So you’ve launched a WooCommerce store and already have a healthy number of sales. What’s next? SEO. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is a collection of tactics that can make your website appear higher in search results, primarily on Google. Properly implementing SEO is a must for any business that relies on web traffic to generate sales.
In this post, we’ll take a look at a number of tips and tactics you can implement to improve your WooCommerce store’s SEO.
Where to Find Reliable SEO Information
Ranking a WooCommerce store can be a bit difficult, especially when you’re just starting out. From finding and setting the right keywords to integrating products and content that is SEO friendly, SEO for your online store can take some time to properly set up.
As such, you’ll need to learn how SEO works in order to optimize your online store and attract new sets of customers to your website. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation online about SEO, so it can be difficult to find good sources that aren’t biased or just flat-out wrong. We recommend reading the articles Search Engine Land for reliable and accurate information.
How to Enhance SEO for Your WooCommerce Store in 8 Steps
Now let’s walk through some tactics for improving your WooCommerce store’s SEO, step-by-step.
Step 1: Conduct Keyword Research
First, you’ll need to do some keyword research. Proper implementation of keywords will ultimately determine how well you rank in Google. When searching for the best e-commerce keywords, it’s important to identify what people are searching for in the niche related to your store.
To begin, look for the relevant and popular keywords and figure out why users are searching for them. Perhaps the most important aspect of keyword research is finding out what the users are looking for over time, and then creating relevant content that answers their questions. The key word here being “over time”, as you want to build an audience that comes back repeatedly, not just once.
To do this, you’ll need to examine specific keywords that people look for while searching by checking the results in Google.
Tools to use for keyword research
Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start discovering the right keywords related to your store. However, if you want to go in-depth or need specialized support for keyword research, try some of the tools below:
- Semrush: Semrush is a full-fledged SEO tool kit. It’s one of the most popular keyword research tool in the market. Semrush is a keyword overview tool, where you can see how many people search for keywords every month, get a list of alternative keywords, and a list of organic search results.
You can also keep a track of your competitor’s rank for specific keywords and other traffic metrics. You can add trending/similar keywords to your content and enhance your SEO and marketing strategies. - Ubersuggest: A free tool that offers search volume data, suggestions for keywords, and metrics on how hard or easy it is to rank on that keyword. You can also check for the top 100 search results for that keyword, along with an estimated number of visits, clicks, backlinks, and the number of shares.
You can also log into Ubersuggest with your Google account to get personalized SEO suggestions for improving your ranking. - AnswerThePublic: This tool comes with a slightly different approach for keyword research than other popular tools. The keyword results from this tool are based on Google and Bing’s auto-suggest and autocomplete features.
Moreover, the keywords are presented in a visual format and can be downloaded in CSV file format. If you are a beginner with SEO, this is an ideal tool to begin with.
Step 2: Optimize Your Store’s Structure and Navigation
Once a visitor has landed on your website, they’ll (hopefully) click on links and visit other pages. If they don’t and leave after only viewing the home page, that is considered a “bounce” and negatively affects your SEO ranking.
As such, your online store must be well-structured and easy to navigate.
Keyword Integration
To build a structure for your website and drive traffic, you need to have a list of your target keywords. Then, determine different keyword variations and implement them on your websites’s pages.
E-commerce Navigation
Next, you’ll need to create a clean and structured menu for your website, preferably with some of your keywords included directly in the menu items. You can also include other most searched items, based on your keyword research. Other crucial navigation elements include header and footer, breadcrumbs, sorting, and filtering options.
Create a Sitemap
For search engines to discover your online store and understand its structure, you need to prepare a sitemap and submit it to Google. In WordPress, you can install a plugin to automatically create a sitemap for you. The two most popular ones are WordPress SEO by Yoast and Google XML Sitemaps.
User-Friendly URL Structure
With WooCommerce, you can easily create user-friendly URL structures that both implement keywords and make it easy for visitors to understand. To ensure your URL structure is direct, keep the following in mind:
- Keep your URL as short as possible
- Steer clear from additional symbols or any type of prepositions (“of” or “an” for example) for better readability
Step 3: Optimize Your WooCommerce Product Page
Next, you’ll want to optimize the on-page elements of your WooCommerce store. This includes meta descriptions, images, heading tags, etc.
Product Description: With on-page SEO, you can start optimizing your product page descriptions to ensure they have vital keyword-rich content which attracts customers to buy the products displayed on your page.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when optimizing product descriptions:
- Start including target keywords based on your research
- Add multiple images
- Write detailed and keyword-rich descriptions
- Add CTA (Call To Action) whenever possible
- Include testimonials
Image optimization: Images are a crucial part of an on-page SEO strategy, as they help entice users through visual communication. With the right image, you can communicate a message or highlight a CTA.
