What is WooCommerce SEO?

In an ideal online world, all you have to do to make decent sales is offer your things for sale on your website and wait for the magic to happen. This is, however, reality, and things are done a little differently here.

Take use of WooCommerce SEO to achieve impressive sales figures and boost the visibility of your websites. On Google’s SERP, SEO ranks websites, and the higher the rank, the more likely people are to locate your stuff.

This ready-to-use advice will assist your WooCommerce store in moving up the search results ladder.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce
WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a popular open-source, customisable eCommerce platform based on WordPress. Because it is an open-source plugin, users have a lot of customization choices. Although setting up the store is simple, you may need a little technical knowledge to fully utilise the platform’s many optimization approaches.

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Because WooCommerce is built on WordPress, it is SEO-friendly right out of the box. You can also utilise a variety of plugins to improve your eCommerce experience. We’ve put up this guide to assist businesses rank higher for keywords that important to them because there aren’t many guidelines on how to use WooCommerce.

Is WooCommerce SEO Friendly?

WooCommerce
WooCommerce

Yes, it’s a resounding yes!

WooCommerce is extremely successful since it is based on WordPress and its plugins. These plugins might help you improve your SEO and increase your revenues.

When you understand what WooCommerce is, you’ll realise that there’s a thin line between being SEO friendly and really ranking high on Google’s SERP for the keywords you’re after.

WooCommerce is built with SEO-friendly code, yet it lacks numerous SEO-friendly features. When you first set up your WooCommerce store, it’s up to you to add and personalise the theme, photos, content, and product descriptions. You must optimise each new content you upload to your store.

You must optimise each new content you upload to your store. A well-thought-out SEO plan is the best method to deal with this.

WooCommerce SEO optimization is a continual process that necessitates ongoing maintenance in order to function at its best. When compared to other standalone platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce can give a successful experience if you are prepared to put in a little extra work on the optimization front.

How to SEO WooCommerce?

You can optimise WooCommerce for SEO in a variety of ways. These simple methods will assist you in gaining a thorough understanding of how to improve your store’s internet ranking.

1. Optimize Page Title

Best-Practices-of-Writing-Title-Tags
Best-Practices-of-Writing-Title-Tags

Let’s begin with the most basic element: the page title.

Begin with optimizing the page title, as the title>/title> tag is the first thing crawlers see. Because the title tag is shown on the results page, it must be SEO-friendly. But, exactly, what does an SEO-friendly page title entail? While maintaining inside the character limit of 60 characters, the title should truly reflect what you’re selling – a product or service.

Make an effort to combine the “selling term” in a creative way. Make sure each product page has its own title, as having two pages with the same title can confuse the search engine and hurt your SEO efforts.

2. Always Add Meta Description

Free-Meta-Tag-Generator-2
Free-Meta-Tag-Generator

Make sure you develop specific meta descriptions in addition to keeping the page title distinctive and SEO friendly. In the Yoast SEO plugin, edit the meta description box.

The meta description will be displayed or not by the search engine. The search engine will sometimes simply pick text from the website. In any case, having a unique meta description for each of your products is critical. Make sure the description does not exceed the maximum character limit for the search snippet.

3. Keep URL’s Short & SEO Friendly

importance-of-URL-structure-in-SEO-1
importance-of-URL-structure-in-SEO

The URLs should not be overlooked. Begin by properly configuring the product pages’ permalinks.

Keep your URLs brief, descriptive, accessible, and SEO friendly to have a major impact on your rankings. To change the URL structure, go to the site’s permalink settings. With permalink, you have the option of including important keywords in the URL, which can improve your website’s accessibility significantly.

The following are examples of WooCommerce URLs with optimised permalinks:

Yourdomain.com/product/productspecificname

When you disable permalinks, the default URL will be as follows:

Yourdomain.com/?productID=001.

4. Enable Breadcrumbs

What-Are-Breadcrumbs-in-SEO
What-Are-Breadcrumbs-in-SEO

Breadcrumbs aid in the interlinking of your website’s pages, providing users with a clear path to the page they’re looking for. All pages in WooCommerce have the breadcrumbs capability enabled.

