There are several popular online stores, shopping cart platforms and plugins.
They all have pros and cons, and one of the most SEO-friendly options is WooCommerce: a popular WordPress e-commerce plugin.
As of June 2022, WordPress powers 64.2% of all content management systems.
This puts it near the top of the CMS rankings.
Looking specifically at e-commerce, WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce technology among the million most popular websites. The WooCommerce plugin became so popular that WordPress acquired it in 2015.
My team has been using WooCommerce for almost a decade. Although I’m very familiar with it, I was a little surprised to see WooCommerce take the lead among several other shopping cart platforms in recent years with the survival of Magento and the rise and popularity of Shopify.
We continue to use WooCommerce because we get the SEO benefits of WordPress and can add the e-commerce features we need.
Platforms like Shopify and Magento are shopping first and content second when it comes to their design.
It is difficult to achieve the same level of CMS and other aspects to control the components and variables that can be optimized in other plugins.
Sometimes things are locked and you can’t get to the root or theme level to update code and manage technical SEO.
Why Does Any Of This Matter?
Contents
Maybe you’re already on WooCommerce or another e-commerce platform.
I’m all for whichever platform works best for you. There are specific SEO caps you can do on different platforms.
WooCommerce also has limits if you don’t use it, how you can set it up, how you handle your WordPress optimization as a whole, and how your overall SEO strategy is defined.
I hope that if you are in WooCommerce or deciding which platform to choose and have SEO in mind, this article will help you on your journey.
What Makes WooCommerce SEO Unique
WooCommerce SEO is unique because it resides in WordPress. Much of what you do to optimize a WooCommerce eCommerce site is consistent with what you would do for a WordPress site in general.
Overall, the SEO-friendly benefits of WooCommerce in WordPress out-of-the-box or with easy configuration are:
Best Practices
Most of the best practices for WooCommerce and WordPress are consistent with SEO best practices for broader stores.
This includes managing the technical, on-page and off-page aspects of e-commerce SEO within an overall strategy and at a tactical level.
If you’re new to SEO or want to make sure you’re not missing out, I recommend checking out SEJ’s SEO 101 guide.
Getting Started
Before you optimize, make sure you’re ready.
I strongly recommend working out your action plan and goals before you start.
Knowing your current performance and researching what keywords and topics you want to target is an important part of both.
WooCommerce Analytics
I recommend using Google Analytics as your primary analytics data source and platform for WordPress.
Going deeper and specifically into the eCommerce analytics you can integrate into WooCommerce GA, the GTM4WP plugin is a great way to get that data.
Don’t miss out on measuring the data you want and need from your site to track your SEO and broader marketing goals. I recommend prioritizing the data before you start optimizing so you can measure the raw data if you don’t already have it in a good place.
Transactional Emails
Another important thing you’ll want to do is set up transactional emails. Several email platforms integrate with WordPress and WooCommerce.
My team’s favorite for ease of use and to do well is Mailchimp’s transactional email feature.
Formerly called Mandrill, it can handle post-purchase emails such as order and delivery confirmations.
Mailchimp itself can also be used to create automated email campaigns based on a customer’s journey or purchase behavior (e.g. cart abandonment emails, redemptions, etc.).
Functionalities like these are essential to get the most out of our SEO investment, and you have to work hard for traffic to drive to the site and enter the cart.
Keyword Research
It’s important to know what words, phrases, topics, and terms are related to the topic you want to rank for. Also, make sure that the people searching for these topics are your potential target audience.
There are many great third-party audience and keyword research tools out there, such as Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
These are paid tools with different subscription levels, but they are the leaders. They have their own strengths that help you research topics that match your content, products, and categories and dive deep into the right goals of your SEO plan.
Build your own lists, map them to your content, and use them as context as you work through optimization best practices to follow.
Technical SEO
As with any site, and to follow best practices for the broader user experience, you want your site to load quickly, be indexable, and have nothing in the way.
There are a number of specific technical factors that you need to consider, configure, and monitor that can hinder or improve your chances of ranking well compared to similar sites.
Indexing
It’s important that your content is found.
