WooCommerce SEO: Best Practices for Optimizing Stores

According to Insider Intelligence, the e-commerce industry had over $5 trillion in revenue in 2022. By the end of 2023, it’s estimated to rake in $6.3 trillion. If you’re ready to take a good share of this revenue, scaling your e-commerce website is paramount. 

The first step to making your online business profitable is to optimize your e-commerce site for increased visibility and higher ranking on Google — a process called search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) appears very technical for many online store owners. But it doesn’t have to be. In this guide to optimizing WooCommerce websites, you’ll learn all you need about SEO for WooCommerce to rank higher on Google. 

What Is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin designed for WordPress-built websites. When you add WooCommerce to WordPress, you can transform the WordPress site into a WooCommerce site with improved functionality. 

A WooCommerce website differs from a typical WordPress site due to advanced features like online store creation, product management, shopping carts, shipping options, payment integration, coupon and discount management, etc. WooCommerce is an e-commerce store with blogging features.

With the WooCommerce plugin, you can turn a regular site into a fully functioning e-commerce store with all the necessary features. And it’s no wonder WooCommerce powers 39% of all online stores globally.

Whether you sell physical products, digital products, subscription services, event tickets, or offer your services virtually, you can use WooCommerce to sell almost any kind of product. 

Creating an e-commerce store is just the beginning. Ranking higher than thousands of other online stores is the challenging part. But with a solid optimization strategy, your WooCommerce website will get better SEO performance quickly.

Why Is WooCommerce a Good Option for SEO?

There are several online store builders, but when it comes to what matters — being visible and accessible to customers, WooCommerce stands out as the best. 

Because it’s integrated with WordPress, the best website builder for good SEO performance, WooCommerce websites tend to perform better than the alternatives.

When you keep to the best SEO practices and use the tools WooCommerce provides, you can maximize your chances of attracting customers and gaining more sales.

Some of the features and tools WooCommerce provides to help you improve your website’s ranking in search engines are:

SEO-Friendly URLs

WooCommerce generates clean and customizable URLs for your product and category pages through permalink settings and custom slugs. This makes it easier for search engines to understand your site’s structure and use their bots to crawl and index your pages.

Meta Title and Meta Descriptions

Using descriptive keywords, you can customize the title and meta descriptions of your product pages and categories. For example, rather than use a phrase like buy men’s shoes, integrate more details with phrasing like men’s athletic green shoes and add any other essential detail as you deem fit. Using descriptive and keyword-rich titles and descriptions can help your products rank better in search results.

Schema Markup

WooCommerce automatically includes schema markup for products. This makes it easier for search engines to understand and display relevant information about your products in search results. You’ll learn more about schema markup later in the article,

Mobile Responsiveness

Most WooCommerce-developed themes are mobile-responsive. This is important because mobile responsiveness signals to search engines that your website is accessible, which increases user experience. User experience, in turn, reduces bounce rates, increasing SEO results in the long term.

XML Sitemaps

WooCommerce generates XML sitemaps automatically. XML sitemap is a file that lists essential pages on your website so the search engine bot finds it easily and indexes it on Google (or any other search engine). Once indexed, search engines can include your website pages in search results.

Canonical URLs

WooCommerce includes canonical tags by default to help prevent duplicate content issues, which confuses search engines, and negatively impact your website SEO. These tags work by highlighting the preferred page for search engines to index. More about this later in the article.

Social Media Integration

WooCommerce supports social media sharing with integration, like social sharing buttons. These can help improve your SEO performance by increasing your site’s visibility and driving traffic.

Some of these features work automatically, others you have to customize. In the next section, we’ll delve into how to optimize your WooCommerce website.

How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Website

Once you know how to set up WooCommerce for your online business, the next phase is to implement WooCommerce SEO. Here’s a comprehensive guide to optimize your WooCommerce website for SEO.

Understand Your Customer

Before you work on making your product site rank on Google, be clear on the kind of customers you want to attract. This is the basis of your SEO strategy. Understanding your buyer persona is important to defining the phrases you use in your product description, keyword analysis, and other SEO processes.

Your buyer persona is a description of your ideal customer. To create a buyer persona, find the following details about your ideal target customer.

• Age range
• Location
• Spending power and patterns
• Income level
• Education

Next, answer the following questions to streamline your ideal customer profile (ICP).