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Breadcrumbs make it simple for customers to find their way to your product pages or comparable items in your store. The sitemap is primarily used by Google’s crawlers to evaluate how well your site is structured, and it may have an impact on where your site appears in the search results page. If you properly utilise the possibilities of plugins, you can gain a significant advantage, such as absolute control over the appearance of the breadcrumbs, where you want your homepage to direct to, a page map, and more.

5. Avoid Duplicate Content

content is a king
content is a king

One of the most serious issues in SEO optimization is duplicate and non-unique content. Duplicate content does not provide Google with a sufficient incentive to rank your page higher.

Imagine having product content that is same or similar to that of Amazon or any other large online retailer. Your site’s prospects of ranking high in search results are obviously slim. If your products are comparable to those sold by huge merchants, the only way to stand out is to create original and interesting content.

Let’s look at how you may make your WooCommerce content stand out. The long and short descriptions are the two locations where you can put your product description text.

It’s worth noting that the brief description is above the fold, and Google considers any material visible above the fold to be essential. To make the most of this opportunity, consider the following:

  • Maintaining a concise, distinct, and exactly descriptive description
  • Including the product’s name and basic information Keywords
  • If possible, include a summary.

6. Promote your WooCommerce store

It’s now or never to promote your eCommerce store aggressively. To finish the process, you should work on both the marketing or SEO and the technical aspects of the store. You must also pay attention to off-page optimization. We refer to off-page optimization as:

  • Promotional activity for a brand
  • Creating connections
  • Promotion on social media

For people to talk about your business or products, you need to go viral. If your content doesn’t reach and resonate with your target viewers, how will it go viral? Create a blog that delivers relevant information to your audience while also attracting traffic and sales.

7. Maintain Mobile-friendliness

67-of-users-are-more-likely-to-buy-from-a-mobile-friendly-company
67-of-users-are-more-likely-to-buy-from-a-mobile-friendly-company

In today’s world, being mobile-friendly is a must-have. The shift to mobile is nearly complete, and you must seize the opportunity. Google’s new tool for testing a website’s mobile-friendliness is pretty useful.

You should first use Google’s test to see if your WooCommerce is mobile-friendly and responsive. However, don’t expect Google to give you a detailed response because it will only offer you a black-and-white answer — either your site is mobile-friendly or it isn’t. If that’s the case, keep up the good work. If not, we recommend changing the theme or completely redesigning the store’s appearance.

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8. Use SEO Friendly Themes

What good is an online eCommerce business that is geared for search engine crawlers but not for customers? Digital Pro is a fantastic theme that is well-designed, well-optimized, and easy to use. Make sure the theme is user-friendly by lowering load time, using high-quality photos and product videos, establishing a site structure that is easy to navigate, and giving valuable, high-quality information.

9. Use Product Category & Tags Properly

Product categories and tags make it simple for your customers to find the products they want. As a result, you must ensure that your tags are correct and keyword-rich so that search engine crawlers can quickly list your products.

The function of category and tags are frequently confused by newcomers, which is incorrect. The tag gives specific identifying information, while the category is a generic phrase used to describe the goods.

10. Add Alt Text on Every Product Image

Image-SEO-Alt-Text
Image-SEO-Alt-Text

The majority of people use images to improve their search, yet Google has eliminated the ‘view images’ option from its results page. It had always compelled users to examine the images directly from the website.

Site owners can use alt text to add useful text to the photographs they post. The replacement text will be displayed if the image does not load. Site owners can add alt text to all of their product photos with WooCommerce. Add alt text to each product in the product list from the media library.

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11. Monitor WooCommerce Users in Google Analytics

You won’t be able to make any meaningful adjustments to your position unless you constantly monitor your WooCommerce site for SEO strategy flaws.

