WooCommerce SEO Guide: Tactics and Plugins to Rank Your Store
WordPress and WooCommerce make it easy to launch a flexible, user-friendly e-commerce store. But if you want to get shoppers to your store, you need to nail your WooCommerce SEO so that they can find you in Google.
That’s what we’re going to help you do in this post. We’ll take you through all of the important parts of WooCommerce SEO. Then, we’ll share some quality SEO plugins that work well with WooCommerce stores.
We’ll also share some ways in which Elementor WooCommerce Builder can help you indirectly improve your store’s SEO by giving you more flexibility to add content to your store templates.
Is WooCommerce SEO Friendly?
Before we get to those other things, let’s start at the beginning with a basic question – is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
The short answer is “yes”. Much like WordPress itself, WooCommerce is SEO-friendly…but you’ll need the help of an SEO plugin to unlock that functionality.
With the right plugin, you’ll be able to make all the search engine optimizations that you need to rank your store in Google. You can add SEO titles/descriptions to your single products and category pages, include breadcrumbs, add structured data, and more.
Later on, we’ll share some of the plugins that you can use to add SEO functionality to WooCommerce. But first, let’s go through the tactics.
How to Optimize WooCommerce for SEO
In this first section, we’ll go in-depth through the different parts of ecommerce SEO for WooCommerce stores.
For the example screenshots below, we’ll use the Yoast SEO plugin because it’s the most popular SEO plugin that works with WooCommerce seo.
However, you can apply the exact same strategies using one of the other plugins that we’ll share later on – the interface will just look a little different.
1. Perform Keyword Research
Before you can optimize your store, you need to know what you’re optimizing for. With SEO, that means keyword research.
For example, let’s say you sell a laptop case. You would want to know whether more people are searching for “laptop case” or “laptop sleeve” so that you can optimize for the most valuable phrase.
By picking the best phrase to rank for, you can guarantee that you get the best return on your investment for all of these other tips.
Some excellent premium keyword research tools are:
You can also find useful free tools, though they aren’t as flexible and might have limits. For example, Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool lets you run 10 free queries per month.
For e-commerce stores, another useful option is to just go to Amazon and see what types of queries Amazon suggests. For e-commerce searches, Amazon is just as popular as Google, so you can glean some useful insights here.
For a more automated approach, Keyword Tool can help you automatically pull queries from Amazon for free. If you’re willing to pay, you can also see the Google search volume for those queries.
2. Implement Basic WordPress SEO Settings
Before you can optimize WooCommerce SEO, you first need to get your basic WordPress SEO settings right.
That means installing an SEO plugin – for example, Yoast SEO – and filling out the basic details in the plugin. This will also set up basic SEO best practices such as an XML sitemap.
If you’re not sure what goes into basic WordPress SEO, you might want to take a quick detour to our Monday Masterclass on WordPress SEO.
3. Optimize Your Product Descriptions
If you want to rank your product pages in Google, you need some content. On a single product page, the bulk of that content is going to come from your product descriptions.
We say “descriptions” because WooCommerce lets you add two types of descriptions:
- Short description – on most WooCommerce themes, this appears immediately below the product title and beside the product images.
- Long description – this usually appears below the product images/short description.
While the main goal of these descriptions is to provide relevant information to shoppers and convince them to make a purchase, you also want to make sure that you include your target keyword and some related keywords in your descriptions.
Ideally, you’ll want to use it at least once in both your short and long descriptions.
4. Write Unique Product SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions for woocommerce seo
Your product’s SEO title and meta description are what appear in Google’s search results*.
You should have two main goals for these two pieces of information:
- Provide Google with valuable context about your page by including your main focus keyword (and some related keywords if possible).
- Convince human visitors who see your store in Google to click on your result.
Here are some tips to accomplish that:
- Page Title – make sure to include your main keyword. If you can naturally work in related descriptive keywords, that’s great as well. This should be mainly informational and doesn’t necessarily need to be the same as the title of the product that displays in your store.
- Meta Description – try to naturally include your main keyword once, as well as related keywords if possible. This is also a good place to highlight incentives such as low-prices or free shipping. This can help convince people to click on your result (increasing your click-through rates).
You can set these from the Yoast SEO meta box when you edit a product:
* Actually, Google won’t always use these and will change the title and description for some queries. Search Engine Journal explains why you might see different titles/descriptions occasionally. With that being said, it’s still important to create a unique title and description for every product.
5. Optimize Your Product URL Slug
Your product’s URL slug is another important part of feeding Google contextual information.
As with many of the other tips, you want to include your main focus keyword in the URL slug:
6. Optimize Product Images (Alt Text and Filenames)
In all this talk of product descriptions and SEO titles, don’t forget about your product images.
There are two parts of optimizing your images:
- Alt text
- Filenames
Image alt text helps you accomplish two things:
- It gives Google context for your images, which helps optimize your page and also gives you a chance to rank individual product images in Google Image Search.
- It makes your site more accessible to shoppers using screen readers (which is a worthy reason all by itself).
You can set your image alt text by editing the image and using the Alt Text box:
If possible, you also want to try to use contextual keywords for your image filenames. For example, instead of “s122_v1_hd.jpg” use “green-sports-shoes.jpg”.
7. Use Categories and Tags for woocommerce seo
Categories and tags are two tools to help you organize your WooCommerce products by woocommerce seo.
They’re useful to help shoppers discover products that interest them, but they’re also useful because you can rank your category and tag archive pages in Google. These are the pages that list all of the products with a certain category or tag.
For example, let’s say that you sell five different pairs of men’s sweatpants. If you try to rank each individual product for the keyword “men’s sweatpants”, you’re just going to compete against yourself and cannibalize your rankings.
Instead, you could create a single “men’s sweatpants” category and rank the category page in Google.
You’ll see this all the time in Google. For example, all the top-ranking pages for “Men’s Sweatpants” are indeed product category pages, not single product pages.
So what’s the difference between categories and tags?
- Categories are broader. For example, “Men’s T-Shirts”
- Tags are more specific. For example, a shirt in the “Men’s T-Shirts” category might also have a “Superman” tag to indicate that the shirt is based on Superman.
Categories are also hierarchical, which means you can have sub-categories inside of other categories. For example, you could have a “Men’s Clothing” parent category and then a “T-Shirts” category inside of that to house all of your men’s t-shirts.
8. Optimize Your Category and Tag Archives by WooCommerce seo
Once you’ve created your categories and tags, you need to optimize them just like you would your single product pages.
Again, your product category pages can be some of your most valuable pages, so you want to give them the best chance possible to rank.
First, you want to write a unique SEO title and description for each category, just like you did for your single products. Here’s how to do this with Yoast SEO:
- Go to Products → Categories (or Tags) to show a list of all your store’s categories.
- Edit the category.
- Scroll down to the Yoast SEO box on the category’s setting page.
You can follow the same basic strategy as you did for your single products.
For example, look at how Uniqlo works in related phrases such as “V-Neck”, “Crew-Neck”, “cotton”, etc. for its “Men’s T-Shirts” category page.
Another strategy to rank category and tag archive pages is to add some unique content to high-value pages. Think of it kind of like a “description” for the entire product category.