Do you want to improve your WooCommerce SEO, but you’re not sure how to get started Search engine optimization (SEO) of your eCommerce store is equivalent to having someone standing on every street corner in the real world, rotating banners with the name and direction of your store.
If you don’t optimize your WooCommerce store for SEO, you are losing a lot of sales.
We have created this ultimate WooCommerce SEO Guide to help you improve your WooCommerce SEO and get more customers.
Before we get started, let’s cover the basics.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce plugin designed for WordPress software. It allows you to take advantage of the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store. Due to the open source nature , you can customize every aspect of your store and easily create custom extensions.
Before starting an online store, most beginners usually ask one of two questions: How does WooCommerce compare to Shopify, and is WooCommerce SEO a friend
The answer to the second question is below:
Is WooCommerce SEO a friend?
WooCommerce is very SEO friendly out of the box. It is run on top of WordPress which itself is standards compliant and good for SEO. However, you can definitely use plugins and technologies to further improve the SEO of the WooCommerce product.
When you start an online store with WooCommerce, it’s up to you to add things like themes, products, product descriptions, product pages, photos, and other content to your store. You are responsible for optimizing all the additional content you add.
WooCommerce SEO is an ongoing process, and you will need to keep up with it until you see steady growth in search engine traffic and sales.
Now you may be wondering, what do I need to deploy an effective WooCommerce SEO strategy correctly
Well, this is where the WooCommerce SEO guide can help you. We will go through several important SEO tips for your online store and make them easy to understand.
Are you ready?
Let’s get started.
1. Perform the WordPress SEO setup procedure
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, which means you need to optimize your overall WordPress SEO setup before you can move on to WooCommerce SEO tweaks.
We have created a complete WordPress SEO Guide for beginners. It’s very detailed and includes tips on keyword research, an SEO-friendly عنوان title structure, finding duplicate content using Google Search Console, and more. We strongly recommend that you check out the entire guide first before moving on to step 2 of this article.
However, if you are in a hurry, the most important thing you need is the WooCommerce SEO plugin. We recommend installing and setting up the all in SE SEO plugin on your site.
The aioseo plugin will help you add XML sitemaps along with setting up the appropriate SEO fields for your products. It also comes with SEO features like rich snippet chart markup, on-page SEO analysis, social media integration, and more.
Once you have set up AIOSEO, you can go to step 2 of our WooCommerce SEO Guide.
2. Writing SEO product titles
Just like you optimize your blog posts for SEO, you also need to optimize individual WooCommerce products for SEO.
One of the most important parts of SEO for a WooCommerce product is writing SEO-friendly product titles.
These product titles appear in the address bar of your browser and are used by search engines as the title of a search result.
If you followed the previous step, then you have already installed the aioseo plugin . It is the best WordPress SEO plugin that covers WooCommerce products as well.
You should start by editing the WooCommerce product and scroll down to the AIOSEO settings box. After that, you can modify the SEO address of the product by typing your own or using variants to automatically generate your address from the product information.
The SEO address of a WooCommerce product can be slightly different from the product address in your store. You can use keywords that you think your customers will use when searching for the product.
You also need to make it attractive, interesting and attractive for users. However, it is important not to use misleading or incorrect addresses that will deceive users and search engines as this may result in penalizing your WooCommerce site.
Let’s take a look at the example title below.
Boring title : men’s leather wallet by trade name
SEO optimal title: Brown bi-fold men’s leather wallet-high quality made for durability
In the SEO-optimized title, we mention long-tail keywords such as bi-folding, Brown, durability, and all the things that people will look for when searching for a “men’s leather wallet”.
When shopping online, people write detailed search queries instead of general ones. By adding long keywords in the WooCommerce product title, you help search engines find you and rank higher than your competitors.
3. Add SEO descriptions of the product
Just below the title in AIOSEO, you will also see a box for adding the meta description of your product.
While this description is not displayed on your website, it will appear below your product title on search engine results pages (SERPs). You need to make sure that you use this description to provide a compelling reason for users to click and view your product. Think of this as a one-line promotion.
Don’t forget to use the same keywords you used in the product’s SEO headline. This will boost your chances of ranking for those targeted keywords.
4. Slug product optimization
Slug is a beautiful product name that WordPress uses in your URL address which is also known as permalinks . By default, WooCommerce uses your product address as a slug. However, sometimes the default links do not include any relevant keywords for SEO.
You can change this in the SEO settings of your product. Make sure you use your keyword in the alloy and don’t make it too long.
For example, for a men’s leather wallet, we recommend making a slug: bi-fold-Brown-mens-leather-wallet-by-brand-name
5. Enable Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are great for internal linking because they specify a clean path or path to the page you are browsing.
