SEO For Woocommerce: The Complete Guide

If you desire to create an online store on your WordPress blog or website, the best way to do that is via the Woocommerce plugin. This plugin makes it a lot easier for WordPress domain owners to build and manage an online store and comes with useful inventory and tax management features.

As a whole, Woocommerce makes operating a successful online store more attainable, especially if you already have a popular WordPress website to attach it to. Its sophisticated templates and open-source customisation options also make it simple to build a professional e-commerce store that matches the rest of your brand.

What makes it stand out further when compared to other e-commerce platforms like Shopify is that its connectivity to WordPress allows it to leverage all the features and plugins of that CMS. The biggest benefit of this is that it allows you to build an extremely optimised store due to all of the search engine optimisation (SEO) features and options WordPress has – either right off the bat or via other SEO plugins that can be downloaded.

Woocommerce is also a fairly SEO-friendly piece of software in its own right, but it’s not going to do everything for you automatically. Instead, it’s your responsibility to adhere to good on-page and technical SEO practices when you add products and build your store.

Implementing the best SEO for Woocommerce will be an ongoing process, but it’ll be critical if you want to build steady growth and search engine traffic.

Why SEO Is Important For E-commerce

Good SEO helps make internet users aware of your brand and your business. The main goal is to get your website to rank higher up the search engine result pages (SERPs), with the ultimate goal to be ranked number one. Appearing higher on these SERPs boosts your visibility on the internet and can lead to more click-throughs onto your website and, as a result, more sales.

It can be argued that you can climb the SERPs for your desired keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. by running a paid advert, allowing you to bypass all the hard work and time involved in optimising your website. This may be true, and using a paid ad campaign might be beneficial alongside good SEO practices, but it’s far more expensive than utilising good SEO, and once the campaign is over, your site visitors might drop again.

Good SEO ensures that your website remains relevant and visible for the long run, boosting the longevity of your e-commerce brand. Thankfully, it’s not too tough to improve the SEO for your Woocommerce store. Here’s a look at some of the best SEO for Woocommerce that are simple to execute.

List More Products Per Page

By default, the number of products displayed by Woocommerce on a category page will be 12. This might be aesthetically pleasing; however, if you’re a store with hundreds of different products per category, this format will leave you with lots of extra product pages.

Having too many pages can be detrimental to your SEO as it will increase the number of pages Google bots will have to crawl through to index them. Each domain gets set a ‘crawl budget’, which is an allocated amount of time before these crawlers move to a different website. If they have countless product pages to crawl through, they might end up missing something before they move on.

It’s advised that you should edit this default setting of Woocommerce and display around 32 products on a page by having 8 rows and 4 columns. This should significantly cut down on the number of pages that need to be crawled.

You can easily do this by going to your Customise menu found within the Appearance tab of WordPress. In this menu, you can go to the product catalogue setting within Woocommerce and then alter the number of products you want visible on each page.

Write Product SEO Titles

The titles of your products are very important within the world of e-commerce. This is because these will be displayed on the SERPs, so they need to be eye-catching enough, be keyword-optimised, and provide enough context for the user to understand the product.

Woocommerce can generate SEO titles automatically by setting variables from the product information already present, but sometimes that isn’t good enough, and setting these manually can result in a better performance.

When setting these titles yourself, think of the keywords that people will be using to search for products like yours. Although it might sound good to be broad with your titles so that your product fits more people’s search criteria, it’s actually a lot better to be more focused and detailed.

For example, imagine you had a store selling shoes. A common title that sellers might use could be something like:

‘Men’s Leather Shoes by YourBrand’

This is not descriptive enough, doesn’t utilise any keywords, and is boring. Instead, a better, more SEO optimised title might be something like:

‘Smart Black Classic Leather Shoes for Men’

‘Black Leather Shoes – Luxury Quality for Professionals’

These examples mention more long-tail keywords that people search when looking for shoes. When people know what they’re looking for and search Google for a product, they will be as descriptive and detailed as possible. By matching their search intent, you’re more likely to appear high in the search results of these users who are ready to buy now, increasing your likelihood of a sale and helping you create the best SEO for Woocommerce.

Write Good Product Descriptions

Perhaps the best SEO for Woocommerce tactic is the content that you produce for your website. This is because a good piece of copy that provides accurate information and detail of the item will create a better user experience, which could help boost your sales.

When writing descriptions, think about everything the user wants to know to help influence their decision and leave no stones unturned.

Going back to the black shoe example from earlier, the product description should include details such as the brand, size, colour, materials used to make it, and more. Your pages should also include a FAQ section and previous customer reviews so that users have everything they need to make a purchase.

To elevate the product descriptions further, you’ll want to ensure that you’re adding the keywords and phrases you’re targeting, which will boost your SEO more. Make sure that you add it in naturally, and don’t rely on keyword stuffingKeyword stuffing is a technique that attempts to give pages higher rankings in search engine result pages by inserting the same keywords over and over again., as this is an old Black Hat SEOBlack Hat SEO is a term used to describe practices by webmasters who try to manipulate search engine rankings in ways that are not in keeping with the intent of the search engines. tactic that can get your site penalised.

Finally, another way good product descriptions can help you rank over others is that, currently, there are a lot of e-commerce sellers who all have the same duplicate contentDuplicate content is content that appears more than once across a single website. Duplicate content can be a sign of poor resource management, low trust, or a lack of quality control. to each other. Google hates duplicate content, and if you decide to copy from somewhere else, even on your website, it’ll harm your SEO. Write unique product descriptions to help you stand out and get your brand voice across, too.

Doing this can also help you get backlinks, as other websites will be more inclined to link to products that show personality than a piece of content copied and pasted from a manufacturer’s website.

Getting the right product description can be tricky for novices; that’s why many businesses hire professional content writing services to generate expertly crafted Product Descriptions to help them rank better.

Optimise Product Photos

The images you use on your Woocommerce website are extremely important, as these are what users are going to use to ascertain if your product is high-quality. For this reason, the imagery you use should be of a good standard, taken with a professional camera, and

uploaded with a scalable file type so that the image isn’t altered or re-sized in a way that compromises its clarity.

When uploading images to a Woocommerce site, you want to ensure that they are consistent, as this will boost your brand imagery. A good way to do this is to take photos of the images against a constant backdrop, but you can also edit the images and apply a specific filter to all the photos so that they all fit into a certain theme.

In terms of creating the best SEO for Woocommerce images, there are a few things you can do:

• Optimise the file size so that they don’t take too long to load and thus slow down your website’s performance. You can do this by optimising the images on photoshop before they are uploaded to WordPress, or you can use a plugin like Imagify to edit it while in WordPress.
• Name the picture in a way that is friendly for crawlers. Names that explain the image are great as they provide context, helping the image appear on Google Image Search Results. It’s a good idea to name things in lower case and to use dashes to separate words.
• Add alt text to the images. Writing a description of what is being shown helps Google understand what the image is, again helping it rank on the right SERPs. Be sure to write these in sentence case, and include keywords naturally. You don’t want to simply write lists of keywords, as this has less value. Plugins can be used to automatically add alt text, such as ImageSEO; just be sure to double-check it afterward for syntax errors.

Conclusion

Woocommerce is a great plugin for WordPress if you want to run an online store. Due to its awesome SEO integration, it can allow businesses to create websites that rank and generates a good amount of leads and sales.

SEO is an extensive sub-domain of digital marketing, meaning that the methods discussed barely scratch the surface. However, they provide information on the best SEO for Woocommerce that should help you get the most out of the software and create an online store that is well optimised and successful.