What Are the Best Woocommerce SEO Practices?
Ranking good on Google is essential for getting noticed among potential clients. The better your website ranks, the more chance you have to grow sales. Thus, a good position on Google is crucial for improving website traffic, growing revenue, and strengthening brand awareness. No matter what niche you cover, optimizing your site for search engines can only benefit your business. This applies to online stores as well. With good optimization, your WooCommerce shop and its product pages will be ranked better which directly leads to more sales. When a lot of people see your shop, you’re more likely to sell more products. So, to run your online shop with success, you need to make sure it’s optimized for search engines. Before you launch your site, implement the basic WordPress SEO tips to make sure your site will get a chance to stand out among many others. Although there are numerous WordPress SEO plugins you can use to uplift your SEO, we will use the Yoast plugin to illustrate WooCommerce SEO best practices. Let’s now see what you should have in mind when you want to optimize your WooCommerce store.
Basic WooCommerce SEO Tips
The fact WooCommerce runs on WordPress that is already made to support SEO requirements tells enough. Also, WordPress integrates with tons of SEO plugins you can use to optimize your site further. When you’re starting with your WooCommerce store, make sure you optimize each segment of your shop before publishing. From adding product descriptions to optimizing product images, you can do a lot to prepare your content for search engines. Also, don’t forget to implement SEO tips on each new product you add to your shop. WooCommerce SEO is an ongoing process, so it requires your constant involvement. However, it pays off in the long run. So, if you want to properly implement the best WooCommerce SEO tips, keep reading.
In this article we will cover the following topics:
After you add a product in WooCommerce (we will use a black dress as an example) and name it, make sure you optimize it through the tools that are supported by your SEO plugin. As we use the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin, we will start by adding the product’s title and description. No matter which product type you plan to add, each will have its unique title and description. As you can see in our example, there are two types of product description – shorter, placed right below the price; and longer placed below the product image. In a nutshell, product descriptions are short, informative sections that contain essential information about your product. As they are recognized by search engines, make sure to optimize them so they are SEO friendly. For this manner, don’t forget to include the keyword in your product descriptions. Take some time and write original product descriptions, don’t duplicate them or use manufacturer product descriptions if you’re selling third party products.
But what if you have more than one product you want to rank for one, specific keyword? When your shop offers a lot of products with the same keyword it’s not logical to rank each product for it. In this scenario, group your products (in our case these are dresses) into categories and rank each category. This will allow you to rank each product in one category and your customers will have more options to choose from when they enter your website.
Once you add a product description, it’s time to optimize permalinks and slugs on your website. WordPress slug is a text which comes after your domain name as a part of your permalink that is leading to your content. As it’s one of the first things people will see when they enter your site, don’t forget to make it clear and informative . Yoast WooCommerce SEO gives us the chance to change slug so it meets our SEO needs. Just enter the keyword you want your product to rank for .
SEO page titles will appear on search engines once someone enters the keyword your product ranks for . So, they should be carefully chosen to offer enough information both to searchers and search engines . Basically, they should tell what your page is about. For instance, if you’re selling bags, a good SEO title will provide basic info on the bag’s material, dimensions, or any other characteristic that can be of importance to searchers.
eCommerce sites support category pages and product pages. Category pages are useful for two reasons. Firstly, they can help shoppers easily find the products they’re searching for. Secondly, they prevent individual product pages from competing with one another with the same keyword in search engines. Our advice is to optimize category pages for a broader term (leader bags) and use product pages to rank for more specific terms (colorful and elegant bags). Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin allows you to add SEO titles on each page and category with complete ease .
A meta description is a text that appears below SEO titles so you can create it with care as well. Although meta descriptions don’t contribute to SEO success, they can improve your website traffic significantly. When you write them properly, they can lead to a better click-through rate, thus better sales. As Google sometimes uses meta descriptions to generate search results snippets, make sure each of your product pages has its own meta description. Yoast allows you to easily adjust the meta descriptions. The average length of meta descriptions that are shown in search results is around 160 characters, but you can go with longer descriptions as well. Just make sure your meta description offers crucial product info and some sort of call to action.
Product tags and categories are crucial for organizing navigation in WooCommerce shops. Thanks to them, people will be able to navigate through your website easily. Also, tags and categories are good for SEO so don’t forget to add them once you add the product to your shop.
Also, as we mentioned earlier, our recommendation is to organize your product into categories and then add title, description, or adjust slug for each product category.
Product images are one of the most important elements of any product page. But, if you want to use them to their full potential, don’t forget to define their alt texts. Basically, alt text is what shows up when your image doesn’t appear or can’t be loaded for some reason. Use clear and short alt text that describes your images precisely. Alt text can be a great tool for implementing SEO keywords but make sure you add them so everything sounds natural.
In short, breadcrumb links show website visitors where they are on your site or where they’ve previously been. They help your visitors to navigate through your pages easily. As you can assume, breadcrumbs are another useful SEO element. Based on them, Google determines how your site is structured and how it will appear in search results so don’t forget to enable breadcrumbs.
Besides enabling breadcrumbs, there are other features you can use to improve your website navigation. When people feel frustrated they are more likely to leave your site faster. This, furthermore, impacts your bounce rate and overall time spent on site. When visitors stay longer, Google recognizes this as plus so your site is more likely to rank better. For this reason, make sure your content is well-organized and navigation intuitive. Keep your main navigation easy to follow. Also, focus on the links that lead to the most important pages and place other links in the website’s footer.
The character of your content and its quality is essential for good SEO results. For this reason, it’s important to keep your content unique and avoid duplicate content. When you use the content that’s already used on other sites, Google might recognize it and remove it from the rankings. To prevent this, make sure you don’t use the same content in different areas of your site. Also, never copy the content from a website that posted it first. This is especially important if you’re selling third party products. To prevent duplicate content always change product descriptions – don’t just copy/paste it from the seller’s site.
Let’s Wrap It Up
WooCommerce SEO optimization can do wonders for your online store. So, after you install the SEO plugin of your choice, make sure you optimize each element of your product page. From product descriptions to tags and categories – everything can be adjusted to help you rank better on Google. Don’t be lazy and start working on your SEO strategy today! It will pay off in the long run.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
