22 Nov The Complete Manual of WooCommerce SEO to Rank #1 in Google
Your customers, leads, and the audience only want to buy the best. For today’s internet-obsessed generation, the best always ranks #1 in Google search results. But you are in luck because WooCommerce SEO can get you started on your journey to #1.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a lifeline in the eCommerce world. It’s the skilled sign spinner flipping and twirling away a sign with your store name and directions on the Google sidewalk. Call it what you want, but this is what gets businesses growing.
If your store is not optimized for SEO, you are missing out! But to give you a taste of what good SEO could mean for your online business, we’ve prepared a complete guide detailing what, how, why, and where you could make the most out of your online presence.
A Crash Course To WooCommerce SEO
But first, let’s a few facts straight.
WooCommerce Explained To Beginners
WooCommerce built for WordPress. Its development is open source, which means actual users chipped in to make it happen. That means users can tweak its integration however they want to make their website run like a fully-fledged online store complete with advanced analytical features.
Now stop right there. There is an important issue we need to address once and for all: how does WooCommerce compare to Shopify? Well, here are the important features setting them apart. The only thing you need to keep an eye on is the user-friendliness of the platform.
Is WooCommerce SEO-Friendly?
Short answer: Yes!
WooCommerce is, by design SEO-perfect. You wouldn’t expect anything short of that from an application built to run on top of the world’s best Content Management System. But just in case the basic SEO package isn’t enough, you can always integrate the many extensions to improve it to your satisfaction.
Setting up an online store on WooCommerce is something you do from the ground up. You decide on the theme, products, product description, pages, images and videos, and any other content relevant to your customers and audience.
You are responsible for everything. The SEO part is not a one-time thing but consistent improvements you make to see your online store visits grow. And that begs the question, how can you properly deploy a solid SEO strategy for WooCommerce?
Turns out WooCommerce has you covered on this end too. There is a blog section on the official website that is a must-see. It’s filled with many guides to help you learn your way around SEO, touching on all the major tips of getting your online store to the top of SERPs.
It’s the small thing that really makes a difference, especially when you are navigating your business in unfamiliar waters. These guides are often overlooked, but for forward-thinking entrepreneurs, they are the difference between doing things right and wrong.
WooCommerce SEO Cheat Sheet
Ready? Let’s get started.
Start With WordPress SEO
Having a WordPress website is a no-brainer for selling with WooCommerce. Content creators love WordPress because it is itself simple and easy to use. So obviously, setting up good SEO for WooCommerce starts on WordPress.
WooCommerce is a plugin developed to improve your WordPress SEO strategy. As such, you must have your WordPress SEO score as high as you can so WooCommerce can complete the last mile and bring your website to the top of the pile.
There is no shortage of beginner-friendly WordPress SEO guides online. But we have a more detailed one with expert tips and tricks for keyword research, URL structure, making use of Google Search Console, and many more. You can’t get around this critical step.
But just so you know what to expect, let’s look at a rundown of what you should expect. One thing to keep in mind is that there is no single way to go about improving WordPress SEO. It’s a matter of applying multiple strategies, installing SEO plugins, and publishing great content.
For SEO plugins, AIOSEO plugin is a must-have. It will help you add XML sitemaps – a key component for search result ranking – and organize your store. AIOSEO includes all the features you need to stay relevant.
There are a lot of SEO plugins for WordPress, many of that help you tackle different SEO requirements. You can identify those that address your needs as an online store owner and integrate them into your website. Just remember that you can skip this critical step.
Optimize Your Product Titles
A product title optimized for SEO for conversion typically has better metrics, and that means Google is more likely to rank it higher. As you start selling on WooCommerce, ensure everything is working exactly as hard as it should, bringing more traffic and more opportunities.
Optimizing your product titles for SEO is no different from creating SEO blog posts. Investing your time and if necessary, your money into optimizing your online store’s inventory for SEO could go a long way in turning a profit and making a lasting impression on search result rankings.
Anyone can have an amazing product idea to sell online, but few people can set up a shop for reliable conversions. You start by creating SEO-friendly product titles to communicate to your potential customers that you have what they need.
SEO standards for eCommerce are changing fast. It is changing the way people shop every day. For business owners, it is critical to keep up with the updated requirements for SEO. And so, it is important that you already install the AIOSEO plugin to your WooCommerce store.
Using AIOSEO Plugin
Installing AIOSEO to WooCommerce lets you take advantage of the best-of-breed data to optimize product pages, descriptions, and titles as well as product categories. This app will constantly remind you to configure critical parts of the product detail for better SEO.
