Woocommerce SEO Tips for 2020

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Introduction

Just starting out on your e-commerce business journey? Don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest? Then Woocommerce SEO is the best way for you to build ongoing traffic for your eCommerce site made with Woocommerce.

Here’s why:

  1. Over 44% of people start their purchase journey with a Google search
  2. 37.5% of traffic to eCommerce websites are from search engines ( SERP)
  3. The first result on average gets around 33% of the total traffic from search engines

So imagine that 500,000 people buy organic homemade soaps per month which is your market and so 220,000 of them are starting their search on Google. And the total search traffic from Google and other search engines to these sites would be 187,500 just based on this keyword. If your result goes to the first spot in Google, then you get around 62,000 visitors from this keyword alone.

This is the enormity of Woocommerce SEO done right. In this article, let me take you through the fundamental ideas of Woocommerce based eCommerce SEO, one by one.

If you are unfamiliar with Woocommerce, it’s a WordPress plugin to build your own eCommerce store, and it’s free!
In case you have had some ideas about WooCommerce and want to see how good or bad it is compared to other platforms, you may want to have a look –  Shopify and WooCommerce SEO Comparison.

How Search Engines Work

Keywords are the calling cards of the SEO World. People enter keywords into their search engine and expect to find relevant results that are useful to them. This is what search engines like Google try to provide for them. In simple terms, this is how google works:

  1. Google tries to index (collect information on) all of the websites on the internet
  2. Google finds new websites via links from other known websites
  3. Google has a set of sophisticated and constantly evolving algorithms (standard, machine learning, deep learning, etc) to rank and display the best results for a wide variety of keywords. We call these ranking factors.

Even though we can’t completely know every ranking factor and how much it influences the results. We should try to do the important things well:

  1. Create good and useful content for our target audience and Optimise your website with best on-page practices
  2. Let other relevant websites know about our website

Creating Good Content

Let me define good content in the context of an eCommerce site. You can think of good content at multiple levels:

  1. Accurate and detailed information about your product
  2. Relevant: Content that helps bridge the gap in knowledge as described by the users’ query in the search engine
  3. Satisfying: Content that fulfills the users’ intent
  4. Loved: Content that is unique and people like to tell others about

Any content you create should try to meet these standards. Start with 1 and go as far as possible i.e., level 4.

Website’s Information Architecture

 

A website’s architecture is primarily the architecture of its information, hence, we talk about information architecture as a foundational aspect of SEO.

  1. What is information architecture and why it’s important: Information Architecture of a website is the structure and relationship of various pages in your ecommerce site.
  2. Review SitemapReview your website’s sitemap to check if your information architecture is as it should be. For most websites, your sitemap should be at https://domain.com/sitemap_index.xml.
  1. The right way to structure your pages: It’s important to structure your website right, so search engines can organise your website right and hence they can be shown to the relevant search queries. Some simple rules to structure your content right.i. Maintain right balance between too deep or too wide relationship
    ii. Make sure the hierarchies are accurate.
    Example:Home Products → Sub Products → Product Name Blog → Categories → Sub Categories → Post Name Contact
  1. Top level menu Generally, its good that your Primary Menu reflects your information architecture. But on occasion you might want the Primary Navigation that your users get to be a little different from the Information Architecture of your website.

