WooCommerce SEO:
As a WooCommerce shop operator, you know for sure: more traffic = more sales.
Therefore, more traffic is at the top of the strategy for success in eCommerce. And the best way to get there is still search engine optimization ( SEO ). Because whoever is easily found on Google and Co., the traffic flies to.
The problem: Between search engine algorithms, different approaches and possibilities, as well as excessive use of technical terms, it is not so easy to get a grip on this SEO topic.
This article gives you an overview and gives tips for the correct use of SEO for your WooCommerce shop.
WooCommerce SEO Tips:
- Determine your key expressions
- Choose a good domain name
- Optimize your WooCommerce homepage
- Optimize WooCommerce category pages
- Optimize WooCommerce product pages
- Improve brand visibility in WooCommerce
- Use an “SEO friendly” logo for your WooCommerce site
- Optimize WooCommerce menus
- Optimize the WooCommerce footer
- Create useful site maps with WooCommerce
- Optimize faceted navigation in WooCommerce
- Optimize the speed of WooCommerce
- Optimize the WooCommerce site itself
- The main SEO settings of Google Webmaster Tools
- Optimize images in WooCommerce
- Manage customer reviews on your WooCommerce
- Play the social networking card
- Work on your netlinking
- Take care of your content
- Sources
With SEO for WooCommerce you want to make sure that your shop and product pages are among the first results on the first page of the search results.
Studies have shown that only 4.8% of the searchers land on page 2 of the results list. On page 3 it is even a meager 1.1%. In other words, the higher the results page, the less traffic your product page generates.
The position on the first page is also significant. The same study found that the first result received an average of 32.5% of traffic. For the second result it was only 17.6%. Until the sixth result on the list, the traffic is on average less than 5%.
The motto is: rank as high as possible on the first page on Google, Yahoo and Co.
1. Keywords – The key to SEO success
If you want to start an effective WooCommerce SEO campaign, you should definitely start with a thorough research of your optimal keywords.
Now you may be thinking “I know my optimal keywords”. But are you 100% sure? Because if you don’t start with the right keywords, all the other things you do on behalf of SEO are n’t worth much. And that is because
- Your ideal customers cannot find your shop, or
- the people who are led to your shop are not your ideal customers and will not buy anything.
Researching the right keywords is very important for your WooCommerce shop. There are some tools and approaches to find the right keywords for your shop.
The most effective method to discover Keywords for WooCommerce pages
Most watchword look into instructional exercises center around “data keywords”. These are keywords that individuals type in web indexes to discover accommodating “how-to” content.
Amazon Keyword Tool Dominator
A faster – but paid – way to Amazon to scour for suitable keywords, the Keyword Tool Dominator . Simply enter your main keywords here and get dozens of suggestions for other suitable keywords.
Not only is it faster than doing it manually, the Dominator also spits out more suggestions.
SEMRush
SEMRush is an online software that shows you use your competitors and for which they have grown what keywords.
Simply enter the URL of a competitor in the SEMRush search field, click on “Organic Research” and the software lists all the keywords your competitor uses in the search engines.
The only catch: SEMRush is not cheap at $ 99 / month, but offers a lot more to boost your marketing than just the keyword search.
How to choose the right keywords for your product pages
So now you have a list of potential keywords in front of you. But what’s next? How do you know which keywords are suitable for your shop?
Search volume
Search volume is the most important factor in evaluating keywords. If no one searches for that keyword, everything else is unimportant.
The difficulty lies in determining which search volume is a “good” or even an “ideal” one. In some industries or niches, 100 key words a month are a lot. For others, 10,000 monthly searches are nothing. And some keywords are very seasonal and are searched more or less at some times than at others.
The more time you spend studying your keywords, the better your understanding of what constitutes a high or low volume for your shop in your niche.
To find out the search volume of a keyword, enter it into the Google Keyword Planner one. This is part of Google AdWords, for which you can sign up for free. You only pay when people click on your ads. The Google Keyword Planner shows you the average monthly searches for the keyword.
Keyword matching the product
Now you have found a keyword that is searched a lot in the search engines. That must be a great keyword, isn’t it?
Not necessarily.
This is because the keyword may not fit your products well. If the chosen keyword does not fully describe your product, it will hardly attract the right people to your shop and encourage them to buy. The keyword has a large search volume but the conversion does not take place.
So make sure that your shortlisted keywords fit your product like a glove.
Commercial intent
Rank as top 1 for a much sought-after keyword? Perfect.
Rank as the top 1 for a much sought-after keyword, but which only people without an intention to buy are looking for? Less perfect.
Before you finally decide on your keywords, make sure that they are also entered by people who intend to buy them. Fortunately, it’s easy with Google Keyword Planner.
Competition
The last step is to find out how difficult it will be to crack Google’s first page and top position with the shortlisted keywords.
