A Complete Guide to WooCommerce SEO in 2021

There is tough competition these days among brands seeking the attention of their target audience. If you wish to grow the traffic of your WooCommerce site, you will need to engage your audience and promote your product.

WooCommerce is WordPress’s customizable eCommerce platform, and WooCommerce SEO is what will help you attract your target group. It combines several techniques and strategies to improve the ranking of your store on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

SEO is essential for all businesses, especially when you are running a WooCommerce store. If you are just getting starting in the SEO game, keep reading the basics of WooCommerce SEO; otherwise, you can skip to our WooCommerce SEO strategies below. 

Importance of WooCommerce SEO 

If you are just starting your eCommerce journey, you may not have a sufficient budget to invest thousands of dollars in advertising. If this is the case, WooCommerce SEO can help you achieve popularity and traffic. Here are a few SEMrush stats to clarify just how vital an SEO strategy is: 

• eCommerce websites receive around 37.5 percent of traffic from search engines.
• More than 42 percent of people search on Google before making any buying decision.
• On average, 33 percent of the search engine’s traffic goes to the first result.

Is WooCommerce the Best Choice for SEO? 

The WooCommerce plugin comes with some integrated SEO features to help your online store grow immediately. You will also need a few techniques, plugins and add-ons to boost your products’ SEO performance. You can choose from many options, including products, themes, descriptions, images and other media when starting with WooCommerce SEO. It is an ongoing process, and you should work on it consistently to witness your store’s growth in the form of sales or site traffic. 

Our WooCommerce SEO Strategies

1. SEO-Friendly Themes

Your theme is the first thing that will attract an audience to your store, so you must choose themes wisely. It determines your online store’s overall layout and appearance and provides plenty of features for SEO. For example, your theme is suitable for ranking and affects website speed. 

Be sure to choose an SEO-friendly theme that is customizable to your needs – one that can improve your overall optimization and offers excellent features. 

Here’s what you need to look for in an SEO-friendly theme:

• Light theme: To ensure your website’s quick performance, choose a lightweight theme without any third-party plugins that can make your website sluggish. You can test themes through several plugins.
• Responsive design: Google prefers mobile-friendly websites. Keep that in mind for better SEO performance on search engines.

2. SEO-Friendly Plugins

If you are just starting up with WordPress, you may not know much about plugins. Plugins are software programs or extensions that add new features to your website, and they are also helpful for on-page SEO.  Along with optimizing your site, these plugins will improve your search ranks. You can optimize your eCommerce portal by installing SEO plugins. 

There are plenty of SEO plugins available to improve site elements like meta description, meta title, focus keywords, etc.  

3. Alt Text

Image alt text helps search engines identify images with the human-readable keyword. You can add your focus keyword to your website’s images if you are unable to load the file. You could also set an alt tag and a title when uploading a product image to your online store – it consists of the filename of an image. 

4. Work on Product pages

You need to arrange all the aspects of your product page to help search engines index them. You can optimize product title, URL, images, description, reviews, ratings and videos with some useful SEO plugins.

Here are the key sections of a product page:

a) SEO title: It is among the most critical aspects of the WooCommerce store. Crawlers use product titles to search the product, and these are the essential components of an SEO-friendly title:

• Unique title
• Accurate product and service description
• Between 55-60 characters long
• Contain a focus keyword
• The domain name must be used on the right side, always

b) Meta description: This is the second-most important factor after the SEO title, and should be unique for all products. The ideal length of the meta description to be shown on search results is 150-160 characters. You should also add around 3oo words for the product description, where you can include something interesting about your product. It should have secondary, with focus keywords repeated 2-3 times.

c) Product URL: A URL is significant for ranking and is a component of all online stores. Focus keywords must be part of your product URL. To add readability to your URL, use breadcrumbs. 

d) Product Category and Tags: Users can easily choose the right product with product tags and categories. For example, if you are looking for a red shirt of size L but there are thousands of shirts to choose from, what would you do? Of course, you will choose a nearby store. But if you can easily select categories, you might choose to shop online instead.

5. Smooth Site Navigation

Confusing and complicated site navigation can do more harm than good to your site. Your visitors won’t want to explore your website all day long. So, navigation must be simple and straightforward. Your customers should be able to find out what they want with ease.

Here’s what you can do for smooth navigation:

• Enable visitors to explore your eCommerce site easily by providing smooth flow.
• Have sensible and clear navigation labels to give an idea about the product.
• Avoid too many menus.
• Have a classy design.
• Use breadcrumbs.
• List subcategories.
• Use sitemaps.
• Mention discounts, sales and special offers.

6. To “www” Or Not?

You may not know about www and non-www websites if you have just started your research for WooCommerce. You might be wondering why websites are live as yourdomain.com while others are www.yourdomain.com. There is a bit of difference in terms of SEO.

If you enter the wrong version of the website, the host servers automatically take you to the right version. Choosing the best URL is the primary consideration for branding. You need to pick the domain in the backend for the site address URL and WordPress address URL. 

7. Permalinks

With WooCommerce, you can get your content linked to web addresses. The permalink is given, as each product URL is unchangeable and permanent. The format of your product and page is defined with these links. The WooCommerce store takes permalinks by default, with various special characters like numbers and a question mark (for example, http://yourdomain.com/?=123.)

Custom URLs can be set for the online store with WooCommerce, and permalinks structures can be changed. WooCommerce provides custom URL links to online stores. You have to replace the permalinks and set SEO-friendly and self-descriptive URLs for the products for ranking. 

8. Canonical Links

These HTML elements help avoid duplicate content problems in search engines. It allows search engines to choose the best version of pages, and only canonical pages are indexed. It is not easy to avoid duplication of pages when your site becomes popular. Suppose your product page has two versions with almost similar content, but they come from different sections. In this event, there will be a change in menus and background color. 

9. XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap helps Google navigate your website and crawl all its pages. It connects your site with search engines, enabling crawlers to instantly find all product pages. It is a technical part of a website as it helps Google index an eCommerce store. You have to submit an XML sitemap to Google as it is crucial for your eCommerce store to be found online. 

Crawlers scan each page of your website, but they often stop without focusing on interlinks. All the essential links and pages are listed in the sitemap so Google can easily search for them. It is also helpful to know the overall site structure.

10. Schema

Schema is a rich snippet or description that shows up in search results to help users gain insights about the pages. Google uses this tool to test structured data. It also plays a vital role in ranking a website by enabling search engines to determine whether the content is relevant to the search query.

The Takeaway 

There are different techniques and tools you should know about to optimize your site. SEO is quite a complicated process, especially if you are new in this field – but you don’t have to be an SEO expert. You could always rely on an SEO agency to improve the ranking of your online store. We hope these tips will be helpful in improving your site’s performance.