A Beginner’s Guide to WooCommerce SEO

Are you looking to improve your online store’s visibility in search engine results?

One of the best ways to enhance product visibility is by improving the SEO of your WooCommerce site. This way, there’s a better chance your product pages will show up higher in user’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Ultimately, this can lead to more traffic on your site which means more opportunities to make sales.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about WooCommerce SEO and discuss some of the most effective ways you can improve the SEO of your WooCommerce site.

What is WooCommerce SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of improving your site’s performance in search engine results. Higher SEO performance means your website’s pages will appear higher in user’s SERPs.

The same thing goes for WooCommerce stores. In other words, if your WooCommerce pages are fully SEO optimized, your products will appear higher in search engine results when customers are searching for products to purchase.

SEO is important for any WooCommerce site as it can be a major factor in making it possible for your target audience to actually find your online store’s products through search engines. Since SEO helps your website rank higher in SERPs for your target keyword, it can help drive traffic to your product pages and ultimately lead to more sales for your business.

Optimizing the SEO of your WooCommerce site essentially boosts organic traffic and helps more people find your store’s products organically.

Most search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, use keywords which are phrases that your target audience uses to find products. Let’s look at a simple example: when a user wants to purchase a photography drone they might search the terms “buy drone online” or “buy photography drones in UK”. If your product pages contain the same keywords and phrases, search engines will display your site’s pages higher up in the user’s search results which increases the chances of prospective buyers clicking on your site’s link first.

You might also be wondering if regular SEO is different from WooCommerce SEO. WooCommerce SEO essentially means optimizing your store’s pages rather than regular WordPress post pages. The best part is that most traditional SEO strategies also work great for optimizing ecommerce sites.

How does WooCommerce SEO work?

To enhance the SEO of your WooCommerce site, it’s important to know how the SEO process works. Search engine crawlers start the SEO process by indexing your site’s content whenever you publish a new page or product. Indexing is when search engine robots essentially “crawl” through newly published content on your site and add it to their database.

Now that your content is present in the search engine database, when users make search queries using their browser, the search engine will use its database to match keywords or specific terms that users search for. For example, if a user searches for “buy pizza cutter wheel”, the search engine will go through hundreds of sites that have a pizza cutter wheel product for sale and display the best results to the user.

Search engine robots arrange search results according to the site’s SEO performance and how much content is published on the page. Depending on the ranking of your page, it increases or decreases the chances of users organically discovering your online store’s products through search engine results.

While adding relevant keywords is important for improving the SEO of your site, that’s just the start of it. There are many ways you can enhance WooCommerce SEO so it helps your site’s pages rank higher in user SERPs.

How to improve your WooCommerce site’s SEO

Let’s go over some of the best ways that can help you improve the SEO of your WooCommerce site:

Keyword optimization

One of the most important parts of any effective WooCommerce SEO strategy is optimizing keywords according to your target audience. You need to think about what keywords or terms your customers will use when making search queries for purchasing products you sell. Ensure all WooCommerce product pages contain those keywords so your product pages appear in the user’s search engine results.

While choosing the right keywords can be challenging, WooCommerce store owners can implement SEO best practices for product-based keywords. For example, if you sell apparel products, you can use brand names or specific terms like “Winter hoodies” that your target audience might search for when they need to purchase a hoodie for the upcoming winter season.

Choosing strategic keyword locations

Once you have a solid set of high-priority keywords in mind, you will need to choose the best and most strategic locations to place them on your WooCommerce site. One of the most obvious places to place relevant keywords is the page titles and product titles. While you might not be able to add long-tail keywords to the page titles due to the character limit, you can use relevant terms that make your product pages more search-engine friendly.

In addition to this, you can also optimize subheadings and product descriptions with keywords on your WooCommerce pages to further enhance the SEO performance of your online store. This ensures most parts of your WooCommerce pages contain keywords so search engines can display your site higher in user’s SERPs.

Work on the shopping experience

While adding keywords to your WooCommerce site is a great way to improve SEO performance, you might also want to consider other factors that may affect SEO rankings for your WooCommerce pages. One of these things is the user experience of your online store.