SEMRush’s “Keyword Difficulty” helps. This unit gives you a feel for how competitive a keyword will be on Google.
The higher the number, the higher the competition for an organic search for this keyword.
If the competition for a certain keyword is very high, you have to weigh up whether its search volume is high enough and the search intent of the searchers is large enough to counteract this.
Therefore, check all the criteria listed here for all of your top keywords to find out which of them have the greatest chance of success. Remember: these are not always the most obvious keywords.
2. Website architecture – your ideal shop structure
Website architecture – how the pages are organized and arranged on your website – is an important SEO consideration for any site. However, it is particularly important for eCommerce websites. The reason is simple: eCommerce websites tend to have far more pages than the average blog or other website.
Your WooCommerce shop will most likely not have that many. But in general, the more pages your website has, the more important that the architecture makes it as easy as possible for your users and for search engines to find the most important pages of your shop quickly.
How it works?
Follow the 2 golden rules of eCommerce website architecture:
Golden rule 1: Make the architecture as simple and adaptable as possible.
Golden rule 2: No page should be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage – the fewer clicks the better.
3. On-page SEO – optimization at the page level
Next, optimize your categories and product pages. This is an important step because these two types of pages draw most of the traffic to most WooCommerce shops.
Which also makes sense. A user who enters “red Nike running shoes size 43” is guaranteed to have greater buying intentions than someone looking for “buy shoes online”.
To make your product pages as SEO-friendly as possible, pay attention to the following:
Title tag
The title tag is the page title, i.e. the name of the product page. It is also the blue first line of a Google result, which brings the visitor to the product page with one click:
Be sure to include the main keyword of the product in the title tag – a basic requirement for successful on-page SEO .
You can further optimize your title tag by adding one or more “modifiers” for more long-tail traffic. Modifiers are key words that further narrow down your keyword and make it easier for your potential customers to search. Effective modifiers are for example:
- Cheap
- offer
- Best
- On-line
- Free Shipping
Your tag title could be, for example: “Cheap horse blanket with free delivery”.
Further modifiers to optimize your title tag are so-called Click Magnet Words, such as “10% discount” or “Lowest price”. These increase your click-through rate ( CTR ). And higher CTR = more sales.
Click Magnet Words can be:
- X% discount
- lowest price
- Next day delivery
- best offer
- Guaranteed
With these Click Magnet Words in use, your tag title looks like this, for example: “Horse blankets: 20% discount and guaranteed delivery within one day on every order”.
Meta Tag Description
The Meta Description Tag Although loses more and more important for search engines, but your CTR remains very important.
The Click Magnet Words mentioned above also work for the meta tag description. The only difference is that there is room for more words in the meta tag description. You can therefore enter sentences instead of individual keywords, such as:
- The best prices for horse blankets only today.
- Save 15% on every horse blanket.
- All horse blankets now on sale.
- Get free delivery on all horse rugs only today.
- Click here for exclusive offers on horse rugs.
A meta tag description optimized with clicks is, for example, as follows: “Get the absolute best price on all horse rugs today with free delivery on all orders. Click here for all information about our exclusive offers. ”
Content of the product page
The content – in this case the product description – of a product page has a different focus for eCommerce than for blog articles or “About” pages. Yes, you need high quality content. You also need to keep an eye on your conversion.
Experts therefore recommend four important on-page SEO tactics for the product pages of your WooCommerce shop:
Tactic 1: Write descriptions of 1,000 words or more
Studies show that longer content ranks better on Google than shorter ones. This also applies to eCommerce sites. Because the more content you offer Google for review, the better the search engine understands what the page is about and the more it likes the page.
Apart from Google, of course your potential customer also understands better what your product is all about.
Sure, writing 1,000 words for each of your products can be impossible; either because you offer too many different products or your products simply don’t give so much description. In this case, experts recommend creating detailed descriptions for your 50–100 top product pages.
Tactic 2: Sprinkle the keywords 3-5 times in the text
When describing the product, make sure that you have inserted the main keyword 3-5 times in the text.
This is also about ensuring that Google understands what your product page is mainly about. For example, if your long-tail keyword is “blue horse blanket for cold-blooded animals”, this phrase should be used at least three times in your product description.
Attention! More than five times is not necessary. Google penalizes pages that obviously use a keyword or phrase too often with poorer ranking. The idea behind it: the author was only interested in being found, not in order to offer the reader valuable content.
Tactic 3: Use short, keyword-rich URLs
An analysis of 1 million Google search results showed a clear connection between the length of URLs and their rankings. Short URLs tend to land higher on the first page of Google results lists than long URLs.
As a WooCommerce shop, your product page URLs will be slightly longer than on traditional websites, since you are likely to include the product category and any subcategories. For example, it looks like this: https://muster.de/ategory/subategory/produkt.html .
