WooCommerce SEO – How To Rank High – A Step-by-Step Guide

Are you interested in enhancing WooCommerce SEO but need help determining where to begin? In the real world, having a person spinning signs with the name and location of your store on them at every corner would be the equivalent of search engine optimization (SEO) for your eCommerce store.

You will be losing out on a lot of sales if your WooCommerce store has yet to be optimized for SEO.

This comprehensive WooCommerce SEO guide was written to assist you in enhancing your WooCommerce SEO and increasing your customer base. 

Let's go over the fundamentals before getting started.

WooCommerce: What is it?

An open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress was created by name of WooCommerce. Thanks to this, you can use the most powerful content management system (CMS) to manage an online store. You can easily create unique extensions thanks to the open-source nature of the software, which allows you to customize every aspect of your store.

The two questions most newcomers typically have before opening an online store are: How does WooCommerce stack up against Shopify, and is WooCommerce SEO-friendly?

Below is the response to the second query:

Is WooCommerce SEO Friendly?

WooCommerce is very SEO friendly and out of the box. It runs on top of WordPress, which is standard-compliant and good for SEO. However, you can use plugins and techniques to improve WooCommerce product SEO.

It is up to you to add products, product descriptions, themes, images, product pages, and other content to your store when you launch an online store with WooCommerce. Any extra content you include is yours for optimization.

WooCommerce SEO is a continuous process, so you'll need to keep up with it to see a steady increase in your search engine traffic and sales.

What do I need to deploy an effective WooCommerce SEO strategy properly?

Well, that’s where this WooCommerce SEO guide can help. We’ll review multiple essential SEO tips for your eCommerce store and make them easy to understand.

Ready? Let’s get started.

1. Perform The WordPress SEO Setup

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, so before making WooCommerce-specific SEO adjustments, you should improve your website's overall WordPress SEO setup.

For beginners, we have put together a comprehensive WordPress SEO guide. It is complete and offers advice on finding duplicate content using Google Search Console, creating URL structures that are search engine friendly, and other topics. Before continuing to step 2 of this article, please read the entire guide first.

However, if you're in a hurry, a WooCommerce SEO plugin is the most vital thing you require. We recommend installing and setting up the AIOSEO plugin on your website.

You can add XML sitemaps and set up appropriate SEO fields for your products with the aid of the AIOSEO plugin. On-page SEO analysis, social media integration, rich snippets schema markup, and other SEO features are also included.

You can proceed to step 2 of our WooCommerce SEO guide after setting up AIOSEO.

2. Write Product SEO Titles

Your WooCommerce products, like your blog posts, must be optimized for SEO.

Writing SEO-friendly product titles plays a vital role in WooCommerce product optimization.

Search engines use the titles of these products, which are displayed in the title bar of your browser, to identify search results. 

SEO title example

 If you had completed the previous step, the AIOSEO plugin would have been set up. All In One SEO(AIOSEO) is arguably the best WordPress SEO plugin that covers your WooCommerce products.

Start by editing a WooCommerce product and navigating to the AIOSEO Settings box at the bottom of the page.

Next, you can change the SEO title of the product by typing your title or by using the variables to have a title generated for you based on the details of the product formation.

Change product SEO title

The product title on your store may not precisely match the SEO title for that product in WooCommerce. Use keywords that you believe your customers will type into search engines to find the product.

Additionally, it would be best to make it appealing to users by making it exciting and catchy. However, it's crucial to avoid using deceptive or inaccurate titles that would mislead users and search engines because doing so could result in your WooCommerce website being penalized.

Let's look at an illustration of a title below.

Boring title: Women’s Leather Bag by Brandname

SEO Optimized Title: Bi-Fold Black Leather Bag for Women – High-Quality built for Durability

Long-tail keywords like bi-fold, black, and durability are all things people will search for when searching for "women's leather bag" and are mentioned in our SEO-optimized title.

People enter specific search terms when making purchases online rather than broad ones. You can be found and ranked higher than your rivals by using long-tail keywords in your WooCommerce product title.

3. Add Product SEO Descriptions

A box where you can enter your product's meta description is seen immediately beneath the title in AIOSEO.

Add product SEO description

On search engine results pages (SERPs), this description will show up below your product title even though it is not visible on your website. You must provide a compelling reason for users to view and click on your product with this description. To ensure that users click and view your product, you must use this description to offer a compelling reason for them to do so.

Remember to use the exact keywords in your meta description as you did in the SEO title of the product. Your chances of ranking high for those target keywords will increase.

4. Enhance the product slug

WordPress uses slugs, also known as permalinks, as the friendly name for a product in your URL. WooCommerce, by default, uses the title of your product as the slug. The default slugs, however, occasionally need more essential SEO keywords.

That can be modified in the SEO settings for your product. Make the slug shorter, and include your primary keyword there.

Changing product slug

For instance, we recommend using the slug bi-fold-brown-mens-leather-wallet-by-brandname for men's leather wallets.

5. Turn on Breadcrumbs

A clear path to the page you are on is defined by breadcrumbs, which makes them excellent for internal linking.

These breadcrumbs also appear in search results to give your site an extra advantage in rankings.

