WooCommerce SEO Guide

SEO for e-commerce

Where to start online store optimization

More than 70% of Internet users searches for Google Search. It is logical, for every website owner to strive to direct some of this traffic to his website. It is important to note, that one of the most important techniques for this is exactly the SEO optimization.

Wordpress and WooCommerse can make it easier for you to create a website that’s easy to use and is customer-friendly, however, the most fundamental step is to get the buyer to enter your online store. This article, will help you do this by telling you all about the most applicable SEO practices as to rank your site higher in Google search results.

Is WooCommerce compatible with SEO?

Let’s start with the most basic question – is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
The short answer to this question is “Yes”. Such as WordPress, WooCommerce allows easy implementation of SEO, but first you need to set up an SEO plug-in to unlock this functionality.

With the right settings, you will be able to do all the search engine optimizations you need. You can add titles and descriptions to your products and category pages, structured data, and so on.

We’ll explain some of the plugins you can use to add SEO to WooCommerce in a moment, but let’s go through the tactics first.

How to optimize WooCommerce for SEO

In this section, you will find out in detail the different parts of SEO for WooCommerce stores.
You can apply the techniques below with any SEO plugin. For example, we will use Yoast SEO as the most common tool for the WooCommerce platform.

Research the keywords

First, it is most important to know what you will optimize your website for. Translated for SEO, it means “keyword research”.
Keywords are the main link between your website and the potential user. Choosing the most appropriate phrase / word, you will ensure success and return of your investment.

Some great keyword research tools are:

• KWFinder
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer for free.

Apply basic WordPress SEO settings

Before you start optimizing WooCommerce SEO, you must first set up your basic WordPress SEO settings correctly.

This means installing an SEO plugin – for example, Yoast SEO. This will create basic SEO best practices such as an XML map of the specific website.

Optimize your product description

If you want to rank your products on Google pages, you must submit adequate content. It is significant that each page has a description of the product. WooCommerce offers two main types of “description”:
Short description – it is positioned directly under the title of the product and next to the photo;
Long description – is a description of the product that appears under the title and photo;

Presenting such content is the link that will make people visit your website and buy exactly your product. It’s a good idea to include relevant keywords in both descriptions.

Write unique product SEO titles and Meta descriptions.

The SEO title of the product and its meta description are what will appear in the results of the Google search engine. That is why, they are one of the most important things to pay attention to.

You should have two main goals:

1. Provide Google with the right context for your page, which has to include keywords (as well as related keywords, if possible)
2. Convince users who search on Google to click on your website.

Here are some tips on how to achieve it:
Page title – Make sure you’ve included your main keyword. The title should be for informational purposes only and should not be the same as the title of the product you are selling in your online store.
Meta description – Try to naturally include your main keyword as well as related keywords, if possible. This is also the place, where it is good to emphasize the things that would encourage the consumer to buy, such as, free shipping or low prices.

You can set all this up from the Yoast SEO meta box by editing your product.

Optimize the slug URL of your product

Your product’s URL is also a crucial part of submitting textual information to Google.
As in the previous tips, it’s a good idea to include the main keywords here as well.

Optimize product images

There are two ways to optimize images:

• Alt text
• Filenames

Alt text images help you achieve the following:

• Allows Google to get context for your images, which is also essential for optimizing your website pages;
• Allowing you to rank individual images of products in the Google search engine, making you more accessible to users.

You can specify alternate text for the image by editing the image and using the Alt Text field.
If possible, it’s a good idea to use contextual keywords in the title of your products.

Use categories and tags

Categories and tags are the two main techniques that will help you organize your WooCommerce products.

They are useful because they help buyers find the products they are interested in more easily. However, more importantly, they allow you to rank your category and mark and archive relevant pages on Google.

For example, let’s say you sold 5 different pairs of men’s pants. If you try to rank each pair individually under the keyword phrase “men’s pants”, you will be competing with yourself and you will not be able to achieve anything.
Instead, you can create a separate page with the “men’s pants” category and rank it on Google.

• The categories are more extensive. For example, “Men’s t-shirts”
• The tags are more specific. For example, a T-shirt in the “men’s t-shirts” category may have a “Superman” tag to indicate that it has a Superman print.
• The categories are also hierarchical, which means that you can also have sub-categories in one main category.

Optimize your categories and tag archives

Once you’ve created the categories and related tags, you need to optimize them as you did with your product pages.

Product category pages are some of the most important on your website, so give them the best possible chance of ranking on Google.

First, you need to write a unique SEO title and description for each category, just as you did for the individual products. Here’s how to do it with Yoast SEO:

• Go to Products -> Categories (or Tags) to display a list of all categories in your store.
• Click on “Edit category”
• Swipe down to the Yoast SEO box on the settings page.

You can follow the same strategy that you applied to the products.

Another strategy for ranking categories and tagging archive pages is to add unique content to high-value pages. Think of this as a “description” for the entire product category.

However, not all topics will show a description of the product category, which can be frustrating.

If your theme doesn’t have this feature, or if you just want more control over how your category descriptions look, you can also add a product category description using Elementor WooCommerce Builder.

All you have to do is add the archive description gadget wherever you want it to appear in your product category template.

Add structured data for extended snippets

Structured data is behind-the-scenes data that you can add to your site to help Google and other search engines understand the content of your web page. Structured data can also help you enrich snippets in Google search results. For WooCommerce stores, these rich snippets can help you add additional details to your search results page, including:

• Estimates
• Number of reviews
• Price information
• Condition of the goods

Structured data and rich fragments are not a direct factor in SEO rankings. On the other hand, they make your Internet commerce site more attractive in Google’s SERPs, which can increase your organic CTR. For this reason, structured data is still an important part of WooCommerce’s SEO strategy.

Add Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs is another useful feature that can not only improve the user experience on your website, but also help rank your store on Google. In terms of SEO, they make it easier for Google to understand the content of your store.

WooCommerce comes with its own breadcrumbs feature, which many WooCommerce themes use. However, if you want more control, you will have to make another decision.

One way to correct local breadcrumbs is by using PHP filters.

Some WooCommerce SEO plugins also give you more control. For example, Yoast SEO will allow you to customize what content to include in breadcrumbs, and also adds JSON-LD structured data to help your site get breadcrumbs in Google search results.

Make sure you use “rel = Cononical”

Your WooCommerce store will naturally create a lot of duplicate content, which Google will not reflect positively. To correct this, you can add a canonical tag that indicates to Google which page contains the original content. It’s not as complicated as it sounds! Most SEO plugins, including Yoast SEO, will automatically add the canonical tag for you. Just make sure you don’t disable this feature (it will be turned on by default).

Speed up WooCommerce

Finally, Google uses the speed of each page as a factor in ranking it in search results on both desktops and mobile devices. This is another reason why you need to make sure that your WooCommerce online store loads quickly.

Improve Your WooCommerce SEO Today

If you want to improve your online store, it is extremely important to set up your WooCommerce SEO properly.

We assure you that the application of the tips in this article will take you one step closer to a better ranking of your store and will increase its consumption.