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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- KW Finder
- SEMrush
- SpyFu
- DynoMapper
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
- Google Search Console
- Yoast SEO
- All in One SEO
- Mozbar
- Breadcrumb NavXT
- Ahrefs
- Moz Open Site Explorer
- Social Warfare
- Meet Edgar
- Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO
- Schema WooCommerce Plugin
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- XML Sitemap Validator
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom Tools
- GTmetrix
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
- mobiReady
- CrossBrowserTesting
- Am I Responsive
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.
