WooCommerce SEO Tutorial For Beginners

In this tutorial, you’ll learn best practices for optimizing your WooCommerce store for SEO.

1. Optimize Your Product Page Titles

First on the list is product page SEO, and for a very good reason. Product pages are the most important pages of your store, and you want to rank them higher in search results.

Whatever you write in the <title></title> tag of a product page is shown in the search engine results pages (SERPS), and it’s the first element that crawlers read.

To make your life easier, you can install the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin. This will add a section to all your product pages where you can optimize titles, meta descriptions, and slugs.

An SEO Friendly page title should:

Accurately describe the product or service you are selling. The title gives search engines and users a big clue about what to expect when they visit a page.

Keep the length between 50 and 60 characters—the average number of characters displayed in Google search results.

Uniqueness is very important - Each product in your store should have a unique title. Having more than one product with the same title will confuse search engines, and this can negatively impact your exposure in search.

Be different from what is already on the first page of Google – This is crucial if you want to increase your chances of ranking high for a ‘selling keyword’.

Before you write a product title, open Google and search for your product keywords. See what is available on the first page and try to make your product titles different. Google will not show the same title more than once, so make sure that your title is not a duplicate of what is already out there.

You can differentiate your titles by including benefits like ‘Free Shipping’, which makes the title enticing to click and different from the rest.

Include SEO Keywords – Before creating a title, do your keyword research and identify which SEO keywords you want your product pages to rank for.

Then, search Google for those keywords, see what is already there, and craft your title to include those keywords while being unique, descriptive, and enticing for users to click.

This is the same step as above, but I added it separately to stress that your product titles should not only be based on general search terms but also on keywords that have a decent search volume and clear user intent.

Keep your domain name on the right of the title – It is common to include your domain or brand name in a product title, but it’s better to keep it on the right part.

Start the title with the most important message: the product name, characteristics, and benefits, and keep the site name at the end.

Here is an example to understand this better:

2. Add Meta Descriptions to All Products

In addition to taking care of the product titles, you need to provide custom meta descriptions for all your products.

You can do this by filling the META DESCRIPTION box of the Yoast SEO plugin while editing a product in WooCommerce.

What you need to know about product meta descriptions is the following:

It’s up to Google to decide whether or not they will show the text you will provide or craft their own.

Usually, they create custom meta descriptions using text found on the page.

Nevertheless, having unique descriptions for all your products is still important.

Product Meta Descriptions should be less than 160 characters – The average number of characters shown in a search snippet.

Include keywords, product descriptions, and benefits. Use the 160 characters wisely. Do not repeat what is already in the title; instead, try using similar keywords to provide more benefits.

Here is an example of a perfectly optimized meta description:

3. Configure Your Product URLS

Another element that needs your attention is the product URLs. The first thing to do is to check your WordPress settings and ensure that product permalinks are correctly configured.

From the WordPress admin menu, select SETTING > PERMALINKS. Scroll to the bottom to find the PRODUCT PERMALINKS section.

This is the place to define the permalink of your products.

Since WooCommerce is a WordPress add-on, and to avoid conflicts with existing WordPress pages, all your product URLs should start with a unique identifier.

This can be the word ‘product’ or any other identifier you believe is relevant to the products or services you are selling.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I have set my product permalinks to be:

/products/product_category/product_name

For example, this is the URL for my SEO Course:

https://www.reliablesoft.net/academy/seo-courses-bundle/

This way I can add more products and courses without creating conflicts and this structure is also SEO friendly.

You can follow the same pattern for your WooCommerce shop to ensure that your WooCommerce installation will not conflict with your WordPress posts, pages, or other plugins.

Besides taking care of the product permalink structure, you also need to optimize the actual product URLs i.e. the URL of each of your products.

You can do this by changing the product permalink while EDITING a product.

Some guidelines for making SEO-friendly URLs:

• Use dashes (-) to separate the words that make up a URL
• Keep it short and descriptive
• Avoid stop words like ‘an’, ‘the’, ’and’ etc
• Include keywords
• Include the product name and most important characteristics
• Keep unnecessary information at the end of the URL

Here are a couple of examples of optimized WooCommerce product URLS:

https://example.com/engagement-rings/14k-white-gold

https://example.com/books/fiction/the-end-of-the-world-123bs

4. Optimize the Product H1 Tag

The H1 Tag is what is shown on the product page. It can be the same or different than the page title.

You can use the H1 tag to provide more info about the product without worrying about the 60-character limit of the page title.

5. Provide For Unique Product Content

In general, one of the biggest problems of eCommerce websites is duplicate content in product descriptions.

