WooCommerce SEO – A Detailed Guide on How to Rank Higher

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Introduction to WooCommerce SEO

In today’s world what you see more is what you buy, and everyone wants to sell online. 

If you are a business owner running your business online through eCommerce platform such as WooCommerce store, an SEO optimized website can make a lot of difference to your online business.

To truly stand out amongst thousands of websites and make your website and products or services visible to the targeted users, you need to implement effective SEO strategies. 

In this guide, we will walk you through the essential steps to optimize your WooCommerce store to make it rank higher on search engine and attract a host of new users for your business.

Understanding WooCommerce SEO

WooCommerce SEO simply involves optimizing your online website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google. 

The higher your website appear on search results; the more is the possibility of it being generating traffic from your targeted audience. 

This WooCommerce SEO optimization process requires you to work on different techniques including but not limited to keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and link building. 

By following these strategies, you may raise brand awareness and draw in more organic traffic, eventually resulting in increase in revenue for your company.

Key Strategies for WooCommerce SEO optimization

A. Keyword Research

Keyword research forms the very foundation to master the SEO strategy for your Ecommerce website. 

This involves identifying the terms used by your potential customers to search the products or services you are selling. 

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Here’s how to conduct effective keyword research –

• Keyword Research Tools – Make use of plugins and tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner and WordStream to identify keywords with most searches in the industry with less competition and use them across your website content.

• Use Long-Tail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are more specific keywords in nature with targeted audience. This makes them less competitive on the search engine.

 For instance, consider using the keyword “kid’s sports shoes” rather than “shoes.” By doing this, you can draw attention to the targeted kids who are into various sports.

• Understand Competitors – One good way to improve your keyword game is by identifying the keywords your competitors are using and target similar or related terms for your website. 

You can make use of WooCommerce SEO plugins like Ahrefs and SEMrush to study about your competitors.

Master Tip – Don’t stuff keywords in your website content. Having repetitive use of keywords can negatively impact the user experience. They should not run out of context. You can make use of Yoast SEO plugin to determine if your keyword density in the content is too high.

B. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the optimization of individual pages on your website to generate traffic and rank higher in your area of industry. 

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• Optimize product titles and descriptions – You must ensure that all your product titles and descriptions include relevant keywords that your targeted user base are using to search the products on internet. 

Make your product title and description compelling and informative to attract customers and rank higher on search results.

• Use SEO-Friendly URLs – Create clean and descriptive URLs including the targeted keywords. 

You should not use generic URLs with numbers or special characters as they are difficult to understand, copy and use.

• Add alt text to images – Alt text helps in the identification and tracking of images uploaded on your website by search engine. To make the images easy to find, use descriptive alt text covering as many keywords as possible. 

• Use compressed images – If you are using high quality, heavy and uncompressed images, it can significantly slow down your website. The issue becomes a bigger problem when your targeted audience is accessing the same over mobile phone. 

You can make use of tools like TinyPNG or Smush to compress images and significantly improve page load times.

• Enable breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs improve site navigation by providing a clear path from homepage to the respective product pages. This is important for search engines to understand the structure of your website. 

WooCommerce supports breadcrumbs out of the box, so make sure they are enabled. You can even make use of plugins like All-in-One SEO to enable breadcrumbs on your website.

Example of breadcrumbs can be Home > Men’s > Shoes > Formal Shoes

• Utilize meta descriptions – Instead of having one meta description, try to create new and unique meta descriptions for each product page on your ecommerce website. 

These meta descriptions should be precise and easy to understand with focus on target keywords that excites the targeted audience to click through to your website.

C. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is for the purpose of optimization of the technical aspects of your website to improve its performance. The technical SEO also allows the search engines to crawl and index your site effectively. 

Here are some technical SEO tips for WooCommerce –

• Improve website speed – A fast to load and easy to access website is generally favoured by search engines. 

You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify speed related issues on your website and fix them quickly and efficiently.

• Ensure mobile-friendliness – Since the consumer base is gradually shifting towards increasing use of smartphones, it is important to ensure your website is meant for use over desktop as well as smartphones. 

You should use responsive design to ensure your website functions well and appears appealing across all devices.

• Use SSL certificates – Always ensure that your website is secured with an SSL certificate. This helps in protecting your website against cyber-attacks, safeguard user data, building trust among your user base and improving your search engine rankings. 

Don’t forget! Google considers HTTPS as a ranking factor for websites.

• Create an XML sitemap – An XML sitemap plays an important role in your WooCommerce SEO strategy by helping the search engines to understand the structure of your website and find all your pages. 

