One of SEO’s best features is that it doesn’t require purchasing advertising space. Your website and your intended audience can be reached by using SEO. It makes it possible for the audience to have a significant online presence, which ultimately helps to achieve the marketing objectives.
When a potential audience actively searches for online resources during the initial stages of their research, SEO increases your site’s credibility and dependability in their eyes. It acts as a support for the website and makes sure to keep you one step ahead of your current rivals.
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Some SEO Stats 2022
- With 91.94 percent of the market, Google is followed by Yahoo! and Bing.
- 75 percent of users never scroll down to the second page of search results.
- For generating sales, 70% of online marketers prefer SEO to PPC.
- Search engines are the starting point of 68% of online activities.
- Online shopping is preferred by 63% of people.
- SEO and organic traffic produce more leads than any other marketing initiative, according to 61% of B2B marketers.
- The only way to triumph in the never-ending race to appear on search engine’s first page is through your company’s uniqueness.
Basics of WooCommerce SEO
WooCommerce SEO and its significance have been covered. Therefore, let’s proceed with:
Prioritizing search engine optimization is essential when managing a WooCommerce store (SEO). An effective WooCommerce SEO strategy can increase your online presence and make it simpler for customers to find and use your store.
Your best marketing resource is, in many ways, an online store that is optimized for SEO. The process of optimizing your online WooCommerce store to rank higher in search engine results pages are known as WooCommerce SEO (SERPs). More organic traffic and sales are correlated with higher rankings. WooCommerce SEO generally aims to increase the visibility of your website in organic search results through a variety of optimization techniques.
The more opportunities you have to turn visitors into paying customers, the more likely it is that they will find your website. You’ll probably spend less on other marketing strategies, like paid social media advertising, if you can improve your SEO.
WooCommerce already has a great deal of SEO-friendly features. It has options and built-in features for optimizing your online store for higher search engine rankings:
For instance, you can easily make sitemaps and robots.txt files, as well as add title tags and meta descriptions to your products. Additionally, WooCommerce is compatible with many well-known SEO plugins and tools, like Yoast SEO, that can make optimization even simpler:
12 Ways to Boost Your WooCommerce SEO
1) Pick an SEO Friendly Theme
One of your store’s most alluring features that draw customers in is its theme. You should therefore be careful when selecting themes for your WooCommerce store. It determines how your store will look and be organized. It also gives your online store a number of new features that are essential for WooCommerce SEO.
For instance, the theme that you are using can impact the speed of your site. Additionally, it helps your store’s ranking. Therefore, keep SEO in mind whenever you are choosing a theme for your online store.
You can choose one of these WooCommerce SEO-friendly themes for your online store. Additionally, you can modify the theme to meet your needs. You ought to look for a theme that comes with unique features and is intended to boost your SEO. Thus, the query is:
What is needed for an SEO-friendly theme?
Responsive Web Design– According to Google, content that is optimized for mobile devices will rank higher when people search on their phones.
Light Weight Theme– It provides web pages with quick performance. Avoid bloated themes with third-party plugins because they will make your website load more slowly.
Tester plugins for lightweight themes like ASTRA, OceanWP, Zakra, etc. are readily available. The majority of themes claim to be mobile-friendly, but before you believe it, use the Mobile-Friendly Test to confirm.
2) Use SEO Friendly Plugins
If you’re new to WordPress, you might not be familiar with plugins. They are extensions or software parts that will give your website new functionality and improve on-page SEO. These plugins assist you in both website optimization and search engine positioning.
You can optimize what Google sees on your eCommerce sites by installing SEO plugins. Although there are numerous SEO plugins available for WordPress, the free Yoast plugin is the clear winner in terms of popularity. It is the most well-liked SEO plugin available for you to use to enhance your website.
Other SEO plugins that can aid in site optimization include:
- The SEO Framework
- SEO Squirrely
- Broken Link Checker
- All-in-one SEO plugin
- SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant
- All-in-one SEO plugin
Additionally, it adds meta titles, meta descriptions, meta tags, keywords, and much more to your WordPress website. SEO for WooCommerce of the site, these plugins offer a comprehensive SEO solution.
