If you have a WooCommerce store or any other e-commerce site, you need to bring quality traffic to your website to make the conversion happen. There are a variety of ways to get traffic to your website, such as SEO, social media marketing, search engine marketing , email marketing.
And in this post, we’re going to discuss the various SEO techniques that you can use to rank your website on search engines and bring organic and quality traffic to your website. With these steps on your website pages, collections will stay longer on the search engine result pages ( SERPs).
You will need to follow the steps below to get the benefits from the search engines. Before we start let’s discuss some of the basics that you need to know.
WooCommerce vs Shopify vs BigCommerce
There are other e-commerce platforms available that you can use to create your online store. WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world. It works on WordPress and allows you to easily create fully functional e-commerce websites with Products , Orders, Inventory, Shipping, Taxes, Payment Management all in one place.
There are a lot of other e-commerce plugins that you can use on your WooCommerce website to extend the features of your site. WooCommerce gives you a lot of customization options that no other platform provide. To start with WooCommerce you will need a hosting plan with WordPress installed in it, and a domain.
Secondly, Shopify is another popular e-commerce platform. It focuses only on building e-commerce websites, so it’s a bit user-friendly. But there are limited customization options available. To start with Shopify, you’ll need a domain and shopify’s plan, starting at $29 / month.
Finally, BigCommerce is the other major platform for e-commerce website creation. The number of websites it has is less than that of Shopify and WooCommerce. It also comes with all the features and tools needed to start an online business. But there are limited customization options. The price starts at $29.95 per month.
If you have to choose one of the platforms, you can start with any one in the list. All of these platforms are well protected, but you can take a few more security measures on your website to make it more secure.
WooCommerce is the leading platform when it comes to creating e-commerce websites, it comes with a steep learning curve, giving you a lot of customization options. aIt’s cheaper than the other platforms we’re comparing as you don’t have to pay monthly fee. If you are a beginner, you can go with Shopify or BigCommerce.
Why SEO is Important?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the tactic wont to increase the position of an site on search engine results pages (SERPs) on sites like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Developing an SEO strategy for your business can help increase your site ranking and bring consumer traffic to your website as well as increase your sales and revenue. Moreover, If your website is ranking on top of search engines then more people will be aware of your brand and it is beneficial to your business.
Is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
WooCommerce is SEO friendly as it is built using SEO optimised code. And using SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, RankMath you can add more features that can actually help improve SEO performance. In the points below, you will learn more about the SEO plugins.
What are the WooCommerce SEO Best Practices?
I’ve tried to list all the best SEO practices that can optimize and improve your WooCommerce website ranking on the search engine results pages.
Here are the 11 best SEO practises to improve your search engine ranking.
1. Choose a Powerful Hosting
As we discussed, if you want to start your online store using WooCommerce, you need a hosting plan and a domain. Hosting plays an important role in SEO. A lot of people think shared hosting can run their eCommerce store easily. But It can only handle a limited number of products and traffic.
But when you’re looking to scale up your business. You’re going to need a better hosting plan. Shared hosting servers share their resources with many other websites, so the performance will be divided.
You need to choose a dedicated or WooCommerce specific hosting or managed hosting if you want to scale your website. Which can easily cope with the high demands of your website due to the high volume of traffic.
Dedicated hosting can give you better performance and is more secure than shared hosting. As a result, user engagement and site performance will increase and you will have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.
2. Write Product Titles and Descriptions
Create unique, interesting and catchy titles and descriptions of the your pages, posts and product pages. These are useful for the user and the search engine to understand what the page, post or product is about.
The title should be descriptive, clear, catchy and concise. Write a description of each page, post and product page. The description should be clear, descriptive and easy for readers to understand.
3. Write alt tags for images
Alt tags are important for both the SEO and the visually impaired. They can read from the alt tags what the image is about, when the images fail to load. Alt tags can also help your images show on image search results, which can bring more traffic to your site.
You can add alt tag to your old images from the WordPress media library. Search engines use these alt tags as a ranking factor, so adding alt tags to your images is one of the most important things for WooCommerce SEO.
4. Use the SEO plug-in
By default WordPress doesn’t provide a lot of SEO settings. So, you need an SEO plugin to install. You can use the Rank Math or Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress to boost the SEO of your website.
By using an SEO plugin such as Rank Math, it helps provide suggestions on your URL structure, meta tags, keywords, rich snippets, alt tags, redirect alert, 404 monitor, internal and external link suggestions, and more. It can help you with on-page SEO and it is very helpful for your WooCommerce SEO as well.
