Product Page SEO for WooCommerce
Improving your SEO for your WooCommerce site is mostly about making sure your product pages are well-designed and full of crucial information. Online stores live and die by their search engine optimization, so keeping it up is a big part of running an ecommerce business.
Product page SEO is like standing on every street corner in the real world to advertise your products, but not as ridiculous. It’s one of the things that make ecommerce so great, and it’s one of the aspects of ecommerce you should clearly understand since it directly impacts sales.
Let’s take a look at how we can improve and maintain the SEO of your WooCommerce site.
Is WooCommerce SEO-Friendly?
Being a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce is meant to be SEO-friendly right out of the box. However, if left on its own, it doesn’t maximize that SEO, so it still needs some care in order to have your WooCommerce site be as visible on search results as possible.
Upon first starting a WooCommerce online store, you have to add your theme and the contents like products, descriptions, images, and so on. You’re responsible for optimizing all that content, so you learn what goes into it. That also lets you know what needs to be done for SEO.
SEO in WooCommerce is an ongoing process. You put it up, maintain it, and improve it whenever possible. It’s never a “set it and forget it” thing since the online store is bound to change over time, and so should the SEO.
There’s a process to product page SEO for WooCommerce, and it’s as follows.
1. WordPress SEO Setup
Since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, you’ll have to do WordPress SEO first to set the foundation for the SEO of your WooCommerce online store.
There’s the All-in-One SEO plugin, which is like a more comprehensive version of Yoast SEO. It adds SEO sitemaps and is better designed for ecommerce, letting you set up proper SEO fields for product pages. AIOSEO is recommended for online stores, so you should have it installed.
2. Write Product SEO Titles
A big part of SEO is the title of the page. It’s what most people first see when they search for products, so you will want to make sure that it tells the reader what it is at a glance and be more likely to get picked up by search engines.
Writing SEO-friendly product titles is all about combining both the specific description of the product and general descriptions of that product type, including the things that would make up its unique selling proposition. That would bring in more potential customers.
For example, let’s say you’re selling a leather wallet for men. You can title it “Men’s Leather Wallet by Brand X,” and that would actually be a pretty bad title. Not only is it generic, but it only says four general things about it—it’s a wallet, it’s made of leather, it’s for men, and it’s from Brand X. You need to get way more specific than that.
A better SEO-friendly title would be “Bi-Fold Brown Leather Wallet for Men – High-Quality, Built for Durability by Brand X.” It says all four things from the previous example, but also two more specific things—it’s brown and has a bi-fold design. It can also make people believe subconsciously that the product is indeed high-quality and built for durability.
That title is a combination of different long-tail keywords that will make sure that it pops up in more search results for more people. The more it does, the higher it’ll be in search rankings, and the more customers will find it.
3. Add Product SEO Descriptions
Time to get even more specific with the product meta description. This is entered below the title in AIOSEO, and it won’t show up on the product page. What it does is it’s read by search engines, and it then shows up in the search results.
You should use the same keywords as that of the product title to boost your chances on hitting higher search rankings with those keywords.
4. Optimize Product Slug
The slug is basically that last bit of the product page URL, also known as the permalink. By having an SEO-friendly slug, it can add even more SEO power to that product page. It should be descriptive and easy to understand while also being not too long.
For the leather wallet example, you can go with “bi-fold-brown-mens-leather-wallet-brandx” as a solid product slug that has little to nothing wrong with it. The slug should contain your keywords, contain as few function words as possible—words like “a”, “and”, “the”, “by”, and so on.
5. Enable Breadcrumbs
As the tale of Hansel and Gretel may suggest, breadcrumbs are a trail that leads to the product page. It shows up in search results that show from which pages leads to that product page. Search engines like seeing breadcrumbs, so you should have it for the product pages in your online store.
Enable breadcrumbs by using the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin for WooCommerce. Upon installing and activating it, go to Settings » Breadcrumb NavXT menu to tweak the settings. You can also have breadcrumbs show up in your WooCommerce theme by going to Appearance » Customize and choosing where they show up in the Position dropdown menu.
6. Properly Using Product Categories and Tags
It goes without saying that setting product categories and tags help organize products in your online store. Search engines like organization, so they’ll like it if you put up neat yet comprehensive ones.
Product categories and tags make sure your products are not just put in one big pile that makes it hard to distinguish one product from another. Being specific enough with your product categories will make your products much easier to find, and tags can help with search results when customers get more specific with their queries.
7. Add Alt Text for Product Images
Alt text are basically meta descriptions for your images. Having alt text on your product images will give you an extra edge as those images are more likely to show up in image search results. Make sure to have relevant keywords in your alt text and watch your image SEO pay dividends over time.
8. Site Security and Performance
It may not look like that big of a deal, but no one wants to shop in an online store that takes too long to load or looks like it can get hacked by a script kiddie. Security and performance are so important to online stores that they can make or break online businesses.
Because people like fast and secure websites, search engines like them too. If your website is truly secure, it won’t put a warning on it that will stop every visitor who tries to view it. If it’s truly fast, it will rank higher in search results, and more people will find it.