However, one must be careful and not use too many images to divert the consumers from other important details on the page. Here’s what to keep in mind while optimizing your on-page images:
- Include alt tags with the image captions
- Try and keep all the images on the page of similar size (height and width)
- Upload high-quality and authentic images, not low-quality generic ones
- Add keywords in the image file name
Use Customer Reviews and Ratings: Customer reviews can play an important role in improving your on-page SEO. With reviews and ratings from your existing customers, you can attract potential clients to your website.
These reviews help the customers find suitable information about the products, judge the pros and cons, and then make a sound decision to buy a product. This helps build trust with your target audience and improves your conversion rates. You can do this by sending them automated feedback emails, forms, and reminders.
Step 4. Utilize Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality content on your website that relates to your particular niche. Rather than pitching the product directly, you can build an audience by writing about a particular topic, and then indirectly link them to your products.
Importance of Content Marketing for SEO
No matter what type of business you own or the product you are selling, content marketing should always be a key part of your marketing strategy. Here are just a few methods for content marketing:
Create product tutorials/videos: Creating a tutorial video on using your product is an excellent way to both inform and educate users about your product. Be sure to include the most attractive features, and always explain every step with both written words and audio.
Use social media channels: Social media channels are a great way to connect your WooCommerce store with your target customers and deliver valuable information in the most engaging ways possible. You can use creative images, stories, posts, reels, videos, and much more to attract your audience.
Start a blog: Stay ahead of your competitors by maintaining daily blog posts and posting content around your product to establish yourself as an expert in that particular area.
Step 5: On-page SEO
On-page SEO is a practice that helps your e-commerce website rank higher, attract the target audience, boost traffic, and convert more leads. It helps ensure that Google discovers your page and understands what it is about.
Optimizing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are a crucial part of on-page SEO implementation. Using just the meta tags and descriptions makes your content more discoverable on search engines. Meta descriptions are short yet meaningful descriptions of your page or a specific product. Meta descriptions are meant to summarize the subject of your site easily and help the user understand the base of your website or store.
Header Tags
Optimizing your header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) is vital to building a clear structure for your pages and website. Whenever a user visits your website, blog, or product page, they usually focus on the heading first to understand the topic or products on that page. This helps them decide if they want to go and read further into the page. So, you must focus on your headers for search engines to rank you higher.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is an important part of SEO and must be optimized to establish your SERPs on Google. It helps simplify your site navigation and keep the users engaged within your website. It also helps search engines crawl your site and identify the theme of your page.
Internal links encourage users to stay on the website and explore different pages and products.
If you can offer different links to your products or relevant information, it will keep users looking for similar options on the website. This increases your chances to attract more leads for your website. To establish great internal linking you can include the below points:
- Add links wherever necessary but with some context related to the content.
- Don’t stuff too many links with the same anchor text.
- Use breadcrumbs to understand the site structure and create better navigation.
- Place engaging content or images with internal linking to make it more clickable.
Step 6: Utilize Off-Page SEO Strategies
While you have implemented all the on-page SEO strategies for your e-commerce website, don’t leave the off-page SEO behind. It’s equally important to have off-page SEO strategies for your online store to get the maximum results for your rankings in SERPs (Search engine result pages)
Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO is executing your marketing strategies outside your website and boosting the performance offline. With this, you can influence and determine what the search engines like Google think about your website or where it positions in the search engines.
Off-Page SEO Strategies for Your E-Commerce Store
There are several off-page SEO strategies one can bring into practice to enhance off-page SEO for e-commerce stores. From backlinking to Guest posts, off-page SEO is equally important and effective as on-page SEO for your store.
Backlinks: Backlinking is one of the most used SEO tactics for the off-page optimization of your e-commerce site and store. It is the process of fetching quality links that point to your e-commerce website. When similar good websites link your website on their page, Google recognizes your website as the one with reliable and useful information.
These links from authority websites help your page’s rankings elevate on Google. This also helps your target users find you and see you as a trustworthy website with relevant and good products and services.
Ways to build backlinking: There are two ways to go about link building:
- Organic link building: This happens when authority websites link your site URL on their page without any direct efforts from your end. Typically, this is because your e-commerce website has authentic and user-rich content that delivers quality information related to its niche.
- Inorganic link building: This type of link building happens when you intentionally or purposely draw traffic to your website and increase your website traffic and ranking.
Guest Post: Guest posting has been the most effective process of building links for off-page SEO. This technique involves an offering to create valuable content for another’s website blog, which is an authority website similar to your field. This allows you to link your website as you write its content and increases your chance of attracting more traffic to your website.
