A Basic Guide To SEO For WooCommerce Stores

If you want your WooCommerce store to rank high on search results, focus on SEO. It’s a must for better visibility.

For many, SEO is an afterthought. But you’ll see better results if it’s part of your strategy from the very beginning. Taking time to optimize your online store should result in an increase in traffic. It should also increase sales, as search engines connect your target audience with your products. However, improving your site’s SEO isn’t a straightforward process, as there are multiple facets that need to be addressed.

This Basic SEO for WooCommerce guide covers a set of actionable tasks. You can use them to improve your store’s SEO. You can consider these the foundation blocks of good SEO. We’ll walk you through some top SEO steps, tips, and tricks to help your site rank well. This includes choosing the right hosting provider and theme, adding keywords to content, and installing the Yoast SEO plugin. Let’s get started…

Select A Good WooCommerce Hosting Provider

Choosing a reputable and reliable hosting provider is crucial in ensuring your online store’s success. A top-quality hosting provider will greatly improve your customers’ shopping experience. It will also positively impact your site’s SEO. Often, when customers join our WooCommerce Support service, we review their hosting first. One of our top suggestions is switching to a better web host.

There are many hosting services, plans, and packages available to choose from. If you’re building a WooCommerce website, it makes sense to choose a high-quality host. These WILL be more expensive than the standard hosting packages. But you will be rewarded in the long run.

There are many good hosts. In our experience, Cloudways, SiteGround, and Amazon Web Services are great choices. Of course, there are others too. Siteground now provides WooCommerce specific hosting. Features of high-performance hosting include…

• Fast Servers with a good geographical choice of locations
• PCI Compliance
• Excellent Caching solutions
• CDN
• Quick Backup and Restore options
• 99.9% Uptime
• Quick 24/7 Support (very important)

Choosing a top hosting provider like one of the above ensures fast loading times. It also provides high performance and minimal downtime. Search engines monitor these factors. Good results will help your site rank well in Google and other search.

Choose a Mobile-Friendly Fast WordPress Theme

Google has stated that any site that isn’t mobile responsive will be penalized in search results. Therefore ensuring your WordPress theme is mobile-friendly should be a top priority.

Almost all new themes have been designed with this specification in mind. However, if you are using an older theme then it may be time for an upgrade. You’d be surprised how many stores still run an old theme. Though it may be mobile “responsive,” it’s not truly optimized. As a result, the mobile user experience suffers.  ThemeForest is a popular theme shop. You can find impressive premium WooCommerce themes that are mobile responsive and retina friendly.  Alternatively, free WooCommerce themes can be found on the WordPress.org website.

Jetpack also provides a Mobile module, which will enable you to create a mobile version of your site, however old your theme. Install the free Jetpack plugin on your site and activate it. Adjust the settings. Then visit your store from a smartphone to see how it performs. Once set up, having a mobile version of your online shop should help dramatically improve your site’s SEO.

Improve Your Store’s Loading Times

If your store’s pages and content are slow to load, you will lose visitors. It will also negatively impact your SEO. Choosing a reliable hosting service is just the start. There are many other steps you can take to keep your site running fast. Let’s take a look…

• Start with a speed test. This will identify the biggest causes of a slow website and point in the right direction for a solution. We highly recommend webpagetest.org as our go to speed test tool. It is the best speed testing tool that we have found so far.

• Reduce image sizes where possible and install a plugin like Smush Image Compression and Optimization. This will help you resize, optimize, and compress all of your product images. It prevents large image files from slowing your site down.

• Install a good caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache. This free plugin caches your content and serves static files to your audience. It reduces loading times and provides a smoother user experience.

Yoast SEO is another impressive WordPress plugin that can help improve SEO for WooCommerce stores. Let’s find out more…

Install Yoast SEO on your Website

Installed on millions of website, Yoast SEO is a great option for WooCommerce websites. This free plugin will help ensure both your content, and wider site, are optimized for the search engines. Here are a few of its top features…

• Content and SEO Analysis – Make use of Yoast’s effective tools to ensure you write SEO-friendly text across your site.

• Search Engine Snippets – Take control over how your content snippets appear in the search engines. Add titles and meta descriptions. Preview how your snippets will look in search engine results and on social media. This ensures your snippets stay consistent and on point.

• XML Sitemaps – Add XML Sitemaps functionality to your WooCommerce store with the push of a button.

• Breadcrumbs – Take full control over your store’s breadcrumbs by simply adding a piece of code to your site.

Yoast SEO also provides a premium SEO for WooCommerce plugin. Features include more control over your site’s breadcrumbs, a cleaner sitemap, and extra social media features.

Use Keywords in Your Content

Using keywords in your headings, product descriptions, and other areas of text on your site, is extremely important. This will help your content rank in search engines. It works when your audience searches for these or similar terms.

To find popular and relevant keywords for each of your products, use the Google Keyword Planner tool. This helps you identify the keywords and phrases that surround each product you sell. These are the terms your audience uses in search engines.

Once you have established keywords for each product, you need to use these keywords within your site’s text. Let’s find out more…

• Product/Page Title – Having the keyword for your product in your page title will help your page rank for that term. However, always remember your audience. Readability of a product title is key, so add keywords only if they make sense.

• Product Description – Your product description should be search-engine friendly, containing a smattering of keywords and phrases within the text. However, most importantly it should be readable and engaging, helping to promote and sell your product to potential customers.

• Alt-Text for Product Images – Adding the product keyword into the alt-text of each product image is a quick and easy way to give your SEO a boost.

Yoast SEO checks how well you’re using keywords. It tells you if you’ve added enough to optimize each page. It also suggests where to add more keywords. For example, in subheadings, the meta description, or the URL slug.

Ready for the next one?

 This will help you get a good balance between readable text and optimized keywords throughout your content.

Increase Audience Engagement on Your WooCommerce Site

Search engines like to see that your site is well visited and adding value to your audience. If your online store is receiving high levels of new and returning traffic, and people are engaging with your content and interacting on your site, then these factors will all help improve your SEO rankings. Here are a few strategies that you can implement to help improve audience engagement and retention on your site…

• Product Ratings and Reviews – Allowing your customers to leave ratings and reviews for products on your site not only helps with SEO, it can also help boost sales. If your WooCommerce theme lacks a ratings and reviews feature, don’t worry. You can add it using the WooCommerce Product Review Pro extension .

• Related Products – Displaying related products is an effective way to cross and up-sell. It also encourages your customers to click through to other pages on your site. This is a metric favored by search engines.

• Lead Generation – Collecting email addresses should be a focus for all online stores. Once visitors leave your site, you can stay in touch with them. Promote your products, sales, and discounts to bring them back. OptinMonster is a powerful premium lead generation tool. It helps you grow your mailing list, reduce cart abandonment, and increase sales.

Use Google Analytics to track how your audience behaves on your site. This helps you see what keeps them engaged, active, and buying. Use this information to guide future changes to your site. This will improve SEO and drive conversions.

Final Thoughts on SEO for WooCommerce

Remember, nothing is certain with Google (or the other search engines). However, if you implement the above strategies, you should see your store begin to rank more frequently for different keywords, engage with your target audience, and make sales. So, are you ready to get started?

If you need additional help in setting up your site for good SEO you can always hire us for your WooCommerce Support.

Which tips from this SEO for WooCommerce guide are you going to implement on your online store? Please share your thoughts in the comments below…