These navigation paths also appear in the search results, which gives your site an additional advantage in the ranking.
You can enable navigation paths for your WooCommerce products using the aioseo plugin.
To enable navigation paths, go to all in SE SEO “general settings .
The markup of the navigation routes scheme is automatically added to the code of your site. But, if you also want to display navigation links for the navigation path on your website, you need to enable the navigation paths by toggling the key.
You will then see the settings for displaying various navigation routes that you can use on your website.
For example, you can use the Gutenberg block “AIOSEO – Breadcrumbs”. Just edit any post or page on which you want to display navigation in the navigation path and add AIOSEO – the Breadcrumbs block.
If you are using one of the best WooCommerce themes, you will probably come up with the built-in navigation path functionality.
6. Correct use of product categories and labels
Product categories and tags help you organize products throughout your online store. This makes it easy for your customers to find the right product they are looking for.
Categories and tags also help search engines in the same way. Each category and product tag has its own page in WooCommerce which is crawled and listed by search engines.
Since these pages have similar products, this increases their keyword density and increases the likelihood that they will rank for those keywords.
Many beginners are confused about the difference between category and tags and end up using them incorrectly. Categories are intended for the wide grouping of your products. If your store is a book, then the categories will be the table of contents.
For example, a clothing store can have categories such as men’s, women’s, accessories, jewelry, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add subcategories to them.
Tags, on the other hand, are more specific keywords that describe the characteristics of the product. For example, a T-shirt product can have tags such as casual, summer clothes, and more.
7. Adding alternative text to product images
Many customers turn to image search to quickly find the products they are looking for. To help website owners, Google recently removed the “View Image” button from their image search results. This means that users will have to visit your website to see the image with context.
This trend also helps online stores attract highly motivated customers to their websites.
SEO on images works like a web search. Google uses artificial intelligence, image recognition and other algorithms to help users find the photos they are looking for.
The most important thing you can do to get traffic from Google Image Search is to add an alt tag to all the images on your website.
Alt text is an HTML theme that allows website owners to add some text with their images. This text is intended to be displayed when the browser is unable to fetch an image.
Search engines use this alternative text as a ranking factor in their image search. Basically, you can add text to describe the subject of this particular photo.
You can add alt text to all your product images when they are uploaded to WooCommerce. You can also edit photos of old products in the media library and add alternative text to each of them one by one.
To learn more about alt text, see our article about alt text for image vs image title in WordPress .
8. Add SEO title and descriptions for product categories
Each product category in WooCommerce has its own page. This page contains similar products, which increases the keyword density of your target keywords. This makes product category pages more important for WooCommerce SEO.
You can further optimize product category pages by adding a title and description to them. AIOSEO allows you to set SEO titles and descriptions for each category in your WooCommerce store.
Just go to the products page “categories” and click on the Edit link located at the bottom of one of the categories.
On the editing screen, scroll down to the AIOSEO settings and click on the category title in the snippet preview. AIOSEO will now display editing fields to enter your custom SEO title and a description for the product category.
9. Analytics WooCommerce Analytics Google Analytics
Data is the most important part of an effective SEO strategy. You need to find out where users come from, how they found your store, what products they looked at, what they are doing on your WooCommerce site.
Google Analytics can help you keep track of all this information, but it is very difficult to set it up correctly.
That’s why we built MonsterInsights, the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
The Pro version of MonsterInsights comes with a built-in ecommerce tracking feature that you can use to enable enhanced ecommerce tracking by WooCommerce with one click.
You can use MonsterInsights along with Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions about your WooCommerce store and grow your business with confidence.
To learn more about how to use advanced ecommerce features in Google Analytics, see our article on how to enable customer tracking in WooCommerce .
10. Improve site speed and performance
Google considers website speed to be one of the most important ranking factors. This means that faster websites are more likely to rank higher than slower ones.
Slow websites are also bad for your business because they affect the user experience and cost you actual money.
According to the Strangeloop case study, a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% less page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
Most of the time, the number one reason why the WooCommerce store is slow is web hosting. If this is the case, then you need to switch to one of the enhanced WooCommerce hosting providers such as Citeground or Bluehost .
11. Improving WooCommerce security
Search engines love safe and secure websites. Google warns users about scams, malware and phishing sites, by quickly marking unsafe websites with warnings.
This can not only destroy your WooCommerce SEO rankings but will also have a severe impact on your brand reputation.
Hackers are always targeting random websites with brute force attacks, malware injections, and data theft attempts. To prevent this, you need to tighten the security of your WooCommerce store.
We hope this article helped you learn how to improve WooCommerce SEO.