This is a huge SEO problem because if your product content is not unique, it gives no incentive to Google to rank your pages high in the results.

Especially if you have the same product content as Amazon or other big online retailers, you have no chance of appearing anywhere close to the first page of Google.

So, the first thing to remember is that you need to make the best possible effort to write unique product descriptions for all your products.

Let’s see the best way to do that:

The top part (short description): Google considers content shown above the fold more important than content found in the lower parts of a page.

To take advantage of this, make sure that:

• You provide a UNIQUE short description for all your products.
• You Include the product name and essential characteristics
• You Include a summary of the product benefits
• You include the keywords you want to rank for

The product-long description: This is the place to provide more detailed information about your products.

Follow these best SEO practices:

Make your product content unique - I know it’s tiring to read about the importance of product uniqueness again, but it’s necessary to understand this and make it your top priority.

I know that if you have similar products, it is difficult to have 100% unique content for each of them, but at least try to have pieces of content on a product page that are not found on any other pages of your website.

For example, if you’re selling the same product in different sizes and colors and decide to have separate pages for each, then add images of the product in that color and size with proper ALT text and captions on each product page.

You can also add user-generated content (reviews) specific to that product (like Amazon).

Use LSI or similar keywords - Remember that besides providing a description that can convince users to buy your product, you must also give search engines the right signals about the page's content.

In the product long description, you need to use long tail keywords, related keywords, and semantically related keywords (also known as LSI keywords). These keywords should be the results of your keyword research. Read this guide for step-by-step instructions.

6. Provide An ALT TEXT For All Images

Any images you add on your product page, either in the product slider or product descriptions, should be optimized for SEO.

Optimized images increase your chances of achieving high rankings in Google image search and Pinterest search.

When adding an image to WooCommerce using WordPress's MEDIA function, you can specify a title, ALT Text, Caption, and Description.

Title: Use the name of the product (without dashes)

ALT TEXT: The most important element for image SEO. In the alt text describe the product shown in the image. Try to intelligently incorporate keywords in your text but avoid using only keywords.

Caption: Write a caption and ensure it is shown correctly below the image. The caption can be the same as the ALT text or different (recommended).

Description: This is optional. It is not used for SEO purposes.

Here is a summary of all image SEO guidelines:

7. Upload Product Videos on YouTube

Videos are a very useful tool, especially for selling physical products. You can add videos to your product description section to demonstrate the product features to customers.

SEO-wise, you should consider uploading your videos to YouTube.

Uploading and streaming videos from WordPress will slow down your website. The best solution is to embed them on your product page by copying and pasting the video URL from your YouTube channel.

This way, you also have more chances of getting organic traffic from YouTube searches.

8. Enable and Optimize Breadcrumbs

By default, WooCommerce has the breadcrumb trail enabled for all pages. If not, you can change your WooCommerce theme or use a custom plugin (like Yoast SEO).

Breadcrumbs are very useful for a WooCommerce shop. They help users navigate to the product categories to view similar products, and search engines use them to better understand the site structure.

In terms of SEO, you need to ensure that your breadcrumb trail has valid structured data.

9. Revise Your Shop Structure

So far, we have covered the steps to optimizing your products, but you should not forget about your shop site structure.

A simple and well-organized site structure makes crawling faster and makes your website eligible for Google sitelinks and product maintenance easier.

Optimizing your WooCommerce site structure is not difficult. All you have to do is:

Create a Hierarchical structure with no more than 3 levels - Configure your permalink structure (as explained above) to have the following hierarchy:

/products/product_category/product_subcategory (optional)/ product

This way, you can organize your products into categories and optionally subcategories and still make the products reachable from the homepage in 3 clicks or less.

Ensure your menu and breadcrumbs accurately represent the URL structure - Your main menu and breadcrumb trail should follow your site structure. For example, if you choose to have sub-categories, your top menu should list the main categories, and click or mouse over to display the subcategories.

The same goes for the breadcrumb trail. If a product is part of a sub-category, that should be shown on the breadcrumb menu.

10. Work On Your Category Pages

I’ve mentioned above that one of the most significant issues of ecommerce websites is duplicate content, which is true for category pages as well.

Unlike an e-commerce website, an online shop needs category pages. These are very important for usability purposes and also contribute to SEO.

WooCommerce uses the same category concept as WordPress. A product category is an archive page, like a blog's category page.

You can find the CATEGORY settings under PRODUCTS.

A WooCommerce category, by default, shows the product name, thumbnail, and price of products in a particular category.

This is not enough. If you want your product category pages to rank in search, you need to edit your categories and add some content (introductory paragraph) to help Google understand what kind of products the particular category is selling.