First, make sure you have a clean XML sitemap and robots.txt file. Additionally, go to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and third-party validation tools to make sure everything is as planned.
Use the Yoast plugin (or similar) to customize your XML sitemap and robots.txt settings.
Yoast gives you a great option to include or remove these files, so you don’t have to touch the code or adjust these files manually. You can change the settings to your liking and then submit them for approval via the console/web manager tools.
Screenshot from the author, September 2022
Page Experience
There are many data points and best practices that Google looks at when it comes to page experience, such as page load times, site speed, and other factors.
In general, you’ll want to pay attention to basic web conditions and page load times to ensure you have fast-loading pages that don’t compromise image quality or content richness for users.
I strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with these three online vital aspects of the SEJ guide.
Imagify and WP Rocket are recommended plugins for image optimization and caching to improve page load time and overall site performance.
Screenshot from Imagify, September 2022
Accessibility
It’s important to make your content accessible to everyone, including the visually impaired.
This includes coding to common ADA standards and including alt attributes and other cues.
Not a plugin recommendation here – I recommend using a 3rd party tool like PowerMapper.com to audit your pages to get the useful information you need to adjust your page elements to meet the standard required by your legal counsel (I’m not a lawyer).
Structured Data
It’s important to use additional context clues and opportunities to categorize, catalog, and label your topic. Use it whenever possible to get specific information about your industry, especially using specific product attributes.
Again, using the power of the Yoast plugin, you can use it to add basic schema markup to your site pages.
If it’s a new concept, I recommend reading more about the scheme and how it works before diving into the implementation.
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Canonical URLs And Permalinks
By nature, online stores can be complex and have issues with duplicate content.
Whether you have a product that appears in multiple categories, or you’re just dealing with the out-of-the-box way that WordPress and WooCommerce create multiple separate URLs for a single page, you need to include one canonical version for search engines. for indexing, displaying in search results and aggregating all link value.
Here again, I recommend Yoast for handling canonical documents.
I also recommend the redirect plugin if you have pages that are moving, products are discontinued, or if you need to permanently 301 redirect a certain page.
Pay attention to how you use canonicals and redirects, and always validate with tools like Screaming Frog or other lightweight redirect testing tools.
You want to avoid conflicts between multiple plugins that can send the wrong signal to search engines or give your users a bad experience (sending 404s, redirect loops, etc.).
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Breadcrumbs
Tests are links on internal pages that show the user (as well as the search engine) where they are in the navigation path or depth of the site.
They allow users to see how far they’ve delved into a particular product category, blog category, or other interior section, and how to click back upstream.
They are usually coded into your WordPress site theme as a default element. The Yoast plugin is perfect for adding WordPress/WooCommerce schema markup to them.
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
On-Page SEO
Ecommerce SEO page ranking factors and SEO aspects you will want to address on your WooCommerce site include:
URLs
In addition to the technical aspects of implementing canonical tags and trying to manage duplicate content to get search engines to index and rank a single version of your pages—including categories and products—you don’t want to miss the opportunity to add important contextual keywords to your pages. your URLs.
Use WordPress’ own page naming conventions and tools to add meaningful keywords to your URL string (without overdoing it or stuffing it).
Tags
Like any SEO plan, you want an optimized custom title, meta description, and title tags on every page. If you have a lot of products, like any large or enterprise site, find ways to scale your tagging with data-driven content whenever possible.
Use Yoast to create custom titles and meta descriptions on each page.
As with copy and URLs, look at how the defaults are set up to pull in dynamic elements and set up what elements to use. This way you can create tagging formulas that don’t require you to write custom tags for each page to achieve your own unique tags per page.
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Copy
Unique optimized copy can be a challenge for ecommerce sites.
As with labels, you may have trouble making this work at scale. Or you may have many similar products. Find ways to invest time writing manually according to best practices, avoid duplicate content, and scale programmatically when possible while maintaining high quality.
Images
Image file attributes are an area where you can add relevant contextual keywords that describe the subject of the image.
This is important for product images, product category level images, and any content on your site.
They are important for meeting accessibility standards – and also for search engines – to understand the context of an image.
Manage them on upload or later in the WordPress media center by editing images via the media tab or by going to the page and clicking on the image to review and change the attributes.
