Last updated - July 8, 2021
Are you running/going to run an eCommerce site? Well, you are at the right place as here we are going to talk about WooCommerce SEO intended to increase your online store’s Google traffic and drive more sales.
We should warn you right from the start – don’t focus on ranking for uber‐competitive high‐volume terms.
Supposing you are selling female clothing on your site built on the basis of one of the premium WordPress themes.
Coleo – Fashion Clothing Store WP Theme
What is the most obvious term you may want to rank for? Female clothing, right?
Now take a look at the top ranking pages on Google. Missguided, Amazon.com, I SAW IT FIRST, ZALANDO, etc. Are you a dreamer thinking that you can outrank these guys? Then get down to Earth, please. This isn’t going to happen.
Ok, what’s the alternative for you?
It’s better to focus on ranking individual product and category pages for less competitive terms.
Well, let’s get started.
BTW, don’t forget to do your WooCommerce site audit and get rid of errors that may prevent you from ranking high.
If you are running an eСommerce store, then you should be using HTTPS sitewide.
A surprising number of WooCommerce sites still neglect this. But this is super‐important! Almost all WooCommerce stores feature many forms which collect personal users’ details. So you must make sure that all information is encrypted (not just credit card details).
Google has confirmed that there is a slight ranking boost for sites serving content over HTTPs. We guess this is one more reason to do this.
- Do keyword research for your WooCommerce site. It’s just like with all SEO campaigns, WooCommerce SEO should begin with a keyword research.
How will you do keyword research for a WooCommerce site?
It’s quite simple:
- List all the pages on your site firstly;
- Find and map appropriate keywords to each page secondly.
- Do the necessary on‐page SEO for your WooCommerce site.
When you know which keywords and terms each page should be optimized around, it’s time to implement your findings.
- Optimize your meta titles, descriptions, and H1’s.
It’s really boring to write unique titles and meta descriptions for each of the hundreds/thousands of your e-store pages.
However, we don’t recommend to use templates. Take a hybrid approach instead.
Write well‐optimized tags for the most important pages. Then use a templated approach for the rest.
But don’t use the same template for every page. Create a unique template for each category, subcategory, brand, etc.
Which are the most important pages? These are the ones that already rank in the top 10 for at least one keyword.
Here are a few pointers for your writing:
- Include your primary keyword;
- Sprinkle in some of the long‐tail keyword variations (where appropriate);
- Include action words (e.g., buy, click, learn, sale, free, etc.);
- Mention your USP (free shipping, next day delivery, free returns, etc.);
- Optimize for CTR by making them compelling
We advise to split test different title and meta description formats to maximize click‐throughs.
What about H1’s?
Just use the category title (for category pages) and the product title (for product pages). They should also be keyword‐focused.
There is no need to overcomplicate this — just make sure there’s only one H1 on each page.
- Optimize your URLs. Make your URL slugs (permalinks) as clear and readable as possible.
Here’re some suggestions as starting points:
- yourdomain.com/category‐name (category page)
- yourdomain.com/category‐name/subcategory‐name (subcategory page)
- yourdomain.com/category‐name/subcategory‐name/subcategory‐name (sub‐subcategory page)
- yourdomain.com/category‐name/subcategory‐name/subcategory‐name/product (product page)
This is pretty simple.
Write unique product & category descriptions. Almost all big retailers include unique descriptions on their category pages and product pages.
Ozisti – Augmented Reality, AR WooCommerce WordPress Theme
There is a couple of reasons for this:
- It tells visitors more about the category or product they’re viewing.
- It helps Google understand what the page is all about.
Google ranks pages according to a certain algorithm, so, if there’s no written content on a page, it gives the algorithm a hard time.
So, we recommend adding unique descriptions to both category and product pages. And when we say unique, we mean it.
- Don’t copy/paste product descriptions from the sites of manufacturers. Create the content yourself.
Here are a few quick guides for this:
- Include your head target keyword in the description;
- Sprinkle in long‐tail variations, synonyms, and LSI keywords (where appropriate);
- Make sure they’re well‐written and readable for visitors;
- Tell visitors things they may actually want to know;
- Don’t ramble—keep them short and sweet
If the only thought of doing this for every page on your site makes you want to die, start small, with the most important pages.
- Add schema markup. The presentation of your store on Google will be not only more eye‐catching, but will also provide the searcher with more information which can increase CTR by up to 30%. This brings more traffic which results in more sales.
But that’s not all. Google uses this information to understand your content. (e.g., is it a product page, category page, blog post, etc.—this is very useful for WooCommerce SEO).
Undoubtedly Schema markup is rather complicated. We will try to touch the basics.
You can use the schema.org Product markup for product pages.
- You can add a lot of different properties to this schema property. Here are some of the most common. We recommend adding them to product pages:
Here’s how this may look:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<span itemprop="name">Grainfather - All in one brewing system</span>
<img itemprop="image" src="grainfather.jpg" alt='grainfather' />
<div itemprop="aggregateRating"
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">4.3</span>/5
based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
</div>
<div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
<span itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD">$</span><span
itemprop="price" content="1000.00">1,000.00</span>
<link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
</div>
Product description:
<span itemprop="description">The Grainfather is an all-in-one all-grain brewing system. It's great!</span>
</div>
<
- As to category pages… This is really confusing.
You can interpret as you wish. Here’s what we think:
- You can markup multiple products on a single page.
- If you mark up one product on your list, you have to mark them all up.
However, with category pages everything comes to helping Google decipher the type of page (category) than anything.
You probably won’t see rich data appearing in the SERPs for category pages.
For that reason, we do recommend marking up category pages. Just try to keep it simple.
Here’s a link to the site that does this well.
Instead of the conclusion
We are sure you understand that we barely scratched the surface of covering marketing techniques to increase sales of your WooCommerce site. But we don’t want to overwhelm you with information. Now you know where to start. Then will follow some
- technical moments like fixing duplicate content issues,
- finding keyword cannibalization errors,
- building links to your WooCommerce site,
- content marketing, and so on and so forth.
Have questions on the covered techniques? Want us to tell about further aspects? Have your own thoughts/suggestions/tips/impressions/questions? Please drop us a line in the comments section.
And please don’t forget to share this blog post with your entrepreneur friends on socials.
Cheers!