• What is the primary purpose of your product? Why would they buy it?
• Where would they buy your product?  
• In what ways would they use your product?
• How does your product enhance their life or solve challenges?
• How often would they buy it? 
• Why would they consider not buying it?
• Who would consider buying it?

With a buyer persona in mind, you can create informative blog posts and social media content that targets your ICPs. By knowing where your ideal customers educate themselves about the industry online, you can work on getting backlinks from such sites to direct their audience to your site.

For example, if you’re in the fashion business, a backlink from Vogue will boost your credibility and direct valuable traffic to your site. Some of these visitors may want to buy from you, and a good shopping experience will make them loyal customers in the long term.

Do Keyword Research

Keywords are the search queries users enter into search engines to get information about a product, find an online store, or purchase an item. Search engines examine these queries and scout the web to find the most relevant answers to display to the user. 

Your goal is to know the keywords your target customers use to find your products and incorporate those keywords into your product site. Keyword analysis is simple and easy to do, especially with premium keyword research tools. 

Some popular keyword research tools are Keyword Tool, Semrush, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, and Moz Keyword Explorer. To do keyword research, start with the primary keyword of your product. 

Assuming you sell skincare products, your primary keyword is “skincare.”  As seen in the Semrush keyword research image below, skincare yielded some interesting insights.

By typing “skincare” into the search box, the keyword analyzer pulls insights about that keyword, telling you the search volume, keyword difficulty, latest trend, and competitor usage, including the top sites ranking for that keyword.

You can use long-tail keywords like ‘skincare products for children’ or ‘skincare products for oily skin’ to target a segment of customers your product is perfect for. Compile relevant keywords into a list that you can refer to easily when writing your titles, meta descriptions, blog content, and product descriptions.

Optimize Your Website Pages

Your WooCommerce website has different website pages. Your online store comes with a homepage; it’s the front page of your store and the first page a visitor sees on entering your website. Next are the category pages detailing the categories of items you sell and product pages with information about individual products. 

Others include the blog page, where you create helpful content around your product for your customers, and the About Us page- to inform your website visitors about your business. 

Here are some tips to optimize your WooCommerce website pages for SEO.

• Create unique and descriptive title tags for each page using carefully sought-out keywords. The example below shows the first e-commerce site ranking for the keyword “skincare” on Google. The title is underlined in red.

• Craft attractive and persuasive meta descriptions that encourage clicks and include keywords. From the example above, the meta description is underlined in yellow, focusing on the benefits customers can get from their products. Notice how the store includes important skincare keywords in the description. These are skin care, cleanses, treats, moisturizes, results-driven….
• Use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) with solid keywords to structure your content logically. 
• Don’t over-optimize. Insert keywords naturally to create high-quality, informative, and engaging content.
• Optimize images with descriptive and SEO-focused file names and alt text.
• Promote your website’s architecture and ranking by linking one page to other relevant pages. This is called internal link building, and it’ll increase user experience (because they can go from A to B quickly) and increase page views for linked pages. 

Improve Your Website’s Technical SEO

Because it is built on the WordPress platform, WooCommerce already has excellent technical search engine optimization plugins and documentation. But your actions can reduce or improve how well search engines rank your site. 

E-commerce websites that load slowly or lack a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate usually rank lower in search engines. Why? Slow page speed increases bounce rate, which means the website will lose traffic. Also, lacking an SSL certificate means the site isn’t secured, which doesn’t inspire trust. 

Although WooCommerce itself doesn’t directly control site speed, you can adjust some settings to improve the performance of your website.

For example, you can optimize your images using relevant plugins, add alt text, and use HTTPS to comply with website content regulations. Further, using a hosting service optimized for speed and exploring caching mechanisms that store less data can make your site load faster. 

Finally, ensure you create and submit an XML sitemap to Google to allow the bots to crawl and index your site.

Add Backlinks to Build Your Domain Authority

Backlinks are links to your ecommerce website from higher-domain websites. Backlinks signal to Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy. See it as a way for top-ranking sites to recommend your website to Google.

You can get backlinks through guest posting, outreach, partnerships, and creating shareable content. Guest posting, for example, offers the opportunity to feature in an industry blog, and you can add a link to either your blog post or product page. If you’re in the fashion industry, it’s like getting featured on Vogue.