Here is an example of an optimized product category:

If you have paging enabled in category pages, you must provide a canonical URL for each sub-page pointing to the main category pages.

This is an advanced SEO concept, but don’t worry. If you have Yoast SEO installed, it will set the canonical URLs automatically.

11. Submit a Product Sitemap to Google

A WordPress website with WooCommerce enabled has many pages, but not all pages are important for rankings.

For example, you don’t need to have your ‘checkout’, ‘cart’, ‘order received’, and ‘my account’ pages submitted to Google.

You don’t usually need product tag pages or author archives.

As part of the WooCommerce SEO optimization, you need to optimize your XML sitemap by including only the important pages for your website (homepage, product pages, product category pages, blog) and have unique content.

12. Add Product Structured Data

WooCommerce has built-in support for schema markup. This is great news because schemas and structured data are among the best ways to describe your content (and products) to search engines in a way they can understand.

They are also used in Google search results to create rich snippets that can lead to higher CTR and more Google traffic.

A default WooCommerce installation (with the Yoast SEO Plugin Installed), provides for the following schemas:

• Website
• Organization
• Product
• Reviews
• Breadcrumbs
• Images

First, open the structured data testing tool and check your homepage, product category, and product pages.

If you have no errors or warnings, you don’t have to do anything else. In the majority of cases, these are all the schemas you need to implement.

If your products contain warnings, you should probably edit them and provide the necessary information. If they contain errors, the best solution is to hire a developer to look at the problems and fix them.

13. Improve Your Site Speed

Loading speed is a known ranking factor and can influence sales. Several studies show a direct relationship between the time it takes for a website to load and conversions.

What you can do to speed up your WooCommerce site is the following:

• Ensure you are running the latest version of WordPress and WooCommerce.
• Upgrade your PHP to the latest stable version. Check your hosting provider for options.
• Ensure you have your own VPS hosting and are not using shared hosting.
• If you have a lot of images, use a Content delivery network (CDN).
• Avoid installing too many plugins. Plugins are great, but too many plugins can slow down a website.
• Review the WooCommerce System Status Report (found under WooCommerce > Status) and follow any recommendations.
• Use a caching plugin that is compatible with WooCommerce.

14. Check Mobile-Friendliness

Whether your WooCommerce website is mobile-friendly depends on the theme you are using. This has nothing to do with WooCommerce's core functionality.

What is essential to know is that more than 60% of searches and a large majority of eCommerce transactions are now executed through mobile devices.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, you minimize your chances of getting valuable SEO traffic or making sales.

So, before you do anything else, run a mobile-friendly test and fix any issues.

Make no mistake, this step is not optional but mandatory. Many of the WooCommerce shops we have worked with were optimized for desktops only, and no care was taken for mobile. As a result, they were making half the sales they could have made if their website was mobile-friendly.

15. Promote Your Store

Working on your technical and on-page SEO is only part of the puzzle. You must do a lot of work on your off-page SEO to achieve top rankings for highly competitive ‘buying’ keywords.

Off-Page SEO has many parts, including:

• Link Building – building high-quality links from trusted websites.
• Brand Promotion – getting people to talk about your brand in forums and other websites.
• Social Media Promotion – creating a community in social media networks that talks about your brand and products.
• Video Promotion – Publishing optimized video content on YouTube.

Off-page SEO is one of the most challenging areas of SEO, and it becomes even tougher when you have to promote an online store.

The reason is that it's difficult to get people to link to your product pages and talk about your products on social media unless, of course, you go rival.

One way to overcome these obstacles is through content marketing, particularly blogging. Starting a blog is a great way to increase your exposure in search engines and social networks, which can lead to more traffic and sales.

You can read my Ecommerce Blogging guide, which details how to structure your blog and what to write about.

Key Learnings

WooCommerce is SEO friendly, but that does not mean any WooCommerce website can rank high in Google without working on your technical SEO, content, site structure, and off-page SEO.

When optimizing your WooCommerce store, I suggest you follow the steps in the order explained above.

Your top priority is your products. These are what you sell, and you want to attract search engine traffic and make sales on these pages.

Spend time thinking about your product titles and URLs and working on the product content. Provide users (and search engines) with as much information as possible in a language they can understand.

Do your keyword research, find out what keywords people use for your products, and ensure that these are found in all SEO-optimized elements.

Work on mobile friendliness and page speed and ensure your website is mobile-friendly and fast.

Last but not least, once you finish with on-site SEO, start thinking about how you can best promote your brand on the Internet (on other websites and social networks). Having an active blog with quality content can solve many problems with website promotion.