AIOSEO will help you visualize how certain details and information might look in the grand scheme of things. Go down to the AIOSEO settings box, then edit the product’s SEO title. The app automatically generates a title for your product based on the provided information.
The thing with SEO is that you don’t have to be so obvious. For instance, products on your WooCommerce store can carry a different SEO title than the product title. How? Using keywords that customers query in search engines is a sure bet for driving traffic and sales.
Try something catchy, and interesting, and don’t forget about attractiveness. Remember, however, to keep things simple and straightforward to avoid misleading users. Tread carefully with this, search engines can penalize an online store if there is evidence that the traffic was tricked into clicking on the link.
Here are some examples of product titles: Boring title: Men’s Leather Wallet by ‘your brand name’. SEO Optimized Title: Bi-Fold Black Genuine Leather Wallet for Men – High-quality Durable.
As you can see, the SEO-optimized title includes certain keywords like bi-fold, block, genuine leather, and durable, which are keywords Google users mostly use when looking for wallets online. These terms are used interchangeably alongside ‘men’s leather wallet.’
Google’s search algorithm is pretty adept at returning the exact information you are looking for. More so since client searches are quite specific. Adding long tail keywords to your product title makes the algorithm rank you higher compared to generic titles.
Rethink Product Descriptions
Selling products online requires skill. To keep your customers coming, you really need to rethink how you structure your product description content and remember to keep it enjoyable. When your store visitors better understand what they are buying, they are more likely to complete the sale.
Simply stuffing your product description with focus words doesn’t cut it. Besides making it less attractive to read, it could hurt your ranking. Understand this: Google is a lot smarter than you think, and it keeps getting smarter. It rewards content its users will love.
It’s asking a lot of WooCommerce SEO to boost your product on every keyword on record. To stay on the right side of things, you can rely on AIOSEO to keep your product description balanced. There is a small box for the meta description to convince users that you have what they are looking for.
Its purpose is simple: to give your visitors a detailed account of what they are buying. You might think there are no direct SEO benefits, more so since they are not prominently displayed on the product page, but when used intelligently, they can work out good results for your store.
Should more people click on your product SEO title, Google automatically considers your page to offer the best result, which is a game changer for SEPR ranking. That explains why this one-line sales pitch is so important, as optimizing your product title.
Ultimately, there is no sure way to write the meta description. One thing you need to remember is to add the same focus words from the product SEO title. It is always worth adding the target keywords to increase your chances of ranking whenever you can.
Improve Product Slug
No. We are not talking about slimy, plant-eating creatures. A slug is a part of a URL. It’s as simple as that. The point of having a slug is to increase the SEO value of a particular page but turn it into an easy-to-read form. More precisely, it explains the page’s content.
WooCommerce, by default, uses the product’s SEO title as the slug. Nothing wrong with that, but you want to make the most out of these slugs by changing them yourself to make sure that it has the focus keywords you want to rank for. It adds functionality to your typical URL.
Make sure it still makes sense. To change the slug, go to the product’s SEO setting. From there, you can add the focus words to make your WooCommerce URL more user-friendly. People will be more likely to click on your product page.
Using our example above, the recommended slug would be: bi-fold-black-mens-genuine-leather-wallet-by-brand name.
Activate Breadcrumbs
Here’s the deal: breadcrumbs are designed to help your website visitors to make sense of the content of your website. They improve the Click-Through-Rate as well as add value to the structured data on your website, and improve your chances on SERPs.
They offer excellent navigational value, but above everything, good for SEO.
The AIOSEO plugin enables you to enable breadcrumb. First, go to AIOSEO and proceed to the General Settings. WooCommerce automatically adds a breadcrumb schema market to your website. Toggle the switch further to show navigation links to your site. AIOSEO Enable Breadcrumbs
You can tweak different breadcrumb display settings to make it easier for Google to understand your website. Use the AISE breadcrumbs Gutenberg block to edit any text on your page where you wish to add breadcrumbs and include the breadcrumb block.
Depending on the WooCommerce theme you are using, you might have a built-in breadcrumb functionality. Otherwise, you might have to add it manually.
Learn To Use Product Categories And Tags
There are a lot of missed opportunities here. The categories page should be treated with a greater degree of importance and optimized to the keywords you are targeting. After doing research, you can identify how customers describe your product and use that for product tags.
Don’t overdo it, however, it is still better to come up with something unique, something outside the ordinary. Product categories and tags are meant to organize your online store and make it more manageable. The fact is clients like to judge a book by its cover.