5. Create Unique URL Structure and Descriptive URLs
You can fix your URL permalinks to make sure that it is accessible to both users and search engines. Go to Settings > > Permalink Settings, choose URL structure.
Use URL permalinks to use your search keywords, product categories instead of product IDs or numbers. The URL structure is useful for users and search engines, they can read and know where the page is going to lead. It ought to be unique and descriptive.
5. Activate breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs appear at the top of the product pages to help visitors quickly move back to the previous product page or landing page. It shows a series of links from where the visitor has come to the current page.
Breadcrumbs are not only helpful to me, but also to search engines like Google to determine how your site is structured and how your search results appear. You can use plugins like Yoast SEO to make breadcrumbs.
6. Optimize your website
Responsive Website
There are many areas on the website that need to be optimised to make the most of the WooCommerce SEO efforts.
Make sure your website is responsive, as people can access your e-commerce site from a variety of devices. So, it’s very important that your website can adjust to the different screen sizes without compromising the features you’re offering.
If your website is not responsive, it may not display correctly with all devices so that the user experience may be impaired and the bournce rate will increase and therefore the website ranking will suffer as well.
Cache
The implementation of caching can actually help to reduce the loading speed of the website. As the caching collects and stores frequently used data for a limited period of time.
When the web page is requested by the browser again, it does not directly ask the server to serve the data from the cache memory so that the loading of the website is faster, and increases the user experience.
As the loading speed is a ranking factor in google, it helps in the ranking of the website in the search engine results pages. For your WooCommerce website’s SEO, you can try any of the caching plugins from the list.
Optimize Images
Images are also one of the reasons why website loading is slower. Therefore, use image optimization techniques to reduce and optimise your site ‘s image without compromising the quality of the image. Optimized images can help reduce the loading time of the website.
Limited Use of Plugins
Reduce the number of plugins that add JavaScript and CSS files to the code of your website, which loads when a visitor arrives on your website. Adds more time to load your website.
When you use a limited number of plugins, it adds fewer codes to your website and can make your website load faster.
Minifying JavaScript and CSS files
Minifying the JavaScript and CSS files can also help reduce the page load time. Minification removes unnecessary codes from your website without changing the way your website look. Removing the unnecessary helps to speed up your website, as the request doesn’t include those extra files. To learn more about minification you can check here.
7. Use SSL Certifications
Using SSL certificates on WooCommerce websites is a factor that shows that the website is trustworthy and a standard that shows the visitor that your website has been verified and is safe from hackers. And users are more likely to do business on it without worrying a lot. It is also a factor for SEO rankings.
8. Make your site navigation easy
Make sure your web browsing is clean and clear and gives a clear indication of where the user wants to go. The main menu should show the important categories of products in a clean and well-organised manner. So that the visitor can easily find the page he ‘s going to. This reduces the bounce rate and improves the search ranking.
In addition, link your main pages to the menu and the less important pages to the footer so that search engines can understand what pages are important and what is not that important.
9. Use a Lightweight Theme
WordPress is already an SEO optimised platform and will be more beneficial to your business if you use a lightweight theme.
It will help to improve the loading speed of your website. Plus, look for a theme that’s ready for e-commerce, responsive, comes with custom widgets, sliders, customizable options. A great looking theme can help enhance your website’s look and feel hence user experience will be increased.
10. Create a blog
Create blogs on your website to bring traffic to your site organically. If someone is looking for answers and your blog appears on the results of your search, the user can visit your site. This is another source of organic visitors to the website.
In addition , make sure your content is valuable to your readers. Write unique content to increase your chances of getting ranked on the search engine results pages. If you copy content from any other website, chances are that google may penalise your site and your site won’t be visible to others. Writing unique and original content is the best way to rank search engines.
From your blog posts, you can start collecting your readers’ emails by asking them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can also create content based on your products. How to use your products, best-selling products, best-selling offers, etc. and you can also upsell your products.
11. Sitemap and Robot.txt
You need XML Sitemap on your website to enhance WooCommerce SEO. It helps search engines to crawl your website and index all pages, posts, and other contents of your website. The Sitemap should be included in the robos.txt file, which allows search engines to be notified of the sitemap. Thus, the sitemap helps to rank the website in the search engine result pages.
We have come to the end of this post about WooCommerce SEO best practices. It has covered the parts which will help boost the SEO performance of your WooCommerce website. And also increase your ranking in search engine results pages.
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