engine. What many people don't know, however, is that there is a clear difference between where a user is in their "search journey" based on the terms and the search intent that results from them.

You can see this difference, for example, in the keywords "online store" or "online store agency". Online store is a search term that seeks 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, in the best case, wants to make an inquiry. The same can be applied to goods such as "shoe" or "buy shoe" and should therefore be considered when building a blog page, product page or category page in the store.

To do this, of course, you first need to find out the right keywords. Often a keyword analysis, which you can perform beforehand, helps. The Sistrix article explains very well how you can perform such a keyword analysis.

The basic rules of content creation

Since Google's algorithm is getting better and better at interpreting texts, the basic rules that were set up in the past no longer necessarily apply today. Nevertheless, it makes sense to build web pages and texts in web store in a structured way, so that the user and also Google can grasp the content as quickly as possible.

This includes among other things:

• Optimizing the 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 working through a lot of individual small steps. So this means that time will always be your biggest challenge. We therefore recommend the use of various software tools to perform certain work 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 different SEO tools at OMR.

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

SEO optimization of your Shopware 6 store is a long-term project that you can't complete right away. So that you can carry out the project purposefully, you must consider a few aspects, which we have listed briefly for you here.

These include:

• Plan your work. SEO is like writing an article or a master thesis. Take enough time to structure the individual tasks. Put them on the timeline. Collaboration tools like Asana, Trello or a simple Excel list can help.
• Focus on the important things: Ask yourself what you or your team can do yourself or what should be done by an agency.
• Always put the user in the foreground 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 above mentioned tools.
• Understand search engine optimization as the chance to bring users to your workshop and present them exactly what they were looking for.

And if you need help with that, feel free to contact us. Our colleagues at EXWE will be happy to help.

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

Improving your visibility in search engines, also called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is an important point to consider. To improve it, you can use the following techniques:

Find appropriate keywords:

To find suitable keywords for your website, it is especially important to include relevant information in the search. You can also include your own offered products or services in the search to show your specialization in this segment. In addition, customers can also use surveys to help find the appropriate keywords. The goal of the survey is to gather insights into how the target audience searches for your products or services.

More visibility through backlinks:

Another way to increase search engine visibility is by placing relevant backlinks on reputable websites. Backlinks are links that are forwarded 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 way, more potential new customers can be forwarded to your website.

Social Media:

The social media can help generate more reach and hence more come to the website. Therefore, it is important to regularly fill the 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 running Google Shopping Ads, you can generate more reach. We have already presented information and frequently asked questions about Google Shopping in a blog post of ours.

User Content Quality:

The quality of user content must always be there, which means that you should plan your content well to provide value to the target audience. Internal linking to similar topics can answer more questions from interested users. The goal behind this is to increase the time spent on your own website. What is also promoted is the search engine ranking, which is why a better placement in the search engine can be achieved through high-quality content.

It is important to regularly check and update these techniques. It is not only the timeliness that is crucial to meet the needs of the target audience. It should also be ensured that the topics reach as many potential new customers in the target group as possible, thus increasing relevance.

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