3) Optimize Your Product Page
Afterward, improve your product page. Because the positioning of the various elements on your product page should be done so as to increase the visibility of your product in online search engines.
The Yoast SEO plugin’s free version can be installed. With this, a new section will be added that will assist you in optimizing the URL, title, description, pictures, videos, testimonials, and ratings of your products. Let’s examine the key areas of the product page:
A) Product SEO Title
Writing SEO-friendly product titles for your WooCommerce store is one of the most crucial aspects of it. Because search engines use product titles as the product’s titles and are the first thing crawlers use to search a product.
B) SEO Meta Description
The meta description is a crucial component in addition to the product SEO title. Each product’s description should be distinct. According to recommendations made by plugins like Yoast SEO, the meta description that appears on SERPs should ideally be between 150 and 160 characters long.
Similar to your product description, your meta description should be 300 words and provide brief details about your product. Additionally, keep in mind that your primary and secondary keywords should appear 2-3 times throughout the entire product description.
C) Product URL
In ranking algorithms, the URL is important. The product URL is another element that is both typical and necessary for your online store. Your focus keyword should appear in the product URL. To improve the readability of the product URL, you should enable the breadcrumbs in your WooCommerce store.
D) Use Product Categories and Tags
People will find the specific product they want to buy more quickly with the aid of product categories and tags. Imagine you need to find a medium red Allen Solly shirt among 2000 others if you want to purchase it.
What will you do?
You’ll stop using the website and visit a real store instead. But if you have a simple way to pick and choose the categories of what you want, you will undoubtedly buy the item online.
4) Use Image Alt Text
Image Search engines use alt text, which is a type of human-readable description of images. In the event that the file cannot be loaded, you add human-readable descriptions to the images on your website.
You must specify a title and an alt attribute when you upload a product image to your WooCommerce store. It uses the image filename as the title attribute by default. Additionally, if you don’t add an alt attribute, it copies the same information to the alt attribute.
5) Clear Site Navigation
The bounce rate of your online store can be significantly impacted by complicated and confusing navigation. because nobody has the time to browse your website all day today. Therefore, having an easy-to-use navigation system will make it much easier for your customers to find what they are looking for. Additionally, hire WooCommerce developers to raise general client satisfaction.
What are the best practices related to navigation?
Giving your visitors a straightforward and efficient navigation flow will make it easy for them to browse your online store. This keeps things clear and makes it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for. BoseQuietComfort35 and Bose SoundSport are two examples of clear and meaningful navigation labels that make it clear what you are clicking on.
You could argue that doing this is preferable to leaving the alt attribute empty, but it is bad form. The alt text you create for the product image you add should be focused, as it will have a significant impact on your SEO.
6) WWW Vs Non-WWW
If WooCommerce is new to you, you might not be familiar with www. and non-www. sites. You’ve probably noticed that while some websites are active at domain.com, others are active at domain.com. There isn’t much of a difference between the two of them in terms of SEO.
Additionally, the majority of host servers automatically switch requests for incorrect versions to the version you have chosen. This is taken into account when deciding which URL is best for your site as the main branding factor. Then, in your WordPress backend, select the domain for the WordPress address URL and Site Address URL.
7) Look For Your Permalink Structure
These are the URLs that link to your content on other websites. Since each product’s URL is fixed and unalterable, the term “permalink” was coined. These URLs specify how your page and product should be formatted.
The URLs known as “permalinks,” which include several special characters like a question mark and various numbers and are taken by default in the WooCommerce store, are considered to be non-SEO friendly URLs.
SEO for WooCommerce gives you the option to create custom URLs for your online store, so you should modify the permalink structure. For your product, you should create SEO-friendly URLs that will help you rank on the search engine’s front page. The product name appears in the permalinks, which are regarded as SEO-friendly URLs.
