Is WooCommerce Good for SEO?
The answer is yes, WooCommerce is SEO-friendly.
However, the fact that WooCommerce comes with an SEO-compliant site structure doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank higher.
You still need to optimize your website, use plugins and techniques to improve WooCommerce SEO.
When you start an online store, you will add things like themes, products, titles, descriptions, images, and other content, all of which are your responsibility. So, it’s up to you to optimize all the additional content.
SEO is not a one-time strategy. It’s an ongoing process, so you should be steady to see growth in your traffic.
11 WooCommerce SEO Tips for Higher Ranking & More Sales
You might wonder, what do I need to do for an effective WooCommerce strategy?
Luckily, this WooCommerce SEO guide will provide you all the tips you need in your arsenal. Let’s get started.
1. Set up the Basic SEO Tools
Keep in mind that WooCommerce is a plugin; it is not stand-alone software.
It incorporates WordPress, which is an SEO-friendly CMS.
You need to improve your overall website SEO first and make every element SEO-friendly.
Most WordPress users take advantage of WordPress SEO plugins such as YOAST SEO and RankMath to set up proper WooCommerce SEO fields for products.
Since your CMS is important for SEO, you should take care of while choosing CMS.
There are articles about CMS that you might want to take a look.
- What are the 6 Most-Used Content Management Systems?
- 21 Headless CMS Platforms That You Should Check Out
2. Optimize Product SEO Titles
You might know that you should optimize your blog posts for SEO and engagement.
But it’s not only that. You should optimize your individual WooCommerce product titles for SEO as well.
Your product titles appear in browsers’ title bar, and search engines use these as the title of a search result.
For example:
When search engines crawl, they crawl the title of a page first. So, your product title tags are crucial to optimize.
If you want to simplify this process, you can use AIOSEO or YOAST SEO, which are two of the best WordPress plugins.
P.S: You will see options to optimize page titles, slugs, and meta descriptions in the YOAST SEO plugin. Start by modifying your product titles. You can do that by heading over to SEO Titles in the YOAST SEO section.
Here are a few tips for better page titles for SEO:
- It’s best to keep the page titles between 50-60 characters.
- Each product title should bear a uniqueness. Multiple same product titles may confuse both users and search engines.
- Include keywords in your product titles. You should do proper keyword research beforehand.
- Including your brand name or domain name in your product title is also another common practice.
3. Add SEO-Friendly Product Descriptions
Product meta descriptions appear below the product page titles in SERP. Make sure to craft compelling meta descriptions to drive clicks to your pages.
Think of the product description as your one-line sales pitch. Ask yourself if it prompts users to click.
Use the same keywords in your descriptions that you used in the product title.
This way, your page will have a higher density of those keywords and be likely to rank higher for those specific queries.
4. Look Over Your Product Slugs
Slug is a part of a URL that identifies a page in an easy-to-read form, also known as permalinks.
WooCommerce uses your product’s title as the slug by default.
However, product titles may not include relevant SEO keywords.
In that case, it’s best to change the slug in your product’s SEO settings. Make sure to use your main keyword in the slug and try to keep it short.
5. Optimize Product Categories & Tags
Organizing your products in proper categories and tags helps your customers easily find what they are looking for. They are also useful for search engine crawls.
Each product category and tag has its own page in WooCommerce. Search engines crawl and list them each separately.
These pages include similar products, which increases the keyword density and chance to rank higher for those keywords.
See how categories show as pages in search results:
Most beginner online store owners often confuse categories and tags, which leads to incorrect usage. If we are to explain the difference simply:
Think of categories as a broader grouping of your products. For example, categories for a beauty store can be “Eyes, Lips, Face Skincare,” etc. Since categories are hierarchical, you can add child categories to them.
And tags are short words or labels to categorize the blogs simply. With tags, blog’s topics can be found more easily.
So, it’s important to understand the difference between categories and tags.
6. Write Alt Text for Product Images
Most online sellers aren’t aware of the power of image SEO. Many customers switch to image results to quickly scan and find the product they are searching for.
So, how does image SEO work? It works much like a web search.
Google crawls images using artificial intelligence, image recognition, and other algorithms to provide users with the most related results.
Here’s an example from one of Popupsmart’s blog posts:
Adding alt tags to all images on your website is essential to get more traffic from Google image search.
Make sure you perform this WooCommerce SEO tip to drive additional traffic.
7. Enable Breadcrumbs for Your Site
A breadcrumb is a small text path indicating where the user is on a website.
They are excellent for internal linking since they define a clean path or trail to the page you are on.
What’s more, breadcrumbs also appear in the search results, providing you a rank boost.
There are breadcrumbs plugins for WordPress that you can use for your WooCommerce products, such as Breadcrumb NavXT.