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Product Reviews
Unique user-generated content can help add contextual copy to the copy on the product page.
Product reviews can add context and another type of potential schema element.
My team uses and recommends the stamped.io plugin for easy review management and implementation.
However, there are many great review management plugins available and they vary in cost, ease of implementation, and complexity.
As a bonus, Stamped also sends out post-purchase review requests.
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Screenshot from WordPress, September 2022
Off-Page SEO
Ecommerce SEO, like most SEO, requires off-page factors to support your technical and on-page/content-focused tactics.
These factors are more general and least related to WooCommerce, but they should not be left out of your SEO plan.
Links
Find high-quality, industry/contextual inbound links to your products, categories and content.
This includes natural connections such as manufacturers, partners, affiliates, PR mentions and other quality natural sources.
Social Media
Whether this is a direct ranking factor is of course debated.
Regardless, link to your site from social media content to create context and connections, and look for opportunities across the social media landscape to get links and mentions.
Engagement
Search the web for other engagement and mention opportunities.
Whether it’s part of a PR plan, an influencer strategy, or other ways your brand gets mentioned, use them.
Find them and find quality content to reference yours.
Popular SEO Plugins For WooCommerce
You can boost WooCommerce with other WordPress plugins, many of which are free.
Here’s a summary of the plugins that relate to the individual items you want to optimize.
My team’s recommended WordPress plugins to use with WooCommerce (and in many cases for WordPress in general) are:
The great thing about most of these plugins is that if you have WordPress experience, you may not need a developer to set them up.
Like any plugin, your WordPress infrastructure can affect your level of access and any custom aspects that need to be implemented, depending on how they interact with other plugins or features.
Conclusion
You’ve probably picked up on a few topics by now.
These include the fact that all of WordPress’ great SEO benefits translate to WooCommerce, as do many of the broader ecommerce SEO best practices.
I’m biased by experience and I guarantee many can point to Magento, Shopify and other highly optimized eCommerce sites with SERPs and their industries.
I love that, which is one of the great things about SEO.
For now, I’m still WooCommerce carts.
I’ve found it to be cheaper to implement than some enterprise solutions, more feature-rich than some, super easy to set up, and allows for a richer overall user experience.
In addition, it combines the SEO benefits of WordPress and WooCommerce.
Featured Image: Ashan Randika/Shutterstock
How do I start SEO for my website?
10 Tips to Improve SEO and Rank:
- Please select the correct URL.
- Create titles and descriptions for each page.
- Use anchor text.
- Add alt text to all your images.
- Give your site structure with the right headers.
- Create quality content.
- Do keyword research.
- Prefer proactive indexing.
What is the first step to start SEO? Defining relevant keywords is the first step in creating search engine optimized website content. Using keywords and building your topics around them creates content that answers Google searches.
Is rank math Safe?
Why is Rank Math safe to use? Rank Math is listed on WordPress.org, where plugins are thoroughly vetted by the WordPress team before being added to the repository. Third-party security companies check the plugin every 3 months.
Which is better math or yoast? Yoast SEO is a great tool for beginners. This will help you write better posts and optimize your content for your focus keywords. However, you need to upgrade to access advanced settings. Rank Math is a clear winner for SEO professionals who need to delve into analytics and content optimization.
Is rank Math any good?
Rank Math is totally worth it. This is probably the best alternative to Yoast at the time of writing. It is a handy plugin that helps you with SEO tasks like on-page optimization, content analysis, redirects, rich snippets, etc. All this for free!
How good is rank math?
The intuitive user interface, modular system and wide range of features make this one of the best SEO plugins to date. Choose Rank Math for SEO in 2021 if you are interested in increasing your site’s ranking and traffic. The pricing is great with the features. Good luck optimizing your site for SEO with Rank Math!
Is rank math free?
Absolutely. You can download the free version of Rank Math and install it on your website to experience all the features first. If you want to give PRO a spin, you can test how it works on our demo website.
What is rank math used for?
Rank Math is a WordPress SEO plugin that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in recommendations based on widely accepted best practices.
What is rank Math used for?