Use plugins like Yoast SEO to generate and submit your sitemap to search engines.

• Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) – A CDN is very important tool when it comes to creating a successful SEO strategy. A CDN will help you to distribute your website’s content across multiple servers globally. 

This helps in reducing the distance and time required by your website data to travel across servers to reach the users accessing your website globally. 

Some of the most popular CDNs available in the market include Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront.

D. Content Marketing

In today’s digital era, content is the king! Content marketing has become go to method for businesses to attract and engage with their targeting audience and improving your website’s SEO performance. 

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Here’s how to leverage content marketing for your WooCommerce store –

• Blog writing – A blog helps you to generate valuable content related to the products or services you are offering. It also helps you to expresses your knowledge and expertise in the industry in which you are operating. 

You can start by writing informative articles and how-to guides for your products or services to attract and engage your audience.

• Create product guides and tutorials – When your website offers detailed product guides and tutorials of the products you are selling, it helps the potential customers to make informed purchasing decisions. This ultimately helps you to improve your search engine rankings with passage of time.

• Use video content – Videos are the go-to medium of advertising the business and increasing your customer base. Videos are highly engaging and can significantly uplift your SEO performance. 

You can create a whole library of product demonstration videos, customer testimonials, and behind-the-scenes content to engage and attract more customers.

• Leverage user-generated content – Whenever a customer makes a purchase from your website, always encourage them to leave reviews and share their experiences with your products. 

This user-generated content provides credibility to your products, improving your search engine rankings and attracting new users to your website.

E. Link Building

Link building is the process of using the high-quality backlinks from other websites to gain authority in the area of your business operations and improve the search engine rankings of your website . 

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Here are some effective link-building strategies for your WooCommerce business –

• Guest blogging – You can write guest posts for reputable and trusted blogs in your industry. In the blog, create a link back to your WooCommerce webstore within the content or even the author bio to make it .

• Collaborate with influencers – Try to partner with influencers from the industry to promote your products. This will help you to generate or gain backlinks from their social media handles and websites.

• Create shareable content – You can produce different type of content such as infographics, research studies, and industry reports for users. This will help you to attract backlinks from a host of websites dealing with such information. 

• Participate in online communities – You should create a new online community to communicate about your products or simply engaged in existing online forums, social media groups, and industry-specific communities. Here you can share your own expertise related to your business and include links to your website where possible.

F. Use rich snippets

With the use of rich snippets, you can help search engines better comprehend the content of your pages by providing them with more information about specific content types, such as events, recipes, reviews, and items. 

This extra information is demonstrated to boost click-through rates and will also appear in search results.

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You can put the following kinds of rich snippets on your website, along with some information that goes with each one:

• Products – ratings, reviews, availability, brand, price, and images.
• Ratings and reviews – total rating, number of votes, and number of stars.
• Videos – description, length, upload date, and thumbnail pictures.
• Things that happened – Date, name and location of the event.
• Blog entries – Author, date of publication, and headline etc.

You can add these snippets manually or do it using the All in One Schema Rich Snippets plugin.

G. WooCommerce SEO Plugins and Tools

To further strengthen the SEO game of your website, the best SEO plugins for WooCommerce to make your website rank higher on the search rankings are –

• Yoast SEO – This WordPress SEO plugin will help you to SEO optimize your content, meta tags, and more easily and quickly. 

You can also edit the URL of each page on your website using this plugin. 

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The key features of this plugin are – 

• Complete tool set –  This plugin provides a host of features right from schema markup to XML sitemaps.

• Product page optimization – It helps in improving product categories, descriptions, and titles of your products to make them easy to find for the targeted user base.

• Real-time content analysis – The plugin will provide your input on your website’s content on real time basis.

• Support for multiple languages – This tool is perfect for business catering to various geographic areas.

The plugin if available free of cost to download and use but you may need a paid version starting at $99 per year per website to use some of its advance features.

• All in One SEO Pack – It is a very powerful SEO plugin aimed at improving your site’s SEO and improving the visibility of the products.

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The key features of this plugin are – 

• The plugin provides ecommerce-specific toolkit designed specifically for the purpose of enhancing the SEO game of your WooCommerce stores. You are not required additional extensions to run these features.

• With easy to set-up process, the essential features include XML sitemaps and schema markup.

• The plugin also offers social media integration features using Open Graph tags.

While the Company offers a free ‘Lite’ version, the pricing for paid version of this plugin starts at $49.50 per year per website.

• SEMrush – An all-in-one marketing toolkit that provides keyword research, site audit, and backlink analysis features.

