5 Tips to Optimize Your WooCommerce Store for SEO

WooCommerce SEO isn’t a magic setting that you flip on after uploading all of your products. Sadly, it’s in the details. So, roll up your sleeves. We have work to do.

The first step for optimizing your WooCommerce store is accepting the list of digital chores that come with owning an eCommerce site.

WooCommerce SEO Tip 1 – Speed is Paramount

Fast and reliable hosting is a key component to SEO for WooCommerce sites. Why? Because people are impatient. Sorry to say it but it’s true. If they’re ready leave your site in less than 3 seconds, then you can’t afford to lose a single millisecond. 

Think of your WooCommerce site as an Olympic sprinter. The 100m dash now has a record of less than ten seconds thanks to Usain Bolt – 9.58 seconds to be exact. In 1896 when the 100m dash was introduced to the Olympics the winning time was 12.2 seconds. In 1900 that record time finally got below 11 seconds at 10.8, dropped to 10.6 twelve years later, and dipped below ten seconds in 1968. Milliseconds. Hundredths and tenths of seconds are the difference between gold and silver; silver and bronze. 

In a crowded eCommerce market, the speed at which your site renders, matters. 

Hot Tip from RankMath SEO: “Once you’ve settled on a design that’s suitable for your store, be sure to test using Google PageSpeed Insights as this is how Google assesses page speed (a known ranking factor).”

WooCommerce SEO Tip 2 – Get Technical with the Technicalities

SEO is where art (copywriting) meets science (tech). So, get familiar with the technicalities. This includes ensuring you have a simple permalink structure, keywords are used in the slugs, are using canonical links correctly, and – last but not least – allowing your site to be indexed by Google. (Hey, we’ve seen this in the past.)

Hot Tip from WPBeginner: Customize the SEO slug (permalink) according to keywords. “For example, for men’s leather wallet, we’d recommend making the slug be: bi-fold-brown-mens-leather-wallet-by-brandname.”

WooCommerce SEO Tip 3 – Write Clever Product Descriptions 

Clever product descriptions are not keyword-stuffed product descriptions. We’ve all seen the posts, articles, blog posts, content, content marketing, and product descriptions, that list every attribute in every possible way, form, shape, and description. Okay. We made our point. It’s really hard to read, right?

Write your product description with humans in mind. What questions will your product descriptions answer? Remember that SEO is often about making your text the answer to a user’s question. Write in complete sentences. Writing in complete sentences gives your product description a higher chance of being an answer to a user’s question and showing up as a featured snippet. You don’t have to write every sentence that way – that’d be so boring. But you get the gist.

Hot Tip from YoastSEO: “In researching, search for your product in Google and see which competitor comes up. Analyze their writing and see how you can top that.”

WooCommerce SEO Tip 4 – Photos Make or Break WooCommerce Store SEO 

The better your photos are, the better your results will be. But not just that. Your photos should have alt tags for screen readers. Each photo should be named according to a naming convention that isn’t IMG67893.png. Get cart-worthy photography from a service like Soona. Hire a photographer. Whatever. 

Photos can make or break your WooCommerce Store SEO because people are too lazy to fix the details. This is work. It will cost money. It will be tedious to name your images and ensure they have descriptions, alt tags, and captions that conform to best practices.

It will be worth it when the orders start rolling in.

Hot Tip from Soona: “Customers aren’t just skeptical. They ARE ANNOYED. Asking real customers for content, yes the folks who paid their good money, is the move in 2023. If you’re scared, you can always send them small gifts or additional discounts. But you don’t receive it if you don’t ask.”

WooCommerce SEO Tip 5 – Internal Linking FTW

You have a product. Awesome. Now write a blog post about it. Link to the product page. Internal links will help your marketing efforts and, by extension, your findability (SEO). But don’t forget about breadcrumbs, menus, and sidebar links. Those are all internal links. 

Strategically writing content to take your customer through the buyer journey you design – instead of letting them find your products by hunting and pecking – is the best way to leverage SEO that leads to conversions. Conversions mean sales and sales mean money. Yay!

Hot Tip from Semrush: Start with pillar content. “Pillar pages should target broad keywords with high search volumes rather than more specific long-tail keywords.”

Don’t Forget Pesky Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are the bain of any WordPress agency’s existence. It isn’t a default functionality in WordPress core, yet it is a base functionality required for eCommerce. So you could use Mailgun, Mailchimp, SendGrid, SendWP, etc. Pick one and get it going. Don’t forget to test it. Optimize the email text, header, and footer. Transactional emails are an important customer touch point. 

Hot Tip from Search Engine Journal: Use Mailchimp to automate customer journeys. “Functionality like this is essential to get the most out of our SEO investment, and for traffic, you work hard to drive to the site and into the shopping cart.”

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Let’s talk about how we can migrate your WooCommerce Store to Rocket.net, the fastest WordPress hosting in the world.