Optimizing your ecommerce environment for SEO is important for strong SERP results. Here is how to optimze your Hikashop ecommerce extension in Joomla.
Transcript
[00:00:11.690] - Speaker 1
Your Joomla website with a HikaShop ecommerce plugin is particularly well suited to SEO performance. In this quick video, I am going to show you how to set up your product for maximum SEO performance. We are not focusing on the whole product setup experience, just the fields that are relevant to SEO. To do that, we are going to go into the HikaShop back end. Now, we are looking at a Joomla 310.
[00:00:40.320] - Speaker 1
X site. So if you are in a Joomla 3.x environment, your back end looks like this. If you are in Joomla 4.x, your back end does not look like this.
[00:00:49.230] - Speaker 1
But do not be confused by that, because once you get into Hikashop, it looks the same in both environments.
[00:00:55.930] - Speaker 1
So after you open up Hikashop, go into products, and open the top product to go over the four or five fields that you need to think about for your SEO performance in your product settings.
[00:01:12.290] - Speaker 1
You have main product display fields that are visible to your website users. You also have SEO fields that are hidden to your website users but are visible to the search bots that crawl websites and index them. Two of the fields in your human visible area in your product page displays are important to SEO. The first is going to be the name of your product, and that name of your product should be a maximum of 63 characters, including spaces.
[00:01:46.670] - Speaker 1
Just in case it shows up in search, you do not want the search engines truncating your description. Your product description should tell a very short, very clear story about precisely what your product is. In this case, it is strawberry seeds. Which again is viewable on the product page to the user of your website. Also, viewable on the product page to the viewer of your website is this description.
[00:02:16.410] - Speaker 1
In this description box, you can write as long a description as you like. It can display on your product page like a story. Do make sure that if you are doing a longer product description, you break it up into paragraphs, with each paragraph representing a separate thought. That's just good writing structure, but it also reflects the way that people read. When people see a lot of copy in front of them and they do not have time, they will quickly skim the first sentence of each paragraph.
[00:02:46.650] - Speaker 1
If each paragraph is a distinct thought and the first sentence summarizes the thought, even your skimmers are going to get the benefit of the message, even if people don't read the full long description. The full long description is filled with rich phrases and words that are important to the search engines that are indexing your site. The search engines are looking at everything on that page and saying, wow. The title, the long description, the meta descriptions that we are going to talk about in just a second, they are all sort of saying the same thing.
[00:03:23.960] - Speaker 1
Google is thinking, "for this searcher, this person who is looking for strawberry seeds, I am going to suggest this link because the whole page says this link is all about strawberry seeds." So those are the human readable pieces of the site where you really want to consider what your SEO message is. Now let us go into this SEO box. The information in this SEO box will not be available visually to your website visitors on any of your pages.
[00:03:55.210] - Speaker 1
It will be visible to search bots. When the search engine decides to offer your website as an answer to a search, it is the information in this SEO box that will be displayed as the search link, what the searcher will see, and when they see it. What you have written in this SEO box will be the thing that makes them decide whether or not to click that link. So that is why this SEO data is so important. This will be visible as your search link.
[00:04:28.070] - Speaker 1
The page title is also the product title, because in HikaShop, each product becomes its own page on your website. The page title is your product name. This should be also a maximum of 63 characters, including spaces. Here we got just a little bit more descriptive to make this stand out in a search link. This is because if somebody is searching for strawberry seeds, they could be seeing pages and pages of strawberry seed results. We added "for container growing" in this title just to drive home the point that these seeds are great for containers.
[00:05:06.970] - Speaker 1
For that person who is looking for a very specific type of strawberry seed. Then in the meta description, you have up to 155 characters for this. Which is basically, two lines of search text. We recommend that you use no less than 100, no more than 155 characters, including spaces, to tell a nice, rich story about your product. You want to describe the product visually, if it is a visual product, describe its functions or features, explain the benefits of the product and who the product is for.
[00:05:45.600] - Speaker 1
Now, that's a lot to accomplish at 100 to 155 characters. Do this well, and you will find that your organic search results just get better all the time. In keywords, there are almost no words that by themselves are worthy of search results anymore. It is always key phrases. A key phrase is anywhere from two to five words most of the time.
[00:06:08.100] - Speaker 1
What you are thinking about when you look at the keywords field is, "what might a potential customer of mine be putting in a search bar to which my product would be the perfect answer?" Now you are putting yourself in the customer's head. How are they searching? What are they searching for? Now, you can do research for this.
[00:06:31.310] - Speaker 1
You can use tools like SEMrush or Authoritas. There is a lot of SEO search term tools out there that you can use to determine what the best search phrases would be for you. Or if you do not have time to do that, at least stop and put yourself in the mind of the searcher and say what are they likely to be searching for? The alias field, you do not need to feel back to the keywords for just a moment. For each key phrase, just separate it with a comma and the system will tell Google these are individual or all the search engines.
[00:07:06.210] - Speaker 1
Google is 92% of search. This HikaShop will tell the search engine these are individual search phrases. If you separate them with commas alias do not touch it, your system will populate the alias for you. Canonical URL- your canonical URL may be blank like this one, or it may be populated. Again, do not touch it.
[00:07:28.900] - Speaker 1
Whether it is blank or populated will have to do with the settings of your HikaShop shop ecommerce plugin. So do not touch alias or canonical URL. They are correct as they are, and those are the fields that you need to think about for SEO using HikaShop. I hope that helps you do a better job of plugging in your SEO data and dramatically improving your organic search results over time.