WooCommerce is one of the free platforms available for eCommerce website creation. Integrated with the WordPress framework, WooCommerce is trusted and a ready-to-go solution for small to medium eCommerce businesses. Building an eCommerce store with WooCommerce takes minutes. It is easy to customize, design and integrate with various plugins.
Though easy to build, the eCommerce industry is often very competitive. Designing and developing a WooCommerce store is only the first step to the business. It’s in many ways like starting a brick and mortar shop. If you have built a shop, it’s not necessary that you will have customers. You need to market your brand, shop and products to attract customers.
WooCommerce websites require marketing too and one of the most reliable long-term marketing strategies includes SEO or Search Engine Optimization for your store. Optimizing WooCommerce product pages, integrating SEO plugins for WooCommerce to improve WooCommerce product ranking are a few essential tasks every WooCommerce store owner should consider.
This article provides a detailed list of tasks that can improve the listing of your WooCommerce product page and store in general.
Enable breadcrumbs
WooCommerce site structure improvement with breadcrumbs can be achieved with plugins or the built-in features of WooCommerce itself. Enable Yoast Breadcrumbs and Schema markup for breadcrumbs to help search engines understand your website’s site structure. Google also uses breadcrumb rich snippets to understand the structure of your site. Breadcrumbs provide a navigational hierarchy, and internal linking to your website to access related and relevant products or sections in your WooCommerce store. Prominent tools that integrate breadcrumbs include Yoast & RankMath.
Add alt text to images
Alt tags play a big role in eCommerce stores. WooCommerce image SEO should focus on including keywords in alt tags. Adding alt text in WooCommerce product images increases not only organic traffic in regular search but also in image search which is featured prominently when searching for products. Alt tags also improve product image accessibility in WooCommerce stores. Also, consider adding image descriptions along with a descriptive alt text to images.
Ensure mobile optimization
Ensure your themes are responsive with adaptive layout. Check for viewport settings and touchscreen navigation. A cross-device compatibility check and a mobile-first indexing ensures your website is crawlable easily. Adjust and optimise images for mobile devices. Mobile UX (user experience) check is mandatory for WooCommerce websites as 70% of your audience will be from smaller devices. Click-to-call buttons will help with getting more calls for your services and ensure they are responsive and floating.
Proper product description
Work on a detailed product information page. Most eCommerce websites will have thin content. You have a higher chance of ranking better with a compelling product copy. SEO-friendly product description should include relevant keywords, unique product features and customer-focused language. Benefits-focused writing helps users scan through the content and make a decision fast. Clarity in product detail, bulleted product features and a scannable product format with consistent product videos help with conversions.
Avoid duplicate content
Duplicate content is very common in eCommerce stores with similar products and variants of products. Also, multilingual websites find translation content often as duplicate. Duplicate page content and copied page content often result in ranking drops and SEO penalties, similar to thin content. Use canonical tags and rel=canonical to point to the original content page. Always check for content uniqueness and use a 301 redirect to remove duplicate content on your websites.
Optimize product descriptions
While product description as a part of a copy is important, so is optimizing product description from time to time. Incorporating keyword-rich content, SEO product text and search-friendly description make for engaging product details, improve user experience and improve conversion rates too. User intent matching is probably the latest buzzword but it really works and optimized eCommerce content with intent-focused content and keywords coupled with target audience language makes for higher conversion rates.
Speed up WooCommerce
Faster loading time improves user experience and more conversions. WooCommerce platform optimisation is an important part of technical SEO. Reduce server response times, minify CSS and JavaScript, incorporate caching plugins for WooCommerce, lazy load products and optimise WooCommerce themes to improve overall performance. Database optimisation, Gzip compression and checking for WooCommerce page speed to improve time to first byte should be prioritised.
Add structured data for rich snippets
Implement schema markups and structred data for rich results in SERPs. With microdata implementations or JSON-LD format schema.org types, incorporate FAQ schemas, product structured data, review snippet codes and breadcrumb structured data where relevant. Add schema to WooCommerce for higher CTR in SERP. While implementing structured data manually can be cumbersome and error-prone, plugins can be used for most tasks and allow great flexibility to enhance CTR with rich snippets.
Optimize product images
Images are resource-intensive and take a lot of data and time. With image compression tools and WebP image formats, you can reduce the size of images. Incorporate image alt tags and ensure SEO-friendly image names for your product images. Lazy loading images will improve page speed and SEO. Reduce image file size and incorporate image CDN (Content Delivery Network). Though image sizes should be reduced, do not compromise on resolutions. High-resolution product images with thumbnail optimisation ensures higher user experience.
Use product schema
Product schema plays an integral part in WooCommerce stores. Rich product snippet and product structured data with price and availability schema, review and rating schema with rich product snippets provide a better visual for users from the SERP and enhance CTR with schema. Product microdata implementations are known to increase CTR and engagement by up to 30%.
Write Catchy meta descriptions
While search engine optimised meta tags and descriptions are important, they also need to be catchy. Compelling meta copy increases CTR to the users. Create unique page summaries and check them with Google snippet preview tools. Click-worthy meta content with emotional trigger phrases and search intent alignment is key to higher CTR.
Build backlinks
One of the hardest tasks for an SEO and an online business owner is to acquire high-quality backlinks. Practice authority link building and natural link acquisition for long-term organic backlink strategies. White-hat SEO techniques include backlink outreach strategies, guest posting and other techniques which may benefit your website. Do a competitor backlink analysis and use a backlink monitoring tool to keep track of your links.
Improve security
Website security is key to SEO. Basic website security measures like SSL certificate installations, HTTPS encryption, firewall configuration and malware protection should be in place and not avoided. Keep your website online with regular security audits, brute force attack prevention and automatic security updates. Use WordPress security plugins and vulnerability scanning tools to protect customer information.
Optimize product slug
Ensure SEO-friendly URLs with clean product slugs. Keyword-rich permalinks, readable URL structure and hyphen-separated URLs are easier to read for both humans and search engines. Remove stop words from URLs and optimise URLs for products. Avoid dynamic URLs with ? and & signs. Practice consistent slug naming and a canonical URL structure.
Website structure
Create a SEO-friendly site structure. Choose a site architecture and a flat website hierarchy with logical URL structure. Keep an internal linking strategy in mind. A silo structure works for some websites with a top-down content flow. Content categorisation and website navigation structure play an important role in crawlability of the website. Also incorporate an HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. A clean crawlable website layout with XML sitemap optimisation helps your content crawl regularly and fast.
Focus on keyword intent
Know the difference between informational vs transactional queries. Create content based on buyer intent keywords for product pages. Use search intent analysis tools or ChatGPT to understand high intent search terms and craft your content accordingly. Intent-driven optimisation helps Google understand your web pages and deliver the pages to the clients based on intent. Target conversion-oriented keywords for product pages, and use navigational keyword strategy where relevant.
Google Analytics
Track your website’s traffic with website traffic analysis tools. User behaviour tracking and conversion tracking with bounce rate analysis helps with tweaking your content and website to meet user requirements. Incorporate goal settings in Google Analytics and check the bounce rate analysis from time to time. Key areas to check include page view tracking, user flow analysis, session duration insights and event tracking for data-driven decision-making.
Use categories and tags
Categories and tags are often the most underrated and least utilised sections in a WooCommerce platform. Internal linking through tags improves site navigation. User-friendly content structure improves content discoverability and creates a clean site hierarchy.