This is perfectly fine as long as you keep the keywords of your categories and subcategories as short and targeted as possible.
Tactic 4: Generously link to important internal pages of your shop
Strategic internal linking is a best practice in eCommerce, for which you should definitely take your time. Above all, you want to link from easy-to-find pages to high-priority pages.
4. Content marketing – solutions and answers around the product
Like any “normal” website, eCommerce sites can significantly increase their traffic and sales through good content marketing. We have a step-by-step guide on how you can implement this for your WooCommerce shop.
Step 1: Find out where your target customers are hanging out online
Spending time with your customers gives you helpful insights into the thoughts, dreams, fears and desires of your target group. This is of course hardly possible for an online shop operator in the physical world – but online, too, your target customers often hang out in a few specific “places”.
You just have to find out where.
Forums and social media can provide you with a first clue; maybe there are one or more forums or Facebook groups for your offer.
Step 2: Learn common words and phrases
Once you’ve found your customers’ online hangouts, watch them for a while. Keep your eyes open for words and phrases that you use to describe your problems and questions.
These words or phrases represent long-tail keywords that your target audience enters into Google when they don’t want to buy products but when they are looking to answer questions or find solutions to problems. You can write coveted blog content around these keywords.
Step 3: Compose excellent content around these keywords
Now comes the point where you can use the ideal keywords found to create the best content for your blog without exception.
Learn here how to create a create traffic generating blog article .
Step 4: distribute your excellent content
The Internet is an extremely “loud” and extremely full medium these days. If the Internet were a physical place, you could compare it to a popular fair where many traders sell their goods.
Anyone who does not advertise themselves and their products here and does not display them in a way that is clearly visible to strolling visitors, is selling less than a stand owner who nicely presents and skillfully describes his goods. It is exactly the same with their content.
If you “lay it out” and distribute it in places where your prospects are bustling, you are guaranteed to read it more than if you wait for someone to enter the keywords and click on your link on Google.
Logical, isn’t it?
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is important for all websites – but doubly important for eCommerce sites. These usually consist of many pages. A “small” eCommerce shop can consist of several thousand pages. And the more pages, the higher the chances of problems from the technical side.
A regular check of the technical SEO of your WooCommerce shop is therefore best practice in eCommerce.
You can also identify and correct some problems yourself.
Problem 1: Too many pages
Thousands of pages in your shop can turn into a technical SEO nightmare. But some shops have a lot of products and accordingly many product pages. Sometimes even every product variation has its own URL .
The solution
Identify the pages that can be deleted. Usually 80% of an eCommerce shop comes from 20% of the products – according to the well-known 80 ⁄ 20 principle. And 60% of the products have mostly not made any sales over the past year .
Instead of spending the effort to improve and optimize these product pages, it is usually better to simply delete them, give them a ” noindex” or combine them in an overview page.
For many eCommerce shops, this “dead weight” accounts for up to 10% of the website. In some cases it is up to 50%. Such product pages hang like a block on the leg and make effective SEO difficult.
If you have such problem pages under control – ideally deleted or tagged with noindex – you can start to repair and optimize the other pages.
Problem 2: duplicate content
Duplicate or even duplicate content is one of the most common eCommerce SEO problems – and one that your shop can cost its ranking on the Google results pages.
There can be many reasons for duplicate content:
- A separate URL is created for each version of the product or category.
- The same text modules with more than 100 words appear on several pages.
- The same product description is used for several pages, for example if a new product page is created for each product variation.
The solution
You can save pages that appear as a double page ” noindexen “. For example, if your category filters generate unique URLs, noindex these URLs problem solved.
You can also use ” Canonical Tags “. This tells a search engine that certain pages are copies of another page. If a search engine recognizes this canonical tag, it does not consider this page as a “unique” page.
Finally, you now need to create 100% unique content for all indexed pages that do not have a canonical tag.
Yes, that’s a lot of work, especially for large eCommerce shops. But it is necessary if you want to compete with eCommerce giants like Amazon, which more or less automatically end up in the first place in the result lists.
Problem 3: site speed
Site Speed is one of the few confirmed by Google signals its search algorithm. But site speed is not only important for your WooCommerce SEO : it also has a direct impact on your sales.
Radware found during research that long load times increase have of shopping basket cancellations by almost 30% result.
Long loading times can have different reasons:
- The use of high-resolution images
- Slow hosting and server
The solution
You can handle both problems with a few tips and tricks quite easily and relatively inexpensively:
- Optimize image file sizes by compression.
- Boost loading times with a content delivery network (and at the same time make your shop more secure from attacks and hackers).
- Invest in an upgrade of your hosting provider.
That was a lot of information at once, wasn’t it? And implementing everything will definitely cost you some time and effort. But it’s worth it! When used correctly, the explained SEO strategies increase the traffic on your WooCommerce shop – and thus also your sales.