With the aid of the AIOSEO plugin, breadcrumbs can be enabled for your WooCommerce products.

Go to the General Settings in All in One SEO to enable breadcrumbs.

The breadcrumbs schema markup is automatically inserted into the code of your website. However, it would help if you turned on breadcrumbs by toggling the switch to display the breadcrumb navigation links on your website.

aioseo enable breadcrumbs

As a result, you can choose from a variety of breadcrumb display options for your website.

aioseo breadcrumb setting options

Use the "AIOSEO - Breadcrumbs" Gutenberg block, for instance. Add the AIOSEO - Breadcrumbs block to any page or post you want to display breadcrumb navigation.

aioseo breadcrumbs block

You probably already have breadcrumb functionality if you use one of these top WooCommerce themes.

6. Making Use of Product Categories and Tags Correctly

You can organize products in your online store using product categories and tags. Thanks to this, your customers will easily find the exact product they're looking for.

Search engines benefit similarly from categories and tags. WooCommerce has a page for each product category, and tags that are crawled and listed by search engines. 

Category pages appearing in search results

Due to the similarity of the products on these pages, their keyword density is higher. And they are, therefore, more likely to rank for those keywords.

Because they need to be more explicit about the differences between categories and tags, many beginners misuse them. The broad grouping of your products is what categories are for. If your store were a book, then categories would be the table of contents.

Men's, women's, accessories, jewelry, etc., are just a few categories that can exist in a clothing store. Categories are hierarchical so that you can add child categories to them.

Tags, on the other hand, are more precise keywords that describe a product's characteristics. For instance, tags for t-shirt products may include casual, summer wear, and other terms.

7. Fill in the Alt Text for Product Images

To quickly locate the products they're looking for, many customers switch to image search. Recently, the "View Image" button from Google's image search results was removed to assist website owners. This implies that users need to visit your website to view the image in context.

This pattern aids online retailers in attracting highly motivated customers to their websites.

Like web search, image SEO functions similarly. To assist users in finding the images they seek, Google uses artificial intelligence image recognition and other algorithms. 

The most crucial action you can take to increase traffic from Google image searches is ensuring all your website's images have alt tags.

Using the HTML attribute known as "alt text," website owners can accompany their images with some text. This text is intended to be shown if the browser cannot fetch an image.

A broken image showing alt text

When ranking results for an image, search engines consider the alt text. You can include text explaining this specific image and its meaning.

Adding alt text to product images

When you upload your product images to WooCommerce, you can give each one an alt text description. You can add alt text and edit the old product images in the Media library.

8. Boost SEO with Product Category Titles and Descriptions

WooCommerce has pages for each of its product categories. Similar products can be found on this page, increasing your intended keyword density. As a result, product category pages become more critical for WooCommerce SEO.

You can improve their optimization by including a title and description on the product category pages. In your WooCommerce store, AIOSEO enables you to customize each category's SEO titles and descriptions.

Click the Edit link next to a category on the Products » Categories page.

Edit a product category in WooCommerce

In the snippet preview, click the category title after scrolling down to AIOSEO Settings on the edit screen to enter your unique SEO title and description for the product category. AIOSEO will now display edit fields.

Edit product category title and description

9. Use Google Analytics to track WooCommerce customers.

Enabling customer tracking in WooCommerce with Google Analytics

Data is an essential component of an efficient SEO strategy. It would be best to find out who your users your website, what products they looked at, how they found your store, and what they are doing on your WooCommerce website.

You can track all of this data with the aid of Google Analytics, but configuring it correctly takes a lot of work.

For this reason, the most well-liked Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, MonsterInsights, was created.

You can use the eCommerce tracking feature already included in MonsterInsights Pro to quickly and easily enable WooCommerce-enhanced eCommerce tracking.

Making data-driven decisions about your WooCommerce store and confidently expanding your company is possible with the help of MonsterInsights and Google Analytics.

10. Boost the speed and functionality of your website 

Website speed is one of Google's most crucial ranking factors. This implies that faster websites have a higher chance of ranking than slower ones.

Slow websites are bad for business because they can cause harm to the user experience and cost you money.

A StrangeLoop case study found that a 1 second page delay load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions, an 11% reduction in page views, and a 16% reduction in customer satisfaction.

Website speed case study

Most frequently, web hosting is the leading cause of a slow WooCommerce store. If so, you should switch to a hosting company optimized for WooCommerce, such as SiteGround or Bluehost.

11. Enhance the security of WooCommerce 

Search engines highly value website security and safety. Google quickly flags unsafe websites with warnings to alert users to scams, malware, and phishing websites.

Harmful website warning in Google chrome

This could harm your brand's reputation and destroy your WooCommerce SEO rankings.

Hackers frequently attempt to steal data from unrelated websites using brute force attacks, malware injection, and other techniques. It would help if you made your WooCommerce store's security more stringent to avoid this.

To strengthen the security of WooCommerce, adhere to the detailed instructions in our guide to WordPress security.
I hope you have gained some insight from this article on enhancing WooCommerce SEO. To help you expand your business, check out our lists of the top live chat providers.