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15 WooCommerce SEO Tips To Get Traffic

Looking for WooCommerce SEO tips? You’re in the right place.

Six months after launching my WooCommerce store. I got little traffic and my store ranked on pages 2, 3, or 4 of Google. The old saying goes you can hide a dead body on page 2 of Goggle.

I realized my store was not optimized for SEO, so I saw little to no traffic with few conversions.

I had to act fast or lose my business. Following these 15 WooCommerce SEO tips helped rank my site to page #1. There was no overnight success, but sustainable growth occured over time as I implemented these.

Contents

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free plugin that allows you to create an e-commerce store using WordPress. It permits you to take advantage of a powerful content management system and use it to run your online store.

By virtue of it being open-source, it makes it easy to customize your store. Did I mention Woocommerce is owned by the WordPress.

Does WooCommerce Help With SEO?

Yes. WooCommerce helps with SEO. Being a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce has some built-in SEO features that assist in optimizing ecommerce websites for better search engine ranking.

However, despite being built to use codes for SEO optimization. It offers limited SEO features on its own. Therefore, it works best if paired together with other WordPress SEO plugins such as SEOpress pro

Additionally, it’s necessary for the store owners to implement additional SEO strategies aimed at making their site rank better begin with finding better keywords, write engaging content, better site structure, add categories, tags, link building, and many more.

15 Woocommerce SEO Tips to Gain Traffic

1. Add WordPress SEO setup

Since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin the first most important step is to ensure proper SEO setup on WordPress. This requires you to customize your whole WordPress site environment before proceeding to make WooCommerce SEO specific changes.

To do this you will need to install our favorite SEO plugin. No it is not Yoast, but one that has more features.

SeoPress Pro is among the best plugin for WordPress. With its features, you will be able to add a sitemap as well as set up appropriate fields for your ecommerce products.

Installing and setting up this SEO plugin allows you to easily add and optimize metadata and keywords on the pages of your site.

These are useful tools that help to show what you need to improve for your website to be easy to find.

It also rates your SEO performance giving it a score of either good, bad, or needs improvement.

2. Optimize Your Product Title

Your product titles on WooCommerce need to be optimized for the search engine as the title is the first thing that search engine crawls. As such, give utmost forethought to what you put in the title tag of each product page.

Make sure you come up with SEO-friendly titles that are catchy, attractive, and match customer search intent.

Start by researching and identifying strong keywords for each product based on its features, type, functions, or even niche.

Use longtail keywords that rank higher than competitors and drive the right traffic to your website. Avoid keywords that are too general or misleading.

The chosen keywords must be used strategically in product titles.

3. Add SEO Meta Description

After you’ve come up with the title, you will need to provide a customized meta description for each of your products. The SEO plugin that you used will help you in this by providing a meta description box that you need to fill in.

This description will appear below your product title. As this will act as your selling line, ensure that it’s powerful enough to bring forth clicks and views for your products.

You need to ensure that your meta description is as accurate and as detailed as possible. Also, avoid content duplication as this will impact negatively on your ranking. Moreover, using the same keywords that you used in the product title will give you a higher ranking.

You only have 160 characters to write meta descriptions. Therefore ensure you describe your product as clear as possible.

4. Add and Optimize Product Images

Images are of importance when it comes to ecommerce stores. After all, nobody wants to buy something they have not seen. High-quality product images will help boost your conversion rates.

The best practice is to add several photos for each item as this will give potential customers a thorough picture of what you are offering. You can engage professional photographers for better images with the right color and lighting.

But wait, Is uploading high-quality photos enough? Absolutely not! The images need to be optimized for SEO. Failure to optimize the images may slow down your website’s loading speed and ruin the chances of boosting your site’s rank.

Statistics indicate that a seconds delay in time taken to load your homepage results in a fall in conversion rates by a whopping 7%. Image optimization involves reducing the size of the photos without any compromise on the quality and optimizing the images for specific targeted keywords.

5. Add Alt Text For Images

Most customers prefer to use image search to quickly find the products that they are seeking. This requires them to visit your website to view the images. Adding an Alt text to each image will help drive highly motivated clients to your site.

Alt-text is a feature that allows you to add some text with images of your products. This text is displayed whenever a browser is unable to fetch an image. Seopress allows you to automatically add Alt text to images using the file name.

They also help describe images to people with visual impairment and can’t see the images.

6. Optimize Product URL

Failure to place links to your products pages on your site makes it difficult for clients to find them. WordPress allows for the modification of permalinks of a product page. Ensure you adjust the permalinks to reflect the simplest organization possible.

Make sure the product links are found on your homepage and other relevant to facilitate easy landing by visitors to your product pages. Search engines will also be able to find them with a lot of ease.

Avoid long, illogical and complicated URLs. Be keen also not to use keywords repeatedly and ensure that product permalinks are accurately configured.

You will need to use unique identifiers for creating URLs for each product while using WooCommerce and WordPress SEO plugins to avoid conflict.

Nothing is more irritating than a broken link, right? Avoid them by keeping tabs on all your links.

7. Add Proper Product Categories And Tags

You would love to have all your products easily found by your customers, right? Well, if your store is offering a single or just a few products, it’s not hard for customers to locate the specific product they are interested in purchasing. However, if you have numerous products, it becomes hectic for them. You will need to ensure proper product organization.

Use categories and tags to help you organize your products and make it easier for potential customers to find their intended product. While categories put your products in broad groups, tags on the other hand provide specific keywords that are used to describe the product features.

It’s important to ensure that each product category and tags have its own page for easier indexing by search engines. Placing similar products on the same page puts extra weight on the keyword and increases the likelihood of them ranking for those keywords. Isn’t that what you want?

