WooCommerce SEO: Essential Optimization Features To Drive Traffic

While you may have encountered many tools and integrations for your ecommerce website needs, only a few come close to the capabilities of WooCommerce. This popular WordPress plugin, at the most basic level, allows you to turn your website into an online store where you can sell products. However, many people don’t realize how WooCommerce does so much more.

In this article, Kreidman shares WooCommerce search engine optimization (SEO) features you can use to increase your organic traffic and conversions. With an optimized online store, you’re one step closer to higher revenue and profits. Keep reading to learn more.

WooCommerce SEO 101

Before discussing the specific features of WooCommerce, we want to give a quick introduction to the plug-in. This tool is an open-source ecommerce platform that allows users to create their own online stores. WooCommerce is easy to use and has lots of resources for beginners, making it popular among small and medium-sized businesses.

More than creating a virtual storefront, WooCommerce has built-in features that allow your store to become more visible. This increase in visibility and reach is done through SEO, a process where you improve your website so it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Good SERP rankings help increase your engagement, sales, and overall growth.

What are these specific WooCommerce features that help boost your SEO? How can you maximize them to the fullest? Here’s our definitive list.

WordPress Integration

WooCommerce is designed specifically for WordPress websites. Installing the plugin to your WordPress website is already a solid step towards better SEO results. There are other ecommerce plugins, but WooCommerce is inherently one of the ideal options for a content management system (CMS) like WordPress. Once you have WooCommerce, you gain additional access to more plugins and tools that further help with your SEO efforts.

Tips for Optimization

• Select an SEO-friendly Theme: WordPress has plenty of themes fit for specific website needs or preferences. If you’re going to use WooCommerce, use a theme that’s compatible with the plugin and optimized for SEO. An important consideration is faster loading speeds to ensure that your product image appears immediately.

• Leverage Other Plugins: As we mentioned, merely integrating WooCommerce into your CMS allows you to access other useful plugins. These have varied uses, but Yoast is the most popular for SEO needs. Yoast can perform various tasks, such as the following:

• On-page SEO analysis
• Generate XML sitemaps
• Optimize meta tags
• Content insights
• Schema markup

Customize Your Permalinks

WooCommerce can auto-populate your product links, category pages, and others with the right plugins (such as Yoast). However, these links can be too wordy or are missing critical keywords. WooCommerce thankfully allows you to customize permalinks to your preferences. Through the Custom Permalinks plugin, you can create clean and keyword-rich URLs that search engines favor.

Tips for Optimization

• Use Keywords: Links with keywords allow search engines to easily learn about your product page while crawling your website, potentially increasing your SERP rankings.

• Keep Things Simple: In general, we don’t recommend using special characters, even “&,” on your URL. Stick to alphanumeric letters and numbers and hyphens.

Add Meta Titles and Descriptions

WooCommerce has additional SEO plugins that allow you to customize meta tags on your pages. These are snippets of text that appear on SERPs, giving the search engine user an idea of what they can find on your web page. Optimized title tags and descriptions can help increase your click-through rates and engagement.

Tips for Optimization

• Use Primary Keywords: Meta tags have limited character counts. Meta titles are limited to 60 characters while meta descriptions are at 160 characters. Past these limits, you run the risk of cut-off text on SERP results. These restrictions mean you can’t use long-tail keywords. Thankfully, primary keywords are often adequate, so make sure to incorporate them into your meta tags.

• Add Call-to-Actions or CTAs: Your copy shouldn’t just describe what’s on the page. You need to include engaging CTAs that urge readers to click on the link and visit your website.

Schema Markup and Rich Snippets

Aside from meta tags, you can add more content on SERPs to increase click-through rates. This additional information is called a rich snippet, and it can come in various forms — star ratings, pricing, or event dates. You can’t control what rich snippets will come up on SERPs, but WooCommerce has various plugins that help you get the results you want. For ecommerce websites, the most attractive rich snippets are reviews and pricing.

Tips for Optimization

• Use the Schema Plugin: This tool allows you to implement schema.org markup. You can add detailed information about your products to search engines, making them more likely to show these appealing details. Make sure to use the JSON-LD format, which is recommended by Google and supported by WooCommerce.

• Focus on Reviews: Encourage your customers to leave reviews and ratings. These can significantly improve your click-through rates, serving as signals about the quality of your product or service.

Mobile Optimization

The majority of online transactions today happen on smartphones. Hence, it’s important to optimize your website for mobile devices. WooCommerce has themes that are already mobile-responsive, so it’s really all a matter of choosing one that fits your branding and design needs.

Tips for Optimization

• Be Mindful of Load Times: Don’t bog down your mobile product pages with big image files. We recommend using compressed images and content delivery networks to ensure quick loading times.

• Simplify Navigation: Given the small screens, one priority in mobile pages is easy navigation. Use themes that have intuitive navigation bars to enhance customer experience.

Final Thoughts on SEO for WooCommerce

WooCommerce is more than just a plugin that creates an online store on your website — it has plenty of features that make it a critical inclusion in your SEO efforts. From helping you make optimized URLs and meta tags to optimizing your content for mobile devices, the plugin does a lot to ramp up your organic traffic and reach.

If you’re considering ways to improve your WooCommerce SEO, Kreidman is the team to trust. We offer services that help you optimize your online site, whichever plugin you’re using. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do.