Rank Math is a WordPress SEO plugin that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in recommendations based on widely accepted best practices.
What is rank Math content AI?
Our Rank Math SEO score provides a quantitative measure of how well your content is optimized for basic SEO guidelines such as SEO meta tags, readability, links, etc., while our Content AI gives you a score on how well your content is on target keyword.
Why rank Math is the Best SEO Plugin?
Clean and Simple User Interface Using this information, you can instantly improve your post’s SEO. Rank Math also includes advanced cutout previews. You can preview how your post will appear in SERPs, view rich snippets, and even see how your post will look when shared on social media.
What is rank in Math?
In set theory, the rank (class) function is from the set to the ordinals. The rank of a set is the smallest ordinal number greater than the rank of any member of the set (Mirimanoff 1917; Moore 1982, pp. 261-262; Rubin 1967, p. 214). The proof that the rank is well-defined uses the foundation axiom.
Is rank Math free?
Absolutely. You can download the free version of Rank Math and install it on your website to experience all the features first. If you want to give PRO a spin, you can test how it works on our demo website.
Is rank Math SEO good?
Rank Math is definitely a good alternative to Yoast. It is a handy tool for on-page optimization, content analysis, redirects, rich extracts, etc.
Is rank Math a free plugin?
Rank Math is seriously the BEST SEO plugin I’ve ever installed and tried in my 6 years of blogging! This is hands down one of the craziest, help… Rank Math is amazing and I can’t believe it’s free.
Should I use Yoast SEO Premium?
Yoast SEO Premium vs Free Plugin: An In-Depth Review of the Best SEO Plugin (2022 Edition) If you are new to SEO, the free version of Yoast SEO is enough for you. But if you’ve been blogging for a while and want to take your blog search traffic to the next level, you should opt for the premium version of Yoast SEO.
Should You Use Yoast SEO? Even if you’re not very familiar with SEO best practices, regular use of Yoast SEO when publishing new pages or transitioning existing pages is great training. By using the plugin regularly, you will start to write your page and post content with optimization in mind and more instinctively.
The free version of Yoast includes everything you need to get started with SEO, while the paid version expands its features to include features like 301 redirect management, internal linking recommendations, and ongoing support.
Is Yoast free good?
Yoast is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. I’ve been using it since I started doing digital marketing. Yoast helps with on-page SEO where you can add proper SEO title, description, tip and keywords. It will give you relevant recommendations to improve your site’s SEO. Even the free version is very useful.
Is Yoast SEO Premium lifetime?
Once you’ve downloaded and installed our Yoast premium plugins for WordPress, you can keep and use them for as long as you want.
Is there a free version of Yoast?
Yoast SEO is free! That’s right, you get great features to help you rank – for free! In addition to the free version, you can also get Yoast SEO Premium, which costs 99 EUR. This amount gives you a year of access to additional SEO-enhancing features, 24/7 support, and all Yoast SEO Academy courses!
Is Yoast SEO Premium lifetime?
Once you’ve downloaded and installed our Yoast premium plugins for WordPress, you can keep and use them for as long as you want.
How do I get free Yoast SEO Premium?
Using the plugin on multiple sites You can use Yoast SEO on multiple sites by using multiple WordPress sites or by purchasing more than one subscription. How many subscriptions you need depends on how many WordPress installations/domains you have.
Is Yoast SEO Premium worth it? No it isn’t. The multi-focus keyword feature is pretty useless, redirects can be set up using free redirect plugins, and nothing in Yoast Premium will directly improve your SEO. It’s not worth $99 a year.
Is Yoast SEO Premium worth it? No it isn’t. The multi-focus keyword feature is pretty useless, redirects can be set up using free redirect plugins, and nothing in Yoast Premium will directly improve your SEO. It’s not worth $99 a year.
Is Yoast local SEO worth it?
Yoast is simply packed with features designed to optimize your website. With built-in content analysis, meta keywords and description management. So, yes, it’s good for SEO.
Is Yoast still the best?
However, if you need basic SEO on your site, Yoast SEO is still a solid choice. The free version is enough to optimize your content for your chosen keywords. Newbies love helpful suggestions.