Product categories and tags function similarly. The customer session can be long, and each product category and tag narrow down their choices. To get this right, you just need to think about the intent of each visitor to help you perform.
When your online store has many product categories of the same product type, it increases the keyword density and improves your ranking. To maximize the visibility of your online business, place yourself in the shoes of an online shopper, and you can easily charm your way to the top.
It’s confusing, okay. Product categories and tags are nearly similar, and there is no one-size-fits-all in this department. Categories group a wide variety of products. Putting it another way, suppose you are selling books online, you can break down categories based on the contents.
The same goes for an online clothing store. You would have a category for men and women, and kids too. But, when we’re talking about tags, you go with more specific keywords. Going by our clothing store example, relevant tags like summer wear, active wear, and more.
In the case of a bookstore, some tags include hardcover, paperback, eBook, and more. That way, you will be going after users that know exactly what they are looking for, whether it’s an electronic copy of the actual hard copy, rather than browsing through what you have to offer.
Include Alt Text In Product Images
Pictures really do speak a thousand words. Investing in the best product images can backup your message, but it’s the alt attributes added to your images that really work the search engine spiders crawling for the most useful content for its audience.
It is becoming commonplace for users to turn to Google Image search to find what they are shopping for. With Google doing away with the ‘View Image’ button on image search results, a user now must visit a website to see the image and context.
This is good. It means your online store stands a high chance of only attracting highly motivated shoppers to your product page. Here’s where Image SEO comes in. You see, Google uses AI, Image recognition, and other algorithms to identify what the users are looking for. With a little SEO, it could lead them to you.
The only thing you need to do to take advantage of this adds alt text to your product images. Alt texts are HTML attributes that allow you to add text to an image. These texts are pulled by the search algorithm when the browser is unable to retrieve an image.
Google uses alt text as a ranking factor. Alt text should provide context about the image itself. Remember to add alt text to all product images as you upload them to WooCommerce. You can even make changes to your image library and publish them again.
Edit SEO Title And Descriptions To Product Categories
Hand-crafting and managing compelling SEO titles and descriptions will help you stand out in Google search results. Every product category gets its own page with its own product, all of which add to keyword density and paves the way for a journey to the top.
WooCommerce allows you to add context to product category pages by including a title and a description. Following the lead of AIOSEO to improve the SEO value of the product category pages. AIOSEO gives real-time feedback to gain control of your SERPs appearance.
Go to the AIOSEO setting page and select the category title from the snippet preview section. AIOSEO is an excellent app to use to edit product SEO titles and product descriptions to make a good impression as well as be informative and attractive.
- Use Google Analytics to Track WooCommerce Users
The first indication of how your online store is doing and the results of your SEO strategy is to look at the amount of traffic coming into your store. WooCommerce allows you to track users using Google Analytics. Get this: the most important thing in SEO is data.
You need to learn more about your website visitors, and the way to do it is to track their behavior. Nothing creepy. Identifying how your visitors found your online store, what they bought, where they stopped the longest, and everything they do on your site to better target them.
Google Analytics offers an overview of your WooCommerce store’s traffic and offers critical information for identifying missed opportunities. There is a lot of potential traffic you might be missing out on. Even better, you can get a plugin to automatically track WooCommerce data.
Improve Website Speed and Performance
Speed and performance are two factors Google takes seriously. Their importance keeps growing since data shows users buy more from a faster website. Faster websites are more engaging and make it easier for search engines to crawl, process, and index your online store.
A slow website is so bad for business. They affect the user experience and cost the website owner money. There is data to back this claim. In a case study by StrangeLoop, a one-second delay leads to a seven percent loss in conversions.
Most of the time, website speed and performance are affected by web hosting. You should audit your website to identify how you can improve performance and perhaps change the hosting plan. For simplicity, look at the WordPress performance guide.
Upgrade WooCommerce Security
WordPress isn’t any more or less secure than any other website builder out there, but it has become a target for attacks. Google is protective of its users, and so rewards safe and secure websites. The algorithm is known to penalize websites for scams, phishing, and other threats.
Having poor WooCommerce security could hurt your SEO performance and impact the reputation of your brand. Hackers are getting more sophisticated and using brute force, malware, and data theft. As such, the security of your WooCommerce store should be paramount.
Closing Thoughts
We hope this guide has been helpful. If the thought of mastering WooCommerce SEO ever crossed your mind and growing website traffic is a concern for you, then you are all set now. Remember to keep up with search engine updates to get consistent, high-quality traffic without spending too much time and money.