Imagine having someone standing on every street corner in the world, spinning signs with your store’s name on them and directing traffic to you. That’s what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does for your eCommerce site. In this tutorial, we will take a deep dive into the WooCommerce platform with a guide to get you on your way to ranking #1; we’ll discuss how to optimize WooCommerce store SEO with super improvement tips and our picks for the best SEO plugins.
WooCommerce SEO Improvement Tips
We’ve compiled nine key tips for maximizing SEO for the WooCommerce store. These points assume you’ve installed a plugin to analyze your content, such as Jetpack, The SEO Framework, or Yoast SEO.
1- Meta Description
Meta descriptions are the short paragraphs that appear underneath a title in search engine rankings. The description gives searchers a brief preview of the page’s content before they click on the title. As search engines have evolved, meta descriptions have become less critical to achieving excellent SEO.
Nevertheless, they still play a role in determining how your site’s pages rank, and they’re extremely useful to your customers in helping them determine if a page contains what they’re looking for. In Yoast SEO, you’ll find a section titled Snippet Preview beneath the editor. If you select the Edit Snippet button, you can add a meta description for your product.
2- Permalinks
URLs are most helpful when they contain keywords for the relevant product. Keywords are the terms you want your products to rank for with search engines or the term you anticipate customers will type into a search engine to find your product.
Yoast SEO will rank your keyword based on several factors. Yoast SEO also provides rankings for individual product slugs below the editor.
The keyword does not appear in the slug, which is flagged as a possible problem: To edit the slug, go back to the top of the editor, where you will find an editable permalink: click Edit, make the necessary changes and click OK. Your slug’s ranking in Yoast SEO should now have improved – ideally for a green traffic light.
3- Titles
Titles are important for communicating with both customers and search engines. They’re the first thing customers see when looking through your products and one of the most important factors for search engines trying to determine which pages to prioritize for searchers.
To optimize your titles and improvement your WooCommerce store SEO as per this tutorial and guide, go to your product or category page in WordPress. Yoast SEO displays an area below the editor with two sections: Readability and Focus Keyphrase. If you expand the latter section, you’ll see red, yellow, and green lights indicating SEO rankings for different features. Look through them for any related to the optimization of your title, then make the suggested changes.
4- Make Your Site Secure
Surprisingly, 73.9% of hacks are related to SEO spam. This can prevent Google from properly indexing your site or seeing it. Fortunately, maintaining your website security can help prevent this. A primary consideration is to keep WordPress, your theme, and any plugins you have installed (including WooCommerce) updated.
Updates often fix gaps in security and other bugs, so failing to carry out updates could mean malicious users and visitors could take advantage of any known vulnerabilities. We recommend performing regular security scans to look for evidence of attacks on your site. A security plugin such as Sucuri will be a handy tool, as will installing a dedicated plugin such as Wordfence.
However, this will only protect your site, not your server. You can secure the latter using a Web Application Firewall (WAF). This will redirect any malicious traffic from your site, preventing costly damages and protecting your WooCommerce store’s SEO. The aforementioned Sucuri offers the best in class WAF available.
5- Tips Using Images for WooCommerce Improvement SEO
Alternative (or ‘alt’) text is displayed on your website when your images cannot be seen. If an image fails to load, the browser displays a tooltip in the rollover containing the alt text or displays it in an image placeholder.
Alt text is incredibly useful for screen readers as they will read the image description. As such, using alt text makes your store more accessible – always a top concern for any website owner.
Also, alt text helps search engines index images correctly. Including a keyword in your alt text can also help your image rank better, improving the related page’s overall SEO.
6- Analytical Review
Your site’s Google Analytics includes a whole host of data about your site’s users to improvement your boost SEO. You can learn how many visitors your site receives, which pages are the most popular, and how your visitors are being redirected to your site – by monitoring your Google Analytics.
While installing Google Analytics doesn’t improve your WooCommerce store SEO per se, leveraging the information you learn about your site can. You’ll be able to track your keywords and plan future ones, view your overall SEO stats, check your site’s speed, and more. What’s more, you can install a plugin such as Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress: It includes a handy Google Analytics dashboard for monitoring all your site’s stats, directly accessible from WordPress’ back end.
7- Category & Tags
In this WooCommerce SEO Improvement tutorial guide, we have already mentioned that, ideally, you will have pages where customers can see all items of a certain category. This strategy prevents individual products from competing with one another when customers search for a general term applying to multiple products.
For example, if a customer wants to see your entire collection of t-shirts, they’ll search for “t-shirt.” Of course, you don’t want each of your t-shirts competing with one another to be the top result. Instead, you can show the visitor a page listing all your t-shirts.
Tags work similarly and can serve as a cross-reference for customers searching through your products. Customers can see similar products with the same tag by clicking on a tag. You can access your product categories and tags within WordPress through the Products panel.
Selecting the Categories or Tags options allows you to add new entries by filling in the requested information. You should also be able to edit existing categories and tags from the relevant page.
8- Speed Optimizations
As you may know, your pages’ loading times impact your WooCommerce SEO improvement – sometimes quite heavily. To some extent, google factors page speed into its algorithm so that a slow site won’t rank highly.
Consequently, the longer a page takes to load, the more likely visitors will abandon it. This means a slow side directly and negatively impacts sales. As such, you should test your site’s speed regularly. To do this with the least path of resistance, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and Load Impact.
There are also various ways to improve your site’s load time, including compressing image files, caching, and utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Image compression is helpful because these files are often large. Dedicated plugins such as ShortPixel will compress your images automatically to create smaller files that won’t slow your site down but retain image quality.
To touch on caching a little more, this is a process in which static HTML file copies of pages are saved so they can be displayed quickly without reloading the entire page. It’s extremely beneficial, and as such, there are several useful caching plugins available, including WP Super Cache (developed by Automattic).
9- Breadcrumb + WooCommerce SEO
Breadcrumbs are navigational tools to help customers get around your store more easily. You’ve probably seen them before. They usually appear at the top of a page, showing you what page you’re currently on and a path of links back to the pages you used to navigate to the current page.
For example, you might use breadcrumbs to lead customers back to parent categories from a related subcategory. If you sell clothing on your e-commerce site, a breadcrumb trail could be Men’s > Tops > T-shirts, with other possible trails being Men’s > Tops > Sweaters and Men’s > Pants > Jeans. Your theme may already add breadcrumbs to your product pages. If not, you must edit your theme before activating this in Yoast.
To do this, scroll down to SEO in your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and select Search Appearance from the menu. Select the Breadcrumbs tab in the search appearance settings, then toggle the switch to enable breadcrumbs.
Final Thoughts About WooCommerce SEO Improvement
There are a lot of things to do about WooCommerce SEO. Not just for search engines but for users. What you need to realize is that everyone is trying to please Google. Everyone is trying to do most of the things we talked about.
Those who end up at the top will do so for quality implementation and creativity. You cannot have one without the other. Most people have just one or neither. If you can do both, you’ll win! We hope this tutorial and guide with these top tips for SEO improvement for the WooCommerce store have been of help to you.