Is Yoast SEO WooCommerce worth it?
It can really make a difference to your website and help you get more traffic and conversions. Overall, Yoast SEO is a great tool for WooCommerce websites. It offers many features that can help improve a website’s success, including search engine optimization, keyword management, and tracking progress over time.
Is Yoast SEO Good for WordPress? Every WordPress site needs an SEO plugin if they want their pages to appear in search engine rankings. And when it comes to SEO plugins, Yoast SEO is by far one of the most popular choices.
What does Yoast for WooCommerce do?
Yoast WooCommerce SEO WooCommerce is one of the best shopping cart plugins available for WordPress. This plugin helps you get more visitors to your online store through Google and social media.
How does SEO work on WooCommerce?
WooCommerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential for any successful eCommerce business. This can help your business rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Products that rank high on search engine results pages reach more people.
Is Yoast SEO WooCommerce worth it?
Overall, Yoast SEO is a great tool for WooCommerce websites. It offers many features that can help improve a website’s success, including search engine optimization, keyword management, and tracking progress over time.
Is WooCommerce good for SEO?
WooCommerce SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential for any successful eCommerce business. This can help your business rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Products that rank high on search engine results pages reach more people.
Is a WordPress site better for SEO?
Our clients often ask us if WordPress is good for SEO. The answer is yes! Once known primarily as a blogging platform, WordPress has built a reputation for providing a strong SEO foundation as a CMS – and for good reason. It’s no coincidence that WordPress sites tend to rank well in Google.
Is Shopify or WooCommerce better for SEO?
Unlike Shopify, you need to purchase SSL certificates for WooCommerce sites yourself. You can create it for free, but it requires technical skills to complete the task. Shopify is clearly the winner in the list of SEO-friendly e-commerce platforms.
Is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
The short answer is “yes”. Like WordPress, WooCommerce is SEO friendly, but you need the help of an SEO plugin to unlock this feature. With the right plugin, you can do all the search engine optimization you need to rank your store on Google.
Who owns all in one SEO?
Michael Torbert (founder of AIOSEO) has done a phenomenal job building an amazing community over the past decade. Started in 2007, All in One SEO is the original SEO plugin for WordPress. I have known Michael for many years and respect him for all that he has accomplished.
Is All In One SEO Good? All in one SEO and Yoast SEO are both good plugins, so the comparison between these two plugins must be close. However, All in One SEO wins with ease of use, better user experience and more control over various features.
What is all in one SEO?
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the original WordPress SEO plugin that helps you improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Over 3 million smart website owners use AIOSEO to optimize their website for higher search rankings.
Which is better rank math or All In One SEO?
Rank Math takes the content analysis feature one step further and also includes an Advanced tab that checks more advanced SEO metrics. But All in One SEO trumps both contenders with a quick and easy overview of your overall SEO score in the top right corner of the page.
Is rank Math good for SEO?
Great features. Rank Math gives you a competitive edge with its powerful and easy-to-use features. Whether you’re a beginner or an SEO veteran, Rank Math can take your SEO game to the next level.
Is All In One SEO worth it?
For a hobby site, the free version works great. If you need advanced features like local SEO, it’s worth upgrading to the paid version of All in One SEO. There are 4 paid licenses with additional features that are super valuable beyond the basic optimization.
How do I turn off all in one SEO?
To do this, click on Feature Manager in the All in One SEO menu and you will see a list of active modules. Click the Deactivate button next to the sitemap modules you want to deactivate.
How do I change all in one keywords in SEO?
You can add meta keywords to any content such as post, page, category, tag, etc. by editing the content and clicking the Advanced tab in AIOSEO Settings. Enter a keyword in the Keywords field and press Enter. Repeat this to add more keywords.
Do I need all in one SEO?
In our opinion, All in One SEO for WordPress is a must-have plugin for all websites as it helps you improve your rankings on search engines like Google so that you can increase your website traffic.
How do I get rid of all in one SEO?
If you want to completely remove all All-in-One SEO data and settings when uninstalling the plugin, you can do so by clicking General Settings in the All-in-One SEO menu and then clicking the Advanced tab. You should see the AIOSEO Uninstaller.