In the world of eCommerce, having a well-designed website is just the first step. To truly succeed and stand out from the competition, it’s crucial to have a strong online presence through effective search engine optimization (SEO). And for those running their online store, optimizing WooCommerce SEO can make a significant impact on driving traffic, boosting sales, and establishing credibility in the digital market.
From optimizing product pages to leveraging plugins, there’s a wealth of strategies to elevate your WooCommerce store’s SEO performance. So, let’s dive in and discover the secrets to a successful WooCommerce SEO strategy.
What Makes WooCommerce SEO Unique
WooCommerce SEO is unique as it is built within WordPress. A lot of the work you do to optimize a WooCommerce eCommerce website is similar to what you do for a WordPress overall site.
The SEO-friendly benefits of WooCommerce within WordPress are numerous, whether it is in its default configuration or with a light configuration.
- Analytics – WooCommerce offers extensive analytics and can connect to Google Analytics easily so that you can combine first and third-party visitor data.
- Content – Mix WooCommerce’s eCommerce functionality with WordPress content management.
- Organization – Easily manage and organize product tags, categories, and attributes.
Getting Started
You must be prepared before you optimize.
It is a good idea to start working on your action plan and goals.
Both knowing your performance and researching keywords and other topics that you are interested in targeting are important parts of both.
WooCommerce Analytics
As your primary source of analytics for WordPress, I recommend Google Analytics.
The GTM4WP plugin, which enables you to integrate GA from WooCommerce with eCommerce analytics, is a great tool for getting that data.
Do not skip measuring the data that you need and want from your website for SEO and other marketing goal tracking. Prioritizing data is important before you dive into optimizing. This will allow you to capture baseline data against which you can measure if it’s not already there.
Keyword Research
It is crucial to know what terms, phrases, topics, or words are relevant to the subject matter that you wish to rank for. You should also confirm that those searching for these topics are your target audience.
Many third-party audience and keyword research tools are available, including Semrush and Moz.
These paid tools have varying subscriptions, but they are the leaders. Each one has its strengths. They can help you find topics that are similar to your products and content.
Create your lists and map them to your content. Then, use them as context to help you understand the optimization best practices.
Technical SEO
As with all sites, you want your site to load quickly and be easily indexable.
There are a few technical aspects that you should consider, configure and monitor to increase your chances of ranking well compared to peers.
Indexing
It is important to ensure that your content is found.
Start by making sure you have a clean XML website map and robots.txt files. To ensure that everything works as it should, you can also use Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tool, and third-party validation software.
You can adjust the settings of your XML sitemap or robots.txt files using the Yoast plugin.
Yoast makes it easy to add or remove files from files. You can adjust the settings to your preference and submit them for validation via the Console/Webmaster Tools.
Page Experience
Google considers many factors when determining “page experience”.
You should pay attention to the core web vitals and page loading times in order to make sure that your pages load quickly and don’t compromise image quality or content richness.
These are the core web vitals:
- Largest Contentful Painting (LCP)
- First Input Delay
- Cumulative Layout Shift
WP Rocket and Imagify are two of the most recommended plugins for image optimization. They can be used to speed up page loading times and improve site performance.
On-Page SEO
You’ll need to include the following on-page SEO factors and aspects of eCommerce SEO in your WooCommerce website:
URLs
You don’t want the technicalities of implementing canonical tags and managing duplicate content to get search engines to index and rank one version of your pages. This includes categories, products, and other relevant keywords.
You can use WordPress’ native page naming conventions to add meaningful keywords to your URL string (without being too overdone or stuffy).
Tags
You’ll need to optimize your custom title and description for each page. If you have multiple products, scale up tag creation using data-driven content.
Yoast can be used to create meta descriptions and titles for each page.
Similar to URLs and copy, you should also examine how defaults are set up in order to pull in dynamic elements. You can set any that you like. This will allow you to create formulas to determine how tags will be created. You don’t need to write unique tags for every page in order to achieve your page’s goals.
Copy
eCommerce sites can have a difficult time finding a unique, optimized copy.
Similar to tags, it might be difficult to do it at scale. You may also have many similar products. You can find ways to spend manual time writing to best practices, avoid duplicate content, and scale it programmatically, while still maintaining high quality.
Images
Image file attributes allow you to include contextual keywords that describe the subject matter of the image.
This is especially important for product images and product category-level photos, as well as any content on your website.
These are essential for meeting accessibility standards and to search engines to understand the context of images.
These images can be managed in the WordPress media center at upload. You can edit them through the media tab, or by going to the page and clicking the image to view and modify properties.
Product Reviews
Unique content created by users can be used to add context and copy to product pages.
Product reviews can provide additional context or another type of schema element.
My team recommends stamped.io to facilitate review management and implementation.
There are many excellent review management plugins available. They vary in price, ease of implementation, and complexity.
Stamped will send you reviews as a bonus.
Off-Page SEO
eCommerce SEO, like most SEO, requires off-page factors to build upon your technical and on-page/content-focused tactics.
These factors are less specific to WooCommerce and should not be overlooked in your SEO plan.
Links
Seek high-quality, industry/context-relevant inbound links to your products, categories, and content.
This includes natural associations such as manufacturers, partners, and affiliates, PR-related mentions, and other quality natural resources.
Social Media
Yes, it’s a debatable factor.
To gain mentions and links, you can link to your site via social media content.
Engagement
Look for other ways to engage and be mentioned online.
Leverage them, whether they are part of a PR strategy, an influencer strategy, or any other way your brand is mentioned.
Look for them and find high-quality content to refer to yours.
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Are you tired of struggling to make your WooCommerce store stand out in search results? Our team of St Pete SEO experts specializes in elevating the SEO performance of WooCommerce stores, driving more traffic to your site, and boosting your sales. From keyword optimization to site architecture, we know the ins and outs of what it takes to rank higher on search engines. Trust us to give your online store the attention it deserves and take your business to the next level.
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