The good thing is, WordPress comes with an easy to use built-in categories and tags feature which you can utilize to organize your products.

8. Make Use of Rich Snippets

Looking for a way to improve the CRT (Click through rate) for your site? Rich snippets will do that for you.

Making use of rich snippets promotes the appearance of search engine listings and increases the CRT. This essentially means you get more people clicking on your site without any changes to your ranking.

The purpose of rich snippets is to add extra HTML to your pages which provides comprehensive details about your page to search engines.

Take advantage of the readily available rich snippets especially for WooCommerce sites. WooCommerce also offers some extensions which you can use with plugins to add schema markup to your site.

9. Enable SEO – Friendly Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are of great significance to WooCommerce stores as they assist users to explore product categories for similar kinds of items. These breadcrumbs are acknowledged by search engines to improve understanding of a website structure.

But, what are breadcrumbs really?

These are navigational aids that assist individuals to understand exactly where they are on your site. They aid internal linking by clearly defining a path or a trail to the page you are on. They equally help Google understand how your site is organized.

WooCommerce breadcrumbs are enabled by default. You however need to optimize them by changing the theme or by using a custom plugin.

I recommend the use of Seopress breadcrumbs as they meet the required accessibility standards. And also ensures that your breadcrumbs are in correspondence with your site’s theme.

10. Enable SEO Tracking

Data is an integral part of an effective SEO strategy. Tracking is crucial as there is no SEO without tracking.

Tracking will provide important information regarding your customers and help identify the number of visitors to your site who actually turn into paid customers. You will need demographic information about your site’s visitors, how they found your store, what products they looked at, what they do on your store, among others.

Installing and enabling Google Analytics will help you track this information. Besides helping you assess the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, tracking will also help watch on key performance indicators.

Among the most important key indicators captured by Google Analytics include

Volume in terms of search engine’s result on the number of visits to the website
Quality as measured by Click-through rate and Bounce rates
Value in terms of sales conversion rates
Ranking in terms of the number and position of keywords

Google Analytics integrates well with WordPress which also works well with WooCommerce. Read this comprehensive guide on how to enable tracking with Google Analytics on WooCommerce.

11. Improve Website Speed Performance

Website speed performance is paramount for an online store. Website speed is among the key Google ranking factors.

Slow speed leads to poor customer experiences and consequently reduced customer satisfaction which negatively impacts your business.

Did you know that a delay in a page’s load time by a single second leads to a reduction in conversions by 7%, page views by 11%, and customer satisfaction by 16%? Pretty bad for your business, don’t you agree?

Well, this is what was reported by a StrangeLoop case study.

Website speed optimization starts with the choice of a quality web host. You will need a WooCommerce specific host to achieve this. A host that is optimized for WooCommerce will improve your site’s performance and speed translating to higher ranking and traffic.

12. Organize Your Store Structure

The site structure is important for making it easier for search engine bots to crawl your pages.

Store structure involves organizing and laying out your site’s contents to make them easily accessible.

Having a simple and easily navigable structure will reduce bounce rates and improves ranking.

To improve your store structure ensure that:

Each page on your site is accessible in not more than 4 clicks
Your product page and content are regularly inter-linked
You create product categories if you offer a diverse range of products with each category on its own page
You avoid confusing your viewers with numerous drop-down options

13. Maximize Your Site Security

Search engines have a thing for secure websites. Failure to secure your site will not only ruin your WooCommerce SEO rankings but also impact negatively on your brand’s reputation.

It’s, therefore, crucial to ensure the security of your site as it stores sensitive personal information about customers and their purchases.

You can make use of firewalls, security checks, backups, server configurations, and daily updates to tighten your WooCommerce store safe and keep hackers at bay. In addition, you can add SSL certificates that will put confidence in your customers that your site is safe.

Also use SEO security to identify any weakness in your website’s security, to solve those issues, and for monitoring purposes.

14. Make Your Store Mobile-Friendly

These are modern times characterized by the massive use of mobile phones. Having a mobile-friendly site is a necessity these days. You don’t want your online store to miss this lucrative opportunity, do you?

According to statistics recorded, the number of mobile users worldwide in the year 2020 was expected to go up to 2.87 billion users in 2020 from 2.1 billion in 2016. Wow, those are massive numbers I must say.

With these numbers, you can’t overlook the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. Check if your site is mobile friendly using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

Since most of the google searches are performed on mobile devices (above 60%), you need to design your site with mobile phone users in mind. Think about improving the mobile user experience by using a responsive theme that adapts all pages to the size of the screens of users.

Just remember that positive user experience indicators will boost your rankings. Failure to mobile-optimize your store greatly limits your ability to reach a large audience.

15. Write Engaging Content

I need to emphasize that content is king in the online business. But you already know that, don’t you? Content, not just any content but quality content that adds value to your readers can get you that much-desired traffic.

Despite it not being a necessity for a WooCommerce store, a blog can be beneficial in improving your ranks. You can generate links and social media shares that drive sales by creating and sharing blog posts.

Consider coming up with in-depth case studies, series of how-to posts, detailed product descriptions and product launches to drive sales. To make it more effective, build an email list to help you share exclusive content via email. You can also post your content consistently to different social media platforms.

Final Thoughts

With WooCommerce and WordPress, setting up an e-commerce store is pretty simple. However, you will need to put a lot of effort to make it a success. You need to put in and implement several SEO strategies to help rank high in search engines.

It’s important to remember that SEO is a continuous process and absolutely necessary if you want to take your store to the next level.

There you have it all. Follow these 15 Woocommerce SEO tips to optimize your site to rank on search engines.

What are you waiting for? If you are in the Raleigh area near Wake Forest Contact us for your marketing needs