Search engines will rank your website higher in users’ SERPs if the user experience on your WooCommerce site is top-notch. For instance, if you stuff your online store with ads, there’s a high chance most users will be distracted and in some cases irritated due to the distractions. Ideally, you want to offer a seamless shopping experience that makes it easy for your customers to browse your online store. You also want to offer a quick product selection and checkout process to encourage more shoppers to checkout.

Create optimized product pages

Since the product pages are the main shop pages of your WooCommerce site, optimizing them should be top priority. This way, more search engines will serve those pages in user’s SERPs.

Make sure you’re publishing relevant product information on single product pages with high-priority keywords. This makes it more likely for search engine robots to display your product pages higher in search engine results. In addition to this, you can also add links to subcategories and main categories to offer easy navigation when new site visitors land on your product pages. This not only helps enhance the shopping experience and improve SEO rankings but is a great way to encourage more purchases on your online store.

Lululemon does this well. Here’s what their product page looks like:

Set up a blog for your store

While WooCommerce sites are online stores that let users add products to their shopping carts and checkout, you can also set up a blog on your site to improve WooCommerce SEO. This way, you have a higher chance of attracting more site visitors to your store. Another benefit of this is that you can capture users who are searching for product comparisons or searching for specific features but aren’t necessarily ready to buy yet.

For instance, you can publish a blog post on “Drone Photography 101” and add a link to purchase the “Drone” product from your online store at the end of the post. This way, users who don’t intend to make a purchase just yet will also be exposed to your online store when searching for solutions.

TOMS is a popular store that sells shoes. They have a blog on their website that regularly publishes blog posts and news pieces.

Additionally, the more content you have on your WooCommerce site, the better search engine crawlers can index your site. This can improve your WooCommerce page’s rank in search engine results and attract more site visitors to your online store.

Remove duplicate content

Google and other search engines don’t like duplicate or repetitive content. One of the major reasons for this is to reduce plagiarism and stop sites from publishing the same content across multiple pages.

For these reasons, it’s important to start going through all of your WooCommerce pages and the content you’ve published on them to ensure there’s no repetitive content on your online store.

Use SEO tools

Another great way to enhance WooCommerce SEO is by using robust SEO tools to your advantage.

Popular SEO tools like Yoast SEO and RankMath can help you further optimize the on-page SEO of your WooCommerce site. Both plugins let you add keywords or focus terms to any page or post which can help improve the SEO performance of your online store. You can also use plugins like Jetpack to optimize the performance of your online store which ultimately helps enhance SEO.

Best WooCommerce SEO practices

Let’s talk about some effective WooCommerce SEO practices to keep in mind when optimizing the SEO of your online store:

#1. Avoid stuffing keywords

Keyword stuffing essentially means to “trick” search engine robots by adding a lot of keywords and terms to your content. While this may seem like a viable way to improve SEO rankings, it doesn’t work. Most search engines worth ranking on are smart enough to detect this type of unethical SEO optimization practice.

You can use the Yoast SEO tool to detect keyword frequency within your published WooCommerce pages. This will give you a better idea of where you might need to remove or change keywords to make sure search engines can index your site without detecting keyword stuffing.

#2. Use SSL certification

While you want to offer a secure way for your shoppers to make purchases from your online store with the help of SSL certification, it is also detected by some of the most popular search engines like Google.

Since search engines recognize SSL certification and it plays a role in the overall SEO ranking of your online store, it’s important to protect your site visitor’s sensitive data and information from hackers.

#3. Optimize speed and load times

In addition to robust security features, SEO rankings can also be affected by your WooCommerce site’s page speed and load times. Google uses site speed as an official SEO ranking metric and is the major reason why you might want to focus on improving your online store’s performance.

You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to measure your site’s speed. Both tools also provide tips on how to improve website speed and performance.

Conclusion

Creating a successful WooCommerce SEO strategy can be challenging, especially if this is your first time doing so.

However, if you start with the basics like adding high-priority keywords to strategic locations on your site, the whole process becomes simple and easier to execute. In addition to this, you can also improve the SEO ranking of your WooCommerce site by working on the shopping experience and optimizing product pages for speed, performance, and user experience.

Do you have any questions about how to enhance WooCommerce SEO? Let us know in the comments box below.