WooCommerce is the most famous eCommerce technology among the top 1 million websites. Online store owners keep using WooCommerce because of its SEO benefits and advanced eCommerce functionalities.
Want to learn about WooCommerce in detail before using it? Here, you will learn the most important things about WooCommerce. Let’s dive in.
What Makes WooCommerce SEO Different
WooCommerce SEO is different as it is within WordPress. You are required to do almost the same things for optimizing WooCommerce eCommerce and WordPress websites. The SEO benefits of WooCommerce within WordPress include:
- Analytics: WooCommerce has extended analytics and connects to Google Analytics, and thus, you can combine first and third-party visitor data.
- Content: Mixes WooCommerce’s eCommerce functionality with WordPress content management.
- Organization: Organizes and manages product categories, attributes, and tags.
WooCommerce Best Practices
WooCommerce and WordPress best practices usually align with advanced eCommerce SEO best practices. Here are some of the best WooCommerce practices:
- Technical management
- On-page and off-page eCommerce SEO
How to Get Started with WooCommerce?
You should make sure to get ready before you optimize your WooCommerce store. Build an action plan and goals before you start with WooCommerce.
Here are the steps you can take when starting with WooCommerce:
- Use Google Analytics as a primary analytics data source and WordPress platform
- Set up transactional emails to earn high returns on your SEO investment, and drive traffic to your website and into the shopping cart
- Find which keywords, phrases, terms, and topics are related to topics that you want to rank high on SERPs.
Technical SEO
To boost the technical SEO of your WooCommerce websites, you need to consider certain technical factors. Find them below:
Indexing
Ensure you have a proper XML sitemap and robots.txt file so your content gets found online. Use the Yoast plugin or similar tool to modify the settings of XML sitemap and robots.txt files. Yoast offers options to add or remove from those files, and thus you don’t require touching the code or manually adjusting those files. You can change settings and then submit them for validation via the Console/Webmaster Tools.
Page Experience
Google considers many data points and practices on page load times, website speed, and other factors, which Google considers for page experience. Check the core web vitals and page load times to confirm your website has fast-loading pages that don’t ruin the image and content quality for users. The core web vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Accessibility
You should make your content accessible to users, including visually impaired people. The coding should follow ADA standards and include ALT attributes and other cues. You can use a third-party tool like PowerMapper.com to audit pages and get the required helpful information to adjust page elements and meet legal standards.
Structured Data
Adding extra context cues to categorize, catalog, and mark up your subject matter is crucial. Do it whenever possible to get precise information for your industry, mainly using certain product attributes. You can use the Yoast plugin to add basic schema markup to your website pages.
Canonical URLs and Permalinks
Online stores can have internal complications with duplicate content. WordPress and WooCommerce generate multiple URLs for a single page. You should include a single “canonical” version for the search engines to index, display in the search results, and aggregate all link values.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are links on interior pages that show users and a search engine where they are on your website depending on the navigation or depth. They are usually coded in your WordPress website theme by default and help users to see how much they have browsed a specific product and blog category, or other interior section. The Yoast plugin is perfect to add schema markup for WordPress/WooCommerce.
On-Page SEO
To improve on-page SEO for your website, you should consider the factors below:
URLs
Add vital contextual keywords to your URLs. Use WordPress’ native page naming conventions and tools to add relevant keywords to the URL string.
Tags
The heading tags on all web pages should have optimized titles, heading tags, and meta descriptions. Implement tactics to create tags with data-driven content as and where required if you have several products. Write meta descriptions and titles on every page using Yoast.
Copy
Try to draft the best web copy. Avoid duplicate and optimize content to maintain high standards and reach maximum target customers.
Images
Image file attributes are an area that allows you to add relevant, and contextual keywords describing the image’s subject. Adding relevant keywords is crucial for product images of category-level images and content on your website.
Product Reviews
UGC can help add contextual copy to strengthen the product page copy. You add context and other types of schema elements with product reviews.
Off-Page SEO
E-commerce SEO requires off-page factors to be optimized like technical and on-page content. Here are the factors to consider for off-page SEO:
Links
Add high-quality, and industry/context-relevant inbound links to products, and categories.
Social Media
Link to your website from social media content builds context and connections to get links and mentions.
Engagement
Find opportunities for engagement and mentions online.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, this post helped you in learning the most important things about WooCommerce. All the significant benefits of WordPress for SEO translate to WooCommerce, as do many of the eCommerce SEO best practices. You can find many Magento eCommerce websites that are extremely optimized and own SERPs and their industries.
WooCommerce can be a smart investment to upgrade and grow your online store. It is much more affordable to implement than some enterprise solutions, and more feature-rich than some of those platforms that are claimed to be easy to set up, and delivers a richer overall UX. Moreover, WooCommerce offers SEO benefits of WordPress and WooCommerce combined. So, choose WooCommerce with no second thoughts to enjoy its benefits and thrive in your online store.