Imagine having someone standing on every corner of the world, spinning signs with the name of your store and directing traffic towards you. That’s what search engine optimization (SEO) does for your ecommerce store. SEO plays a huge role in ranking all websites in search results, including e-commerce sites. If you want to rank higher and make it easier for people to find your products in search engines, then you need to optimize your site on an SEO level .Getting your products to rank prominently at the top of search engine results will help you reach more people and generate more sales. Search engine optimization involves developing strong focus keywords that are used throughout your eCommerce site. These focus keywords should be included where they fit naturally and logically .
Focus keywords can easily be incorporated into things like meta descriptions, product pages, URLs, permalinks, image names, and alt text, in addition to the rest of your site content. But remember, use them only naturally.
In this article, we’re going to dive deep into the WooCommerce platform and get you to ranking # 1. We’ll talk about optimizing seo for woocommerce with 10 super helpful tips and discuss our picks for the best SEO plugins and themes.
Let us begin!
WooCommerce vs Shopify
WooCommerce , when combined with WordPress, creates a customizable and easy-to-use e-commerce platform. Common eCommerce features like checkout are simple and most features are included with the plugin. There are also a ton of useful WooCommerce plugins and tools that can help you increase your online store revenue.
Shopify is a comprehensive ecommerce platform. It is designed to be beginner friendly, so there is a limit to the customizations you can make.
To be clear, both Shopify and WooCommerce include everything you need to sell your products online. The difference is that WooCommerce offers a lot more customization for those looking for this kind of freedom.
WooCommerce is also quite a bit cheaper. The WooCommerce plugin itself is open source and freely available on WordPress, while Shopify’s plans start at $ 29 / month.
Of course, there are many things related to opening an online store that are not free; The domain name, SSL certificate, and WordPress hosting cost money. But, not having a continuous monthly fee definitely sets WooCommerce apart.
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Is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
The seo functionality for woocommerce is one area where the WooCommerce and Shopify plugin really differ.
Shopify comes with an SEO-ready site structure. This means that it is designed to help users locate their stores near the top of search results.
It automatically generates a sitemap and allows you to customize meta descriptions, title tags and URLs. You can also set alternative texts for file names and images.
What about WooCommerce? Is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
Short answer: yes, WooCommerce is SEO friendly.
The longer answer is that WooCommerce is built with SEO optimized code, but it doesn’t actually have a lot of SEO features.
Where WooCommerce really shines is in its integration with WordPress and all the plugins that are available.
With plugins like Yoast SEO , which we’ll talk about later, WooCommerce and WordPress can give you an even greater SEO boost than Shopify’s SEO features. You just have to be willing to work more on customization.
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How to do SEO for WooCommerce? Let’s see 10 tips
Previously we have mentioned that with woocommerce you can make many customizations for your online store, however our focus is to show you what are the settings you can do to improve SEO for woocommerce. Go for it.
Here are 10 SEO tips with WooCommerce to get you up in search results.
1- Always include a description of the product
Product descriptions are typically not long, but should be treated as bite-sized pieces of content. This means taking the time to make sure they are well designed and search engine friendly.
See the following product description for a bodyfit t-shirt. They use keywords at all times, but the description itself is engaging and fun content.
Search engines use product descriptions like any other content on your site. They contain vital information about your product page and the keywords to rank for it.
You can use manufacturer’s product descriptions, but your search results rank better if you type your own.
When search engines have to decide which block of the same content is the original, they are not always accurate. It is best to write your own product descriptions as you would the rest of the content on your site.
2- Optimize page titles
Page titles should be descriptive enough to tell search engines and search engines what your page is about. For most ecommerce sites, you will have category pages and product pages.
Category pages not only help shoppers find the products they are looking for, they also prevent individual product pages from competing with each other in search engine results.
You can optimize category pages to rank for a broad term and use product pages to rank specific terms. For example, a category might be “Handbags and Wallets”, with product pages listing the specific bag model (“Sequined Fanny Pack”).
Category page
Product page
The page title and the SEO title are the same most of the time. You can modify your SEO title to get a better search ranking with a tool like Yoast SEO.
You should use keywords in your page title and SEO title, but remember that content is people first. Don’t throw readability out the window to squeeze in more keywords. This will definitely hurt your site and your business in the long run.
3- Enable breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb links appear at the top of product pages and help visitors easily return to previous category or landing pages. They show visitors where they are and where they have been.
Breadcrumbs are not only useful to visitors, but are also used by Google to determine how your site is structured and how it appears in search results.
WooCommerce includes breadcrumbs that are useful as is, but to take full advantage of the breadcrumb SEO capabilities, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO.
We will talk more about the Yoast SEO plugin in our best SEO plugins section below.
We’ve already covered breadcrumbs, but there are other ways to ensure that visitors don’t get lost or frustrated on your eCommerce site.
Clean and simple site navigation can have a big impact on your bounce rates and the time you spend on the site. If visitors spend more time on your site, your site will likely rank higher in search results.
You can improve your site navigation by keeping your main navigation easy to follow. Google will crawl every page on your site, but visitors definitely won’t.
Your main navigation should only include links to the pages most important to your site users. Other links can go in the footer of your site.
Since Google uses search spiders to automatically review and index search results, if a page on your site isn’t linked somewhere, Google can’t find it. A perfect solution to this problem is to add links to the footer of your site. This tells Google which pages are important, as you are linking to them in the footer of each page.
Also, your visitors will be able to access all the important parts of your site without too complicated a main navigation menu.
5- Keep URLs short and descriptive
For those of you using WooCommerce and WordPress, go ahead and enable WordPress permalinks to make sure your URLs are accessible to both visitors and search engines. To do this, go to Settings »Permalinks and choose a URL structure.
