WooCommerce SEO: 10 Tips for Better SEO

One of the major ways to bring potential customers to your WooCommerce store is with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be challenging, but thankfully WooCommerce SEO is just like regular SEO—there are just more moving parts.

SEO pro Rebecca Gill recently shared her wisdom on WooCommerce SEO during a free iThemes Training webinar, SEO for Your WooCommerce Website. During this webinar, she goes into detail on a number of topics that can improve your site’s SEO.

10 Tips for WooCommerce SEO

In this post, we’ll look at 10 different areas where you can boost your WooCommerce SEO, including a quick tip for each one. Watch Rebecca’s webinar to go even deeper.

1. Do Your Keyword Research

Don’t just jump in and guess about the most effective keywords for your products and online store. Keyword research is critical to WooCommerce SEO success. People think they know what customers are searching, but they’re often wrong. It’s always surprising (and sometimes funny or scary) to see what terms people are searching for. Also, keep in mind that voice search is becoming more common, which means longer, complicated search phrases and keywords.

How do you do keyword research? There are several great keyword research tools for SEO out there, including Google Keyword Planner and KWFinder.

For more training on how to do keyword research, check out this free webinar, taught by Rebecca Gill: A Practical Guide to Keyword Research.

2. Site Mapping is a Must

Site mapping is the process of assigning specific pages and posts to keywords and keyphrases. The trick with successful SEO is to not have multiple pages and posts targeting the same keywords.

Why? Your SEO efforts won’t get very far if you’re competing with yourself to rank for certain keywords. Map out your site and assign keywords so you’re not inadvertently beating yourself.

Although it takes some work to get organized, making a spreadsheet of your keywords and URLs will help with site mapping.

Tip: Assign keywords to categories, not products. It’s easier to rank a category page than a single product (products go out of stock, change, etc.).

3. Use SEO Friendly URLs

Make sure your page URLs are simple and readable. No complex structure, no unreadable characters. If your URLs are easy for humans to read, then the search bots can make sense of them, too.

In WordPress, you can check your URL settings from the Settings > Permalinks screen. The best setting is usually the “Post Name” option, as long as you’re correctly naming your pages, posts and products with keywords.

Tip: If you have to change a URL, use a 301 redirect so you don’t lose traffic.

4. Avoid Duplicate Content

Don’t display the same content under different URLs on the same website. It’s a common WooCommerce SEO problem because products can often end up in multiple categories with different URLs.

Tip: If content duplication is unavoidable, set the page you don’t want to rank to ‘no index.’

5. Unique Product Descriptions

If you have a product with the same manufacturer’s description that’s on 500 other websites, search engines won’t rank you for that content. You’re simply not providing value to your users. Ask yourself what you can include so that you will make your store unique.

You need high-quality product descriptions to boost your WooCommerce SEO. Give search engines a reason to rank you higher.

Make your product descriptions more in-depth, provide additional details about the products, answer FAQs, etc.

Tip: Review competitor’s websites and write better content. Also, focus on the category description, since this is the page you want to rank.

6. Use Meta Titles and Descriptions

Yes, you should absolutely create unique meta titles and descriptions for better WooCommerce SEO. Meta titles and descriptions are an opportunity to bring people to your website, so make sure they’re pulling their weight.

While it can be easy to skip over this step when you’re adding lots of products to your store, don’t forget meta titles and descriptions. Using a plugin like Yoast SEO makes it easy to add the additional fields for meta titles and descriptions to your workflow when adding new products.

Tip: Meta titles and descriptions are not just for SEO, they’re also for better click-thru rates on search results pages.

7. Implement Navigation Breadcrumbs

They may seem like an old-school approach, but navigation breadcrumbs are actually helpful for WooCommerce SEO (they also make things easier for humans, by eliminating extra clicks and improving usability). Is your store using them? If not, make sure to get them implemented on your site.

Tip: 68% of e-commerce websites suffer from sub-par breadcrumb implementation, so even if you have them, make sure you’re doing it right.

8. Be Intentional About Link Building

You want to encourage inbound links (other folks linking to you) as well as create your own internal links. Both communicate to search engines what content is important.

Tip: How you link is as important as what you link. Don’t use vague text such as “click here,” “read more,” or “learn more.” Use the specific keywords for the content you’re linking to.

9. Be Active on Social Media

Social media is an indirect ranking factor in SEO. But social media does make a difference because it influences: Your link love and activity shows the search engines there’s value there, plus other people share your links. All that activity helps your rank.

Tip: Build a community first, sell second.

10. Technical SEO

WooCommerce SEO is not just keywords and text. You also need the technical elements:

Schema, structured data & rich snippets: These tools can show prices, ratings, etc., directly in the search results. Yoast SEO for WooCommerce is one way to do it.
XML sitemaps: Make sure you have one and it actually points where you want it to.
Mobile responsive: Google is starting to rank the mobile version of a site first, so make sure your mobile game is on point.
Speed and performance: Even a one-second delay can cost you, so speed still matters.

More Tools for WooCommerce SEO

During the webinar, Rebecca shared a ton of tools that can be helpful for various aspects of WooCommerce SEO. Here’s a taste:

Watch the WooCommerce SEO Webinar For More WooCommerce SEO Training

For more help with WooCommerce SEO, watch the free SEO for Your WooCommerce Website webinar with Rebecca Gill. We also have 18 webinars for free SEO training, so be sure to check those out, too.

WooCommerce SEO: 10 Tips For Better SEO