Content Marketing: As used in on-page SEO tactics, content marketing is a strategy that can be used for off-page SEO too. It includes promoting valuable, engaging, and informative content such as case studies, press releases, infographics, and surveys from your website. However, make sure that the content you are creating and promoting under this technique is 100% authentic and provides valuable information to the users.
Step 7: Utilize Analytics to Track and Improve SEO Performance
As a WooCommerce website owner, one needs to know how to utilize analytics and data to track and improve the website’s performance accordingly. Analytics is a must for any E-commerce store or website as it provides factual data that can be helpful to take your store to new heights.
Google Analytics is one powerful tool for analyzing the success of your e-commerce store and implementing strategies to derive revenue accordingly.
There are several other tools that you can use to track your website traffic on search engines and judge its overall SEO performance:
Semrush: As mentioned above, Semrush is a complete SEO toolkit that helps you analyze and monitor traffic on your website. It is an all-in-one traffic analysis and competition research tool. With this tool, you can have important insights like monthly traffic volume, keywords used, and traffic distribution by country.
In addition, it also gives you the number of unique visits, total visits, average time the user spent on your website, bounce rate, and page views.
SimilarWeb: It is an online web traffic checker that allows you to overview your competitor’s website traffic and keep a close tab on it. You get detailed reports of a website’s entire traffic strategy and a breakdown of the overall traffic.
In addition, you also get a detailed breakdown of your site’s audience, the keywords they are searching for, top referring sites, and a list of competitors’ sites for you to explore further.
Google Search Console: This is a free-to-use tool provided by Google to track and analyze your website search engine traffic. It gives you a clear picture of how search engines are viewing your site. It allows you to see the number of impressions, clicks through CTR, and the average positioning of keywords on search engines. Thus, it helps you discover which keyword you are ranking for and what amount of traffic that keyword is bringing to your site. You can add this tool directly to your website and view the analytics.
Using Analytics and its tools, you can learn your website inside out and implement changes and improvements accordingly. These tools and techniques not only help you analyze your website traffic but also competitors’ websites and allow you to gain important insight into your market.
Step 8: Improve Core Vitals
Your website’s core vitals are a set of metrics that evaluate how fast and interactive your web pages are for users. For an e-commerce store, analyzing and optimizing core vitals is important to ensure all your critical pages offer a great user experience.
There are many metrics that Google takes into consideration to judge the performance of your website. It usually focuses on website speed, reactivity, loading ability, and visual stability. These core vital come together to improve and enhance your website performance and user interface. Three significant core web vitals to look at are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The largest Contentful Paint or LCP indicates the time taken by the browser to fully load the main content of the website. LCP less than 2.5 seconds is good, LCP between 2.5 and 4 seconds needs improvement, and LCP above 4 seconds is considered poor.
- First Input Delay (FID): This metric indicates the time of the first interaction of the user to the browser’s reaction. FID below 100 ms is good, between 100 ms and 300 ms needs improvement, and above 300 ms is considered poor.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric is used to measure the sum of all the layout shifts that occur on a page during its lifetime. A CLS is considered good if it is less than 0.1, requires improvement between 0.1 and 0.25, and is poor if it is greater than 0.25.
Final Tips for Improving Search Rankings
- Get an SSL certificate for your e-commerce store, which helps you protect your customer’s sensitive information and helps build trust for Google, and improves
- s your rankings.
- Improve the meta description of your product/ service pages by writing more compelling and creative descriptions and increasing your organic CTR.
- Improve category tags by structuring pages with specific keywords and content. This will help these pages rank possibly higher.
- Add category-level navigation to your eCommerce store to help google crawl your website and makes it easier for your users to navigate to what they are looking for.
- Add more internal links to reduce your site’s bounce rate and increase user time on your website.
- Optimize your site’s CTA frequently for special holidays, promotions, and campaigns to boost conversion rates.
- Check for any 404 pages on your website; instead of letting them affect your user interface, you can redirect these pages to other relevant pages.
- Improve and structure your title tag by adding specific keywords and crip information related to your website. This will bring in more users and increase your clicks.
- Build an About Us page for your site to add user-rich content and provide more context to the products and services offered in your store. This helps answer almost all the questions a user has in their mind before actually buying the product.
- Add live chat to your website to provide instant access to your customers in case they need any help, have any queries, or looking for quick responses. This helps in enhancing your conversion rates at a fast pace.
Wrapping Up
If you are an e-commerce store owner or just started your online store, optimizing your store with the best SEO practices is a must-do. It not only helps you create a powerful online presence but also allows you to reach your target audience and convert them into successful leads.
Most importantly, it helps you build a valuable website that is trusted not only by search engines but by web users. We hope this guide will help you understand the best SEO practices for your store and help you optimize it to reach new heights.
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