Woocommerce SEO improvement: 10 Tips to Boost Your Rankings

When you’re trying to drive more traffic to your WooCommerce store you’re going to have a variety of different routes to pursue. You have paid traffic, growing your social media channels, and more.
But, one form of traffic can not only be very high-quality, but it’s long-lasting too. If you couldn’t guess we’re talking about search engine traffic.
Ranking your WooCommerce store in the search engines will take some work. But, since SEO traffic is long-term it’s something you’ll reap the benefits of for years to come.

Below we offer 10 of our best tips for boosting your WooCommerce store’s search engine rankings.

1. Optimize Your Images
Of course, you need high-quality images of your products. However, having high-quality images isn’t enough.
If you don’t optimize your images properly they could actually be doing you a disservice. Large images, even if they’re high-quality can dramatically impact your website’s loading speeds. The slower your site loads the worse it’ll do in the search engines.
Optimizing your images requires a two-step process:
Reduce the overall image file size without compromising quality. Using a plugin like WP Smush will do the trick.
Optimize your images for certain keywords. This includes changing your image filename, title, and alt description to reflect your targeted keyword, while still remaining true to the image.


2. Avoid Duplicate Content
Having duplicate content across your WooCommerce site can lead to a rankings nightmare. However, a lot of larger WooCommerce sites end up making this mistake time and time again.
It can be difficult to come up with creative and enticing product descriptions for every product in your store, especially when you have hundreds of similar products. But, it’s absolutely necessary.
Think about it, your product description also helps to convince your visitors to actually buy your products too. Spend time making all of your product descriptions unique.

3. Use Rich Snippets
By using rich snippets you’ll improve the appearance of your search engine listings, which can help to increase your CTR. This means that more people will click through to your site, even without any movement in your rankings.
Essentially, rich snippets will add additional HTML to your pages, which gives the search engines more information about what your page is about.
There are a lot of different rich snippets available, including types that are specifically for eCommerce sites.
There are some WooCommerce extensions available that’ll add Schema markup to your site, but some other solid plugins include the Schema and All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin.

4. Use an SEO Plugin
If you’re really trying to improve your SEO, then a solid on-page optimization plugin will help a lot. Out of the box WordPress and WooCommerce are pretty SEO-friendly. But, if you’re looking to compete it can be a good idea to do everything in your power to improve your rankings.
There are a lot of different plugins available, but one of the best is Yoast WooCommerce SEO. This is a premium plugin, but it expands upon it’s incredible Yoast SEO plugin and adds features specifically for WooCommerce.
Some of the things you’ll be able to do with this plugin include:
Creating rich Pinterest-specific images
Adding breadcrumbs to reflect your site’s structure
Improving your sitemap for easier search engine crawling
Additional focus keywords per page
And more


5. Choose a Quality Host
A lot of people think that WooCommerce will work fine with any shared host. This might be true if you only have a few products to sell and you don’t get that much traffic.
But, if you’re serious about scaling your site, or have a high volume or products or traffic, then a WooCommerce specific host is something you can’t live without.
By choosing a WooCommerce focused host you’ll get a hosting platform that’s been completely optimized for WooCommerce. This will help to improve your speed and performance, which will have a positive impact on your visitors and your search engine rankings.

6. Make Sure Your Store Is Mobile-Friendly
In Google’s eyes mobile matters a lot.
To start your site needs to pass the Google mobile friendliness test. if you’ve passed this test with flying colors that’s a great start. But, it still isn’t enough.
You need to think about improving your mobile user experience factors. By having positive user experience indicators your rankings will improve.
This includes doing things like designing your site with mobile users in mind first. Google recently released an update that they’re rolling out a mobile-first index. This means that the performance and user experience of the mobile version of your site will influence how other versions of your site rank.
Another idea is to integrate AMP. Although there can be some issues with WooCommerce it will help to improve the performance of your mobile pages. There are some plugins which will help to make the integration easier like the WP AMP and AMP for WordPress plugins.

7. Organize Your Site Structure
A lot of WooCommerce sites are notorious for having a confusing site structure.
Your site structure is responsible for two things: making it easier for the search engine bots to crawl your site, and improving your user experience.
Essentially, your site structure involves the organization and layout of your site’s content, including your inventory to make it easily accessible and intuitive.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind:
Every page on your woocommerce site should be accessible from within 3-4 clicks of the homepage.
Regularly interlink your content and product pages together.
If you have a lot of products, then it’s a good idea to create category silos which every product page will sit underneath.
Consider simplifying your overall menu structure. Large menus with too many drop-down options can be confusing.

Finally, you’ll want to avoid any broken links. You can install a plugin like Broken Link Checker, which will analyze your broken links. Or, use an online tool like the Online Broken Link Checker. If you’ve recently changed up your URL structure, or you’ve used a lot of external links, then it’s a good practice to regularly check and update and links that are no longer working.

8. Consider Starting a Blog
A blog isn’t an absolute necessity for a WooCommerce store, but it can help your rankings.
Running your WooCommerce store already takes a lot of time and energy. But, by having a blog you can amplify the time you’ve already spent.
For example, with a regular blog, you give visitors a reason to come back to your site. Plus, the posts on your blog can be a great way to generate links and social shares. You can then pass on the rank juice of these posts onto your products and other pages through internal linking.
Not only that with a regular blog you can actually improve your sales process. A blog gives you a place to create content that drives sales. Think things like an in-depth case study, a series of how-to posts, or product demonstrations. Or, you can even use it as a vehicle to announce new product launches.

9. Optimize Your Headers and Product Descriptions
For every page, post, and product on your site, you’ll have a page title. It’s important to optimize this title for both your target keyword and to encourage click-throughs. Basically, this means you’re optimizing your titles for the search engines and for readers at the same time.
Here are a few tools to help you brainstorm and create better headlines:
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Inbound Now Idea Generator
Emotional Headline Analyzer

You’ll also need to think about optimizing and improving your product descriptions.
Your product descriptions should include emotion to help create desire around your product, while also using logic to describe technical details of the product and show why it’s the best.
Also, use formatting through out your product descriptions to make them more readable.
Hopefully, you have a better understanding of how you can better optimize your WooCommerce store to rank in the search engines.

10. Improve Your URL Structure
Is your current URL structure long and confusing? Having long URLs that are filled with complex characters can actually come across as spammy.
Do you use the classic structure with prefixes category/your-category and /products/your-product? (bad choice!)
Part of this has to do with adjusting your permalinks, so they reflect the simplest organization possible. But, it also means that your product, category, site pages, and any blog posts have also been optimized for a given keyword.
When in doubt make sure that your URL structure is logical, as simple as possible and without the prefixes (/category/ and /products/) that woocommerse imposes on you by default.
For this last point our "Woocommerce Clean Friendly Urls" pack comes to your aid (click here for more details)