8) Use .XML Sitemap Plugin
An effective XML site map serves as a roadmap for your website, pointing Google Bots to all of your key pages. With the help of XML sitemaps, Google can easily find all of your key product pages
The technical aspect of your website is an XML sitemap, which encourages Google to index your website in a particular way. Google may not follow your website if you don’t submit an XML Sitemap because there are billions of active websites, making it challenging for Google to locate your eCommerce site.
Google spiders each significant page on your website, but occasionally it stops without pointing to any internal links. All of the key pages and links are listed in the site map, which makes them easier for Google to find. It aids you in comprehending the layout of your WooCommerce website.
There are various Sitemap Plugins available in WordPress-
- Google XML Sitemap
- Yoast SEO
- All in one SEO pack
- Better WordPress Google XML site map
- Premium SEO pack
- Sitemap Generator
9) Number Of Outbound Links
You should consider all the elements of your profile if you want to improve your website. Nofollow links instruct search engines to disregard that link and not add it to your website’s backlink profile. On your WordPress website, you should add rel= “no follow” to a few selected external links.
Links are viewed by search engines as a ranking signal for a linked signal. You are passing link juice when you link to an external website (i.e. kind of SEO card). More external links indicate the creation of backlinks, which means your authority is beginning to decline.
10) Use Schema
A schema is a type of rich snippet that appears in search results to provide users with clear information. It is a Google structured data testing tool that has an impact on your store’s ranking. It communicates to the search engines the topic of the content. Although there are many different schema, one of the most popular ones is the one where people ask.
Benefits of using schema on your site:
- Assist search engines with knowing more about your online store.
- Improve your ranking
- Enhance the searchability of your store
- Increase page click-through rates
What are the Common WooCommerce SEO Challenges?
Making your product pages and category pages rank highly in search engines can be one of the major issues with WooCommerce SEO. It is critical to have original and engaging content on each page due to how search engines like Google and Bing rank pages. Instead of pumping out article after article, develop a strategy that prioritizes the quality of the content because it is far more important than quantity.
The fact that search engines might not always correctly index all of your products presents another challenge for WooCommerce product pages. There are numerous factors involved in this. You may notice a drop in the rankings of your pages if, for instance, there are broken links, bad plugins, or you don’t have a site map that enables crawlers to index your store.
Wrapping Up
WooCommerce was created with SEO-friendly code, and plugins like Yoast make further optimization simple. But knowing how to optimize your WooCommerce website for search engines is crucial if you want to ensure that it runs as smoothly as possible. Because WooCommerce SEO is integrated with WordPress, it is special.
The majority of the optimization work you will do for a WooCommerce eCommerce site is similar to the work you would do for a WordPress site in general. Overall, WooCommerce within WordPress offers the following SEO-friendly advantages out of the box or with minimal configuration:
Analytics: WooCommerce has robust analytics and connects to Google Analytics with ease, allowing you to combine data from first- and third-party visitors.
Content: Easily combine WordPress content management with WooCommerce’s eCommerce features.
Organization: Utilizing product categories, tags, and attributes makes organizing and managing simple.
Frequently Asked Questions :
Q1.Which SEO plugin is the best for WooCommerce?
There are the top 5 WooCommerce SEO plugins in 2023. These are:
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO
- SEO optimized images
- WooCommerce SEO
- WP- Backlinks
- Jetpack
Q2.Can you use two SEO plugins in one WordPress account?
For instance, you will never want to use more than one WordPress SEO plugin on your website. Here, we need to mention ALL in One SEO (previously All in One SEO Pack), SEOPress, Yoast, and Rank Math, among which you can use only one plugin to stay away from plugin conflict.
Q3.Are the plugins WooCommerce or Shopify better for SEO?
If you want to take over complete control of your website’s SEO, then it is important to mention that WooCommerce is the wiser choice. In case you look forward to acquiring an all-in-one solution that does not require any extra configuration and plugins, then Shopify is the best somewhat better option for you.