On the other hand, creating shareable content is about producing engaging blog posts, social media videos, and infographics. Also, always add links to your online store when you post your business content on social media. These help you gain valuable clicks and rank online.

Use SEO Analytic Tools to Monitor Your Website’s Performance

Once you’ve set up your website pages using the SEO practices above, keep a tab on how your website performs over time using SEO analytics tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. With these tools, you can track keyword rankings, traffic, click-through rates, and conversions.

Read more on how to improve website visibility.

What Are the Problems with WooCommerce SEO?

WooCommerce is excellent for building online stores, but like most e-commerce site builders, it has a few SEO issues. 

First, WooCommerce is known for duplicating content for product categories and other website pages. Duplicate pages make your website less trusted, making search engines lower its rank. Avoid using the same title, description, and keywords for multiple pages to prevent duplicate content. Also, using the same content in the body of multiple pages amounts to duplicate content, so ensure each page has unique content.

However, if you have URLs with different endings that are supposed to link to the same page, e.g. menshoe/brown, menshoe/black, menshoe/blue, you can use canonical tags to fix the URLs so you don’t confuse the bots that will index these pages. You can specify the pages you want a URL or multiple URLs to go to by following Google’s best practices here.

Another challenge with WooCommerce SEO is that search engines may not index all your product pages correctly. This may be due to technical issues like broken links, bad plugins, 404 errors, slow loading times, security issues, or lack of a sitemap.

Here are some tips to fix these technical errors:

• Use Google Console to see if any pages return a 404 error, or use a plugin like Broken Link Checker to scan your website for broken links and remove them.
• If you can’t fix the broken links, redirect your website visitors to other pages using a 301 redirect link that tells the search engines that the old page has been moved to a new location.
• Scan for any bad plugins and deactivate them.
• To improve your website’s speed, compress your images to reduce the size and add a caching plugin like WP Super Cache to improve loading time.
• Secure your e-commerce site from malware, unauthorized access, and brute force attacks using a security plugin like All In One WordPress Security. 

WooCommerce SEO Tips to Improve Rankings

Aside from the steps on optimizing your WooCommerce website, here are additional tips to improve your search engine ranking. 

Use a user-friendly WooCommerce theme.

When deciding your theme, ensure it was built for use on WooCommerce websites. This will help showcase your product well, fit into the website architecture, make the appearance coherent, and make it easy to tweak basic site layouts.

Start an e-commerce blog and ensure the whole site is indexable.

Starting a blog for your e-commerce site will help you gain more Expertise – Experience – Authority – and Trustworthiness (EEAT) points. However, ensure that your blog pages are indexed so your SEO efforts don’t go unacknowledged by the search engine.

Enable breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs are a navigation trail that shows users where they are on a website. You’ll find them on the last line of a front-page result, as shown above the green line in the image below.

You’ll also find them displayed at the top of the page, below the header, illustrated above the green line in the image below. Breadcrumbs are made up of links that show the hierarchy of the website pages, starting with the homepage and ending with the current page. 

Keep your website up-to-date.

Google loves fresh content, so keeping your WooCommerce website current is important. This means adding new products, updating product descriptions, and writing new blog posts.

Make your URLs User-Friendly 

Customize your WooCommerce permalink structure to create clean and user-friendly URLs. Avoid URLs with:

• Long and complex words
• Non-descriptive nature
• Special characters and symbols
• Session IDs
• Capitalization Variations
• Numbers only
• Underscores
• Irrelevant keywords

Keep your URLs short and simple, and use relevant keywords when possible.

Why Hire an Agency with WooCommerce SEO Experience?

Optimizing your online store using WooCommerce SEO can be tedious work. It requires attention to detail, implementing best practices, patience, and who’s better to do it than an agency with years of experience? 

Hiring a digital marketing agency with WooCommerce SEO experience can help you identify problems you’re not seeing, uncover the right solutions, and set your website up for success. We at HigherVisibility have helped e-commerce stores sell more products with SEO. Agencies like ours have tried and tested different strategies to scale a WooCommerce site, and our years of experience provide the necessary knowledge to ease your concerns.

Reach out today and request a free custom WooCommerce SEO strategy!