The Complete WooCommerce SEO Guide to Boost Your Traffic

By siliconindia  |  Saturday, 16 January 2021, 06:22:16 PM IST

The Complete WooCommerce SEO Guide to Boost Your Traffic

Using Woo-Commerce for your e-commerce store is great. But having a website on Woo-Commerce doesn’t mean it will rank on the first page of search engines like Google. To rank your online store, you need a complete WooCommerce SEO guide by which you can boost traffic on the website. SEO helps in reaching out to a wider audience and increase sales as well. In this article, we will deep dive into the WooCommerce SEO guide to know how to bring traffic to your online store. 

WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the practice of increasing web traffic on your site by bringing your website on Google’s (or other search engines) first page. Through this, potential customers come to your website and make a purchase. It is also done for brand awareness. Coming to your WooCommerce online store, Google will show your products on the search engine result’s page when someone will search for it.  

TOP 5 WOOCOMMERCE SEO PLUGINS FOR STORE OPTIMIZATION

1.      Rank Math SEO Plugin

Rank Math is one of the best WordPress and WooCommerce SEO plugin. You can download it for free and start using it to rank your WooCommerce online store. It has customized SEO settings, controls, and features by which you can select how you want your website to appear in search with structured data. You can run a detailed SEO analysis on your site to identify issues and correct them to boost SEO. It also helps in tracking keyword ranking for your products.

The themes like Schema and eCommerce by MyThemeShop are also useful to boost the SEO of your WooCommerce online store as they both are SEO-friendly. 

2.      Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is another WooCommerce SEO plugin having more than 5 million downloads. Through this plugin, you can get to know about the issues related to SEO on your website and can rectify them. It has lots of options and features to improve the SEO of your website. You can try its free version, and if you love it, then don’t forget to buy its premium plan. It helps in increasing reader’s engagement, attract more visitors through Social media and from Google.

3.      WP Smushit

Your WooCommerce online store requires high-quality pictures of the products that you are selling. But, when you use high-quality pictures it takes a long time to load the picture that affects your website’s speed. Therefore, to rectify this you need WP Smush Plugin which helps in speeding up your WordPress site by resizing and compressing all your images without making them fade. 

4.      All In One Schema Rich Snippets

All In One Schema Rich Snippets provides you a brief synopsis of your website page in the search results of different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. It also provides you an overview of the entire content on the page by which you can check whether the content is looking good or not. The plugin is also helpful in optimizing content for SERPs and improving CTR. 

5.      Broken Line Checker

Broken pages are one that you had added in the past but now have taken down. Such pages show 404 error on product pages. It results in a negative point for your WooCommerce online store as they are useless. The Broken Line Checker is downloaded for such pages to bypass such internet penalties. This tool also monitors links in comments and posts. It easily identifies the links that don’t work on your website. This WooCommerce SEO plugin helps in optimizing your WooCommerce store. 

FEW SEO SETTINGS IN WOOCOMMERCE

Title and Tagline - The first step of SEO on your WooCommerce store is to decide and write a suitable Site Title and Tagline. Your Site title will be your brand name, and the tagline must be related to your products that you are selling on the WooCommerce store.  

Your Site Should be Indexable – Once you have added the title and tagline for your website, now move to Settings>General in your WordPress admin area and check if the Search Engine Visibility is unchecked. It must remain to uncheck otherwise, it will discourage search engines from indexing your website. 

Opt for an SSL Certificate - If you have a WooCommerce store on WordPress, then you must have an SSL certificate to make your customers trust your site. However, this is now compulsory with many web hosts in the WordPress/WooCommerce hosting industry. You must install an SSL certificate and make sure it is valid to boost the SEO of your online store. 

Canonicalization – To prevent duplicate content issues, it is recommended to use a canonical tag. It is a way of informing search engines that a specific URL is a master copy of a page. Your WooCommerce online store should not be accessible from multiple URLs. It becomes more important when you have multiple pages on your website that have similar content as this may result in a duplicate content issue. 

Remove Base and Category Base -You should remove unwanted prefixes, such as a shop, product, or any other from the URLs to make your URL easy to remember by your user. It will also help SERPs to easily access the URLs of your WooCommerce store. It will help to have a better user experience. 

WooCommerce applies /product-category/ automatically before the actual category of your product that you can check in your permalink. It must be removed as this makes the URL longer. The shorter the URL, the better for users and SERPs.

Remove Generator Tag from WooCommerce- When you enable the WooCommerce Generator tag, it prevents WooCommerce from loading a meta generator tag from the header of your site’s code. It will disable the WooCommerce version that you are using as it is of no usage for the customer or visitor of your e-commerce site.

Remove Schema Markup- Doing this will disable Schema Markup on shop archive pages. The use of Schema Markup is recommended by Google. Don’t use any other Schema type on shop archive pages. 

Remove Snippet Data- Disabling the option of Snippet Data is also recommended by Google’s guidelines. It will prevent Schema data from being added to your product category pages. 

OTHER WOOCOMMERCE SEO TIPS

  1. Keyword in Product Description – Make sure you have added keywords in the product description for which you want people to show this product. You can use Keyword Planner or UberSuggest to help you in selecting the right keyword for your product. A good description of the products on your WooCommerce site will help in getting high ranks.
  2. Easy Navigation – Make sure to create easy navigation for the users between your pages. Easier the navigation on your site, the higher the chances of an increase in ranking of your WooCommerce store. 
  3. High Speed – Ensure to check the speed of your website. It should not take much time to load the page. Even a 1-second delay can affect your website. WooCommerce SEO plugins help you in preventing such issues.

Conclusion

SEO is important to optimize WooCommerce stores and hence it should not neglect. It helps you in ranking your store higher in SERPs. Using SEO plugins helps in removing all the issues of your website related to SEO and it also helps in enhancing user experience.

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