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The key features of this plugin are – 

• Comprehensive features – The plugin has a host of features including keyword research, backlinks profile building, on-page SEO to improve website’s health, optimization your website for local searches and more.

• Competitor analysis – The plugin provides your detailed insight into the content strategy of your competitors to identify the keywords and content working for their business.

• Detailed analysis reports – The plugin provides detailed analytics reports helping you develop a customer targeted content strategy.

The Pro plan for this plugin starts at $139.95 per month and goes upto $499.95 per month for the Business version.

• Ahrefs – Ahrefs is a very popular SEO tool with extensive features such as keyword research, competitor analysis, and even offers educational resources to help users learn SEO strategies at their own pace.

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The key features that make it popular amongst users are – 

• The website explorer – The plugin provides in-depth insights into competitor websites including but not limited to organic traffic and backlink profiles.

• Keywords explorer and monitoring – This plugin will allow you to carry out extensive keyword research, including search volume, difficulty, and click potential of each keyword. It will also monitor the keyword rankings over time, allowing you to track their performance and customize your SEO strategy.

• Website analysis – The plugin will analyze website health by identifying different SEO issues like crawl errors and recommending actions to resolve the same quickly and efficiently.

• Backlink checker – The plugin displays the backlink profile of website to help in identifying new link-building business opportunities. It will also notify you about new backlinks. Additionally, it will show you websites that link to your competitors but not to your WooCommerce website.

• Batch analysis – The plugin allows you to compare different domains or URLs for quick insights into multiple websites at the same time.

The pricing for this plugin starts at $129 per month for Ahrefs Lite version and goes upto $449 per month for Ahrefs Advanced. However, you can save money by going for annual payment options.  

• Google Search Console – A free tool from Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in search results.

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The key features of this tool are detailed below – 

• Data optimization – The tool allows you to see your website’s impressions, clicks and the position on the Google Search.

• Google search results – You can make use of URL inspection feature to understand the index information of your pages from the Google Index.

• Issue identification – Google will automatically alert you about issues on your website through email. Fix the issues promptly and update it on Google.

The feature is free to use for all users.

SEO Performance – How to Monitor and Analyze Your SEO Strategy

WooCommerce SEO is not a one-time game. You will have to regularly monitor and analyze your SEO performance in order to identify what’s working and what needs to be worked upon. 

Here’s how can you monitor and analyse your SEO optimization results –

• Use Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates of your website. This data can help you identify what’s not working for your business and according change the marketing strategy.

• Track Keyword Rankings – Once you have identified and used the keywords across your website, regularly track their rankings using plugins like SEMrush and Ahrefs and make necessary changes as and when required.

• Study Backlinks Performance – Once you have deployed the backlink strategies we have discussed above, to make sure they help your business in obtaining high-quality connections, periodically review your backlink profile. Basis the results, remove spam or low-quality links that can hamper the Google search rankings of your website.

• Conduct Regular Site Audits – Carry our regular website wide audits to identify and fix existing or potential technical SEO issues. There are various plugins available in the market like Screaming Frog and SEMrush that help your with such website audits.

• Check Your Website Speed – A sluggish user interface will hurt your site’s SEO performance. Try using tools available in the market like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to check your website speed at regular intervals. These tools offer suggestions for additional enhancements as well as information into the speed performance of the website.

Conclusion

Optimizing your WooCommerce store for SEO is a continuous process that requires time, effort, and dedication. If you are not on-point with your SEO game, you are missing a lot of consumer base.

Remember SEO optimization is vast ocean with new additions and changes every day. You might not find success with your SEO success in one go. However, following the strategies outlined in this guide, you can definitely improve your search engine rankings, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately grow your business. 

You need to constantly upgrade yourself with the change in technology and user behaviour and modify your SEO optimization strategy to make your online business a success. 

Want to focus on your business and want someone to handle the SEO game of your business, reach out to Wisdmlabs expert team today.

Frequently Asked Questions

A. Why is keyword research important for WooCommerce SEO?

Keyword research will help you to understand the words or terms used by your potential customers to find your products. This information will help you to optimize the content strategy of your business.

B. How can I improve my ecommerce website’s loading speed?

Image optimization across platforms, using a content delivery network (CDN), and limiting the use of heavy scripts and plugins can make your website significantly faster to load.

C. How do I optimize my WooCommerce store for mobile?

You will have to make use of mobile responsive design for your website, optimize the images for mobile devices. Always test your website on various mobile devices to ensure the appearance of the website content is what you intended and offers a smooth experience that will be visiting your website.