Permalinks allow you to use keywords in your URLs instead of Product IDs. It may seem like a small thing, but it makes a big difference in how well visitors can navigate your site.
If you are not using permalinks with WooCommerce, your URLs will default to Product IDs: yourdomain.com/?product=111
With permalinks, the default will look like this: yourdomain.com/product/product-name
6- Write your own Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions don’t actually help your SEO directly, but they can go a long way in improving your click-through rates. They appear under the title of a search results entry and describe the content. Meta descriptions give you another way to entice users to click.
Google sometimes uses meta descriptions of a page to generate a snippet of search results. Because of this, Google recommends that each page on your site have its own unique meta description. You can edit the meta descriptions using the Yoast plugin.
There is no fixed length for meta descriptions; Google says that the snippets that contain the meta descriptions are dynamically generated by their systems. That said, the average length of snippets shown in recent desktop search results is around 160 characters.
If you change all your meta descriptions, there’s no need to rush. Remember that snippets are dynamically generated, so it is not a guarantee that your meta descriptions will show up in search results. However, in the future, consider best practice to optimize your meta descriptions and make them unique for each page. The more useful these descriptions are, the more likely they are to appear in search results.
Notice the difference between these search results. The first uses text from the post in the results. The second uses the meta description. Which page would you click on? Let’s see:
Neither snippet is terrible, but the second includes an updated meta description promoting both a sale and free shipping. We would definitely click on the second option.
7- Add alternative text to images
Adding alt text to images is useful in many ways. First, it makes your site accessible to those who use page readers to navigate. Secondly, alt text can boost SEO.
If for some reason your image does not display, alt text will.
You should use clear and concise alt text that gives a good description of the image. Alt text is ideal for keyword placement, but remember that keywords should always make sense and flow naturally.
Here are the best practices for image alt text straight from Google:
8- Avoid and consolidate duplicate content
Duplicate content is a deceptive little beast. If you have pages on your site that are very similar to other content on the web, Google could remove your content from its ranking.
You may need to be careful of duplicate content if:
- Use the same content in multiple areas of your site
- Post or share press releases regularly
- You have multiple websites with similar content
The easiest way to make sure your content ranks high is to write and post original content. But what can you do with the content that already exists?
First, you need to find out if it duplicates content. You can search the content manually (not recommended if you have a lot of content) or use a Web Funnel recommended tool like SEMrush.
Structure duplicate content
If you have two or more URLs with identical content, keep the page that has the most internal links, the highest ranked, and has had the most organic traffic. Then redirect the other pages to the page you are keeping. WordPress has several plugins to help create redirects. The premium version of Yoast also has this functionality.
Redirects become vital if you are moving from one ecommerce platform to another. Moving from Shopify to WooCommerce (or the other way around) will likely result in changes to the URL structures. If you want to keep your page ranking from Shopify URLs, you will need to redirect them to the new WooCommerce URLs instead of just replacing them.
Sometimes you may find pages that have similar, but not identical content, and you want to keep both pages. In this case, a redirect will not work for you. Instead, you can use canonical links to tell search engines where to find true content by including this tag in the header of your duplicate content:
<link rel = ”canonical” href = ”https://myoriginalcontent.com”>
Both redirects and canonical links will work for duplicates on multiple domains you own.
9- Take Advantage of the Best SEO Plugins for WooCommerce
WooCommerce comes with thousands of extensions and plugins that you can use to grow your business. With so many plugins available, it can be overwhelming to find the best ones to help you with SEO for your WooCommerce site.
Luckily for you, we enjoy doing this kind of research. Here are the Web Funnels picks of the best SEO plugins for WooCommerce.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins out there. We use it on all of our sites and we always recommend it.
With Yoast SEO you can choose a focus keyword for each page on your site. Once you’ve selected your focus keyword, Yoast SEO gives you suggestions on how to best use it on the page for great results.
Using the right keywords is important to attracting the right visitors and converting leads to customers. Yoast SEO will help you use the right keywords effectively.
Broken link checker
Yes, 404 errors can be funny sometimes. No, they shouldn’t be a regular thing.
The Broken Link Checker Plugin can help you find broken links so you don’t end up with a high bounce rate from rampant 404 error pages.
This plugin consumes too many resources to leave it installed and active all the time, so we recommend installing and activating it when you are going to use it. Visiting your site twice a year will keep everything up to date.
MonsterInsights
If you use Google Analytics to track data like site visitors and top keywords, you will love the MonsterInsights plugin .
MonsterInsights brings you the power of Google Analytics right from your WordPress admin area. You can monitor traffic spikes and potential issues in real time to maximize potential revenue for each customer.
You can also run amazing reports for store metrics. Check out this great eCommerce report from MonsterInsights:
If you really want your WooCommerce sales to skyrocket , check out TrustPulse . It may not do much for SEO, but it will work wonders for social proof. With TrustPulse, you can take advantage of real-time page activity to instantly increase trust, conversions and sales by up to 15%.
10- Use themes optimized for search engines
WordPress is the world’s most search engine friendly website builder. To take full advantage of the existing SEO functionality in WordPress, make sure your WooCommerce site uses a theme built for SEO.
These are some of the best SEO themes for WooCommerce.
Academy Pro
As its name suggests, Academy Pro is aimed at websites that sell online courses.
This theme is ecommerce ready and includes full WooCommerce support. It has easy setup, custom widgets, and customizable theme options.
Creative
Creative is super customizable. Includes 7 skins, 3 layout layouts, and various header styles.
This theme is WooCommerce ready and includes tons of perks to extend the theme features: slider, live chat plugin, portfolio and testimonial sections, sidebars, custom widgets, and social media integration. And something else.