Although Google Analytics is a no-brainer, there are numerous alternative plugins that may be used to track user data. To effectively determine where you stand, you’ll need information on your users, search terms, most-searched items, time spent on your site, zero search results, and more.

12. Optimize Performance & Pagespeed of your WooCommerce Website

Pagespeed is one of the most important characteristics that Google considers when ranking your WooCommerce store. The longer it takes for your website to load, the lower it will likely rank in the search results. You will lose business if your page is ranked lower.

According to Google, increasing the page load time from 1 second to 3 seconds raises the bounce rate by 32%. The hosting is one of the reasons why your WooCommerce page takes so long to load. You can avoid this by switching to a web hosting service that is optimised for your needs.

13. Use Best SEO Plugins for WooCommerce

WooCommerce SEO Plugins
WooCommerce SEO Plugins

The WooCommerce platform’s best feature is its large number of plugins and extensions. These plugins can aid in the enhancement of your store’s functionality and speed. Finding the proper plugin for your individual need can be tedious, but a little research can go a long way toward ensuring your WooCommerce store runs smoothly.

14. Create Simple Site Navigation

effortless-navigation
effortless-navigation

Providing a detailed map to your visitors and Google crawlers is akin to having a structured and easy site navigation. Furthermore, structured site navigation encourages visitors to stay longer on your site, lowering the total bounce rate.

Because Google crawlers will visit all of your pages, but your visitors will not, keep the navigation simple. The most important pages of your site should undoubtedly be included in the primary menu. The rest of the pages can be found in the footer of the page.

15. Submit Sitemap to Google

Although your WooCommerce store contains a lot of pages, not all of them affect the page ranking. Your store’s homepage is a crucial page that has the ability to have a significant impact on your page rankings. However, your site’s “checkout” or “my account” pages are not important enough to be submitted to Google.

Make sure that all of your site’s main pages, such as the homepage, product pages, and blogs, have original, quality content. You can submit the XML sitemap to Google once it has been optimised with all of the important pages.

WooCommerce vs Shopify

The regular candidates for the top rank when it comes to choosing the best SEO optimised eCommerce platform are WooCommerce and Shopify. Both of these systems have some appealing qualities, and the one that is best for you is the winner. Let’s have a look at it in more detail.

Shopify isn’t built for SEO by default, therefore it may appear to be deficient in this area. It isn’t compatible with WordPress, generates duplicate URLs on Google (which aren’t useful), and limits your ability to change tag pages. Furthermore, the robot.txt file is locked — Shopify produces it by default and does not allow you to change it.

Another Shopify SEO issue is duplicate content production, which occurs when tags are used to sort products, resulting in many URLs containing the same content and information. You can only do so much with custom fields on Shopify because it is not an open-source platform. Shopify’s SEO difficulties continue, as it now limits the number of characters in the title and meta description.

Shopify has a significant advantage over WooCommerce in terms of free hosting and limitless storage. Because WooCommerce does not provide hosting, your storage is mostly dependent on the host with whom you have partnered.

Conclusion

Although WooCommerce is SEO-friendly, you must be prepared to put in the effort to create unique content, structure your site, engage in on-page and off-page SEO operations, and spruce up your complete site in order to climb the Google page rank ladder. The key to your online success is keywords. Always be aware of the highest-ranking keywords in your domain. Try to figure out why they’re so popular so you can improve your content and offerings. You have a store that is purely for your customers to access your stuff. As a result, make your online store simple to use and enjoyable to browse. Also, take steps to improve the site’s load time and make it mobile-friendly.

Finally, SEO optimization for your WooCommerce store is not a one-time task; it must be done on a daily basis. We recognise that these are not the only SEO optimization approaches, which is why we recommend enlisting the services of WooCommerce SEO specialists to help you turn the Google page ranking dial in your favour. There are reputable and skilled SEO businesses in India, and working with them will almost likely result in a significant improvement in your Google rankings.

Regardless, you should continue to concentrate on your products, as they are the ones that generate revenue. Only by focusing on offering your consumers with excellent products and useful information can you boost your store’s virtual footfalls.

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