Plus, some WooCommerce themes have built-in breadcrumb functionality. So, you might want to check your theme.
8. Avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate pages are the pages on your site that have a significant portion of identical or very similar content.
When you have duplicate pages, there’s a risk that Google might remove your content from rankings.
You might want to check for duplicate content if
- You regularly publish press releases,
- You are using the same or very similar content in multiple areas of your site,
- You own several domains with similar or identical content.
The best practice is always to make sure to write original content.
If you have duplicate page issues in your existing pages, then you should keep the one that gets the most traffic and ranks better.
Then, redirect the other duplicate pages to the page you’re keeping.
Redirects are also vital if you are moving from one e-commerce platform to another, such as from Shopify to WooCommerce (or vice versa.) This action may often result in changes to URL structures.
If you want to keep your page rankings from the former platform URLs, you’ll need to direct those to your new platform URLs instead of replacing them.
Sometimes you might want to keep both pages, whether identical or similar. In that case, redirecting them won’t work.
Instead, you can use canonical links to tell search engines where to find the true content by including a canonical tag in the header of your duplicate content.
Both options will work for duplicates across multiple domains you own.
9. Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance
Another important one of the essential WooCommerce SEO tips is to optimize your site speed and performance.
Google considers website loading speed as one of the most vital ranking factors.
Faster websites are more likely to rank higher in search results.
Besides, website speed is not only important to improve your SEO for WooCommerce and impacts the on-site user experience.
Helpful article suggestion for you: 22 Best UX Tips to Increase Your E-commerce Conversions
You can analyze your website speed with Google’s own tool, PageSpeed Insights.
10. Leverage The Best SEO Plugins for WooCommerce
Many WooCommerce SEO plugins and extensions can help you grow your business and improve your SEO faster.
In fact, WooCommerce.com has 790 official plugins for WooCommerce.
We have mentioned some earlier, such as Yoast SEO WooCommerce plugin and AIOSEO.
Besides them, you can also convert your existing traffic to customers with smart popups.
We suggest Popupsmart no-code popup builder tool.
With Popupsmart, you can create WooCommerce popups without any plugin.
11. Consider Starting a Blog
Last but not least, our last e-commerce SEO tip is to start a blog for driving more organic traffic.
It’s not a necessity to have a blog page for WooCommerce stores, but it can help your rankings.
Blogs increase the sessions users spend on your website.
With correct internal linking to your products and other pages, they can increase your other pages’ ranking.
Eventually, blogs can contribute to boosting your sales.
Woocommerce SEO Tips Infographic
We like sharing our knowledge with our visitors! You are very welcome to use our infographic on your website to present excellent information about how to do SEO on WooCommerce stores.
Conclusion
That’s it! We hope that you found this WooCommerce SEO guide helpful.
With tips and guiding information, we try to tell the details of WooCommerce SEO and how you can do it in the best way possible.
How about you? Do you have any other SEO suggestions for digital store owners?
Let us know in the comments below. 🙂
FAQs
Why is WooCommerce SEO Important?
SEO is important for any website because it helps to improve the visibility, rank and familiarity. As for WooCommerce websites, SEO can help to attract more qualified traffic to the site, which can lead to more sales and revenue. By investing in WooCommerce SEO, businesses can increase their chances of being found by potential customers and ultimately increase traffic, sales, and revenue.
What is the Difference between WooCommerce SEO and SEO?
It’s quite obvious. Woocommerce SEO specifically focuses on optimizing an ecommerce store that is built on the Woocommerce platform for search engines.
On the other hand, SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing a website for search engines, with the goal of improving the website's visibility and ranking in search results.
WooCommerce SEO deals with optimizing the store's product pages, categories, and overall website structure and navigation to improve the store's visibility and ranking in SERP while SEO’s focus is on content, images, and overall structure and navigation to make it more attractive to search engines and easier for users to navigate.
Is It Possible to Track the Performance of My WooCommerce Store's SEO?
You can track the performance of your WooCommerce store's SEO using various tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These tools provide data on how often your website appears in search results and any errors affecting its performance. Also, using SEO plugins can provide features, like keyword tracking and site audit tools to monitor and optimize your store's SEO.
What are the Common Mistakes When Optimizing WooCommerce Store for SEO?
Some common mistakes from the sources are as follows:
- Not conducting thorough keyword research,
- Underestimating the product titles and descriptions,
- Using low-quality content,
- Neglecting to optimize images and videos,
- Ignoring website navigation and structure,
- Failing to optimize URLs,
- Omitting header tags,
- Not using social media and other marketing channels,
- Not tracking performance,
- Not following the latest SEO trends and best practices.
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