Woocommerce is a powerful tool for creating beautiful eCommerce websites However, if you want to have organic traffic you need to optimize Woocommerce for SEO.
Fortunately, WordPress and Woocommerce are SEO-friendly out of the box but for more in-depth optimization you will need to do additional things to make it perfect.
There are some great SEO plugins that help you to optimize Woocommerce stores for SEO however there are some things plugins won’t do.
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7 Steps To Optimize Woocommerce For SEO
And this is the guide for Woocommerce SEO optimization that will teach you how to optimize your store and product pages for better search engine ranking which will get you more organic traffic.
1. Create Clean Product Pages
The first thing you need to do is to create not only beautiful product pages, but these pages must be clean, easy to navigate, and understandable. Because if the page is bloated with unnecessary information, you won’t sell as much product as you might want.
And creating simple, minimalist, and modern pages that sell products easily is not that hard with WordPress because there are many tools that can help you whether it be page builder, Woocommerce theme, or any addon plugin.
However, the easiest way to build custom product pages is with Elementor which is the most popular page builder for WordPress. It’s beginner friendly and has great features. And one of that features is the ability to create templates for various post and archive types.
With Elementor you can build beautiful and fully custom product pages and display the only information you need and apply custom design.
Elementor is used by millions of WordPress developers and designers. It has a free version but for the template feature, it requires an upgrade to a pro version.
2. Choose The Right SEO Plugin
After you have a clean product page design it’s time to choose a good SEO plugin that will help you to optimize Woocommerce for SEO.
There are quite a few popular SEO plugins for WordPress but perhaps the best one is RankMath because of the features it offers. Even the free version can be enough to fully optimize any website for SEO.
RankMath allows you to optimize titles and meta descriptions, add various schema markups, optimize open graphs and give you additional SEO recommendations. Also, you can connect Google Analytics and Search Console to RankMath and see the data from the plugin.
RankMath has a very clean and modern interface and makes optimization very easy. If you are a freelancer or have an SEO agency, you should use it and upgrade to the pro version for additional features.
3. Optimize Product Titles
After optimizing general SEO options it’s time to optimize single products and you should start with the title because it’s one of the most important things for ranking.
Optimizing product titles is not that hard. The goal is that the title should be simple, should contain a keyword, and clearly describe the product itself. Never use clickbait titles because Google won’t rank them.
A product title could include brand name, model, name, and item name but it should not be too long. Sometimes, you can include color or other attributes in the title but it’s not necessary.
An SEO plugin allows you to have different titles for the website and search engines. For example, the title on the website could be Nike Air Force but for search engines, you can use Nike Air Force Red.
And this is very easy with RankMath because it allows you to choose meta titles separately for Google SERP.
Additionally, when choosing the title for search engines, try to find relevant keywords and include them in your titles. This will help it rank faster and higher.
4. Add Product Description
The next important thing for ranking is the content. Every page must have a good amount of content because it helps Google bots easily understand your website and rank for relevant topics and keywords.
So, every product page should have a short and full description. A short description could be used as a meta description which will be displayed in the SERP and a full description with specs is not only good for search engines but customers too.
A good description that is written in a simple way and is full of information is good for search engines to understand what is it about. Also, it is easier for customers to know about your products.
Meta descriptions are not mandatory because Google might choose a different text for it but in general, it’s a good practice to add it to your products. Like SEO titles, RankMath allows you to add meta descriptions easily.
5. Optimize Product Image
Image optimization is another important aspect of SEO and it’s also critical for website load speed. Having unoptimized, huge images it son what you want to have on your eCommerce or any type of website.
You can find the easy way and find an image optimization plugin that does the job but for full optimization, you need to do it yourself. The plugin can resize your image and convert it to WebP format but that’s only half the job done.
A fully optimized image means when it has a good and relevant title, alt text, and size is optimal, the format should be WebP. You can find more information about image optimization on our blog.
But in a nutshell, always resize images to optimal sizes, convert them to WebP format and create relevant titles and alt texts. Especially it’s important for eCommerce websites because it will help to get more impressions and click in SERP.
6. Link To Similar Products
Internal links are very important for ranking and crawling. Google will easily find pages and index them faster. And your eCommerce also needs good internal linking between products.
However, internal links must be relevant to each other. For example, it’s better to link sneakers from another sneakers page than from let’s say a wallet page.
In articles or other pages, the best practice for internal linking is within the text but that might not be a good idea for product pages. So, you need another solution.
And that solution is the related products section where you list products that are similar to the particular product. And the list must be very simple with an image, title, and price.
For example, if you are on a specific jacket page, the related products should be other jackets, coats, or something similar.
This helps not only search engines to crawl and find other pages but customers too. Because they might find the desired product in this section.
So, always add a simple and modern list of related products on every product page. And it’s very easy with WordPress because there are many plugins for that.
7. Optimize Product Pages for Speed
And finally, you need to optimize your eCommerce website for speed. The faster your website and pages load, the more customer will stay on the page and you will have a lower bounce rate.
And speed optimization is not specific to online stores but it’s critical for any type of website for which SEO is important.
With WordPress, you can easily speed up your website with caching plugins. These plugins offer options such as Gzip, minification, page and browser caching, deferring JavaScript, and other important things.
However, only the cache won’t work because speed depends on many other things. One of them is image optimization which is mentioned above. But also, need to use a good and clean theme, and also hosting is very important.
There are many affordable shared WordPress hosting out there but for eCommerce, especially big ones, they might not work. I recommend cloud or VPS hosting because they offer better speed, security, and other options.
You can read more about hosting types and understand how they work and what they offer. In general, you need fast hosting to speed up website load time.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are several steps to fully optimize Woocommerce for SEO and WordPress is one of the best and easiest CMS that can be optimized. However, these methods work for any CMS or framework. Optimizing images, and product pages, using cache and good hosting will help you to rank your website higher in search engines.