On Page Content & SEO

  1. Audit: Whenever you start your On-page SEO effort, you need to do a good audit of what your site is about and how you want to execute your SEO strategy using the techniques available from an on-page perspective.
  2. URL: The url / slug of the page is an SEO important factor. It could even be the No.1 on-page factor.
  3. Meta Tags: The title given with the meta title tag is an important information that a search engine uses to determine the purpose and content of a website’s page. In the same way, other meta tags like meta description, meta keywords, etc are very important too.
  4. Product Page Content: Make sure to use the correct html tag for your Title (<h1>). If you are using a good WordPress theme, this should already been taken care of. And make sure to write a clear and detailed product description. You can use the main keywords, Long Tailed Keywords related to your product in the description also. A recommended product description length  is 500-1000.
  5. Category Page Content: Make sure the category page lists the individual products with the product title and a short description. And the category title is mentioned in h1 tag.
  6. Internal Links: Internal links boost the authority of the page linked to. Make sure to properly link other pages related to the anchor text. For example, you can link your products from your blog posts which are about that particular product.
  7. Product Schema and Reviews: Product reviews play an important role in converting leads. It also has a big impact on your SEO. Woocommerce Review Plugins like Starcat Review Plugin add product and review schema, so that when people search for your product, they see snippets. This increases engagement by a good margin and also takes you to the top of the search results. You will have a great advantage over your competitors. Overall, reviews add content to your product page that are valuable to search engines in 3 ways: relevant keywords are added, content length of the page is increased and review schema shows up in google search making it more prominent and engaging.
  8. Product Documentation: Product Documentation is a great way to 1) Solve your users’ problems without spending time on support 2) Generate new leads by the way of people searching related terms on Google and finding your documentation. Use plugins like Helpie KB and Helpie FAQ for your documentation / knowledge base / FAQ needs.

Useful WordPress SEO Plugins for On Page SEO:

  1. Yoast Woocommerce SEO features include the above mentioned optimisation for meta title, description and keywords. Its one of the best SEO plugin for woocommerce along with Rank Math SEO plugin and All in One SEO Pack plugin.

These plugins help you autopilot SEO for Woocommerce stores.

Recommended Theme:

Astra is one of the fastest WordPress themes out there. And speed is an important consideration for SEO. Hence, Astra WordPress theme will automatically improve your SEO score by a fraction. Its also super-clean and modern. It has custom starter sites for Woocommerce. This is the best way to get started with your Woocommerce website.

Share with other websites and online resources

The famous “build it and they will come” fallacy is also true with creating website content. Start with creating your website’s content, product descriptions, product details and blog posts about your product. But don’t stop there, make sure you share your website, product page, blog post to other relevant websites. Here are some avenues to share:

  1. Blogs related to your niche
  2. An aggregator website
  3. Web directories
  4. Social Media
  5. Online Forums and Communities
  6. Submit to Google Search Console
  7. RSS Feeds for Blogs

and more.

Strategies to get listed on Blogs:

  1. Cold Email the author and let them know about your product. A lot of time blog authors love to recommend good products to their audience.
  2. Affiliate Marketing is another excellent way to reach your relevant audience. Blogs create useful content on their niches and recommend products related to what their audience love. Its a win-win.
  3. Sponsored Post is something you can try if you can afford it.
  4. Guest Posting is another good way. You contribute your insights and knowledge on your domain and you can use the author bio to create awareness of your product / company.

Optimising your website

There are ways to optimise your website that improves what search engines see and how they treat the information. This could have a huge impact on your Ecommerce SEO. Here are some related tools to that end:

Related Tools

GTMetrix: GTMetrix is an awesome free tool to check the time taken for loading your WordPress and it shows it to you in a visual Waterfall graph. It also gives you a score and ways to optimise the score and vis-a-vis your page speed.

Google Page Insights: This is a free tool by Google themselves. It shows your current score of page speed in desktop and mobile separately and gives you suggestions of improving it.

Small SEO Tools: SmallSeoTools.com is actually a collection of tools to check various SEO related metrics including checking content against plagiarism, your Domain Authority, Page Authority, Backlinks and so on.

Conclusion

The path to success is not always in overly complicated and expensive means. Make sure you use the simple tips and tools well to see a good improvement in your traffic. Wish you well on your journey to eCommerce fortunes. Please do share any comments you may have below.

3 thoughts on “Woocommerce SEO Tips for 2020”

  1. Shubham

    Thanks a lot for sharing this amazing blog with us. It is very helpful for me. Please keep sharing more articles like this.

    Reply

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