A Guide to SEO for WooCommerce: 26 Actionable Steps

Did you know that over 39% of All Online Stores Run on WooCommerce?

That is because WooCommerce is one of the most powerful and customizable shopping cart software out there… and the best thing? It’s free!

But you can’t just throw up a store and expect to start getting orders right away. First, you will need to set up WooCommerce and optimize it for SEO.

In this guide to SEO for Woocommerce, I am going to show you everything you need to know to fully optimize your store for SEO.

Before no time, you will be getting organic traffic from Google every day, 24/7… increasing your Woocommerce sales and customers.

So, let’s get started!

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to turn a WordPress blog into a fully functioning E-commerce store.

It currently has over 77,528,124 downloads and runs almost half of all ecommerce stores.

WooCommerce is a completely free plugin that is installed onto a WordPress website. It allows you to easily add products, categories and SEO optimized product pages.

Installation & Setup

In our WooCommerce Guide for Beginners, we go through step by step on how to install and set up WooCommerce. Installation is as simple as a few clicks in the plugin manager on your WordPress website.

I assume if you are reading this, you already have WooCommerce installed and are ready to optimize it for SEO.

On-Page Optimization for WooCommerce

WordPress websites are the best CMS for SEO, which makes Woocmmerce very powerful if you are trying to rank your products and website higher in Google for high searched keywords.

In order to rank well, your Woocommece site will need to be optimized for SEO.

Install Yoast SEO

First things first, you will want to install Yoast SEO, which is one of the best all in one SEO plugins that will make optimizing your WP website much easier.

If you don’t have much experience with Yoast SEO, check out our Yoast SEO Guide for Beginners. It will show you how to set everything up for your website.

In this article, I am going to show you how to optimize your shop, category, and product pages for SEO.

Dynamic Product Meta Titles & Descriptions

Once Yoast SEO is installed, go to SEO->Search Appearance->Content Types. Scroll down until you see the Products section.

This is where you can set dynamic meta titles and descriptions for your product pages.

This way, you don’t have to create custom meta titles and descriptions if you don’t want to. You can set up a dynamic product meta that uses each product’s data.

For example, here is how you could set up your meta title and meta description for your product pages using dynamic variables.

You can also click the Insert snippet variable button to see all of the variables you can use in your meta title and meta descriptions.

You can view your generate meta tags in the source code of your product pages. Here are ours from our example above:

If you would like to set custom meta titles and descriptions for your products, you can do that as well on each product page.

But let’s do the dynamic meta tags for our category pages as well.

Go to the Taxonimoes tab in Yoast SEO Search Appearance settings. Scroll down to Product Categories and create a dynamic meta title and description for your category pages,

Check your meta tags by going to your category pages and viewing the source code like above. Make sure your meta title and descriptions contain your main keywords for each page and include intent-based keywords.

Integrate Schema Tags

What are schema tags?

According to Moz, “Schema.org (often called Schema) is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs.”

I’m sure you have seen product listings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that show price, ratings, reviews, etc. Here is an example of a product page that has schema tags set up:

You can do this too by adding product schema tags using the WooCommerce Yoast SEO plugin or another schema plugin.

The Yoast WooCommerce SEO Plugin will add product schema to all of your WooCommerce products allowing them to stand out more and rank you higher.

I would recommend using SchemaPro so that you can also add other schemas like articles, organizations, breadcrumbs, etc. The more schema tags you can add to your WordPress site, the better chances you have of ranking well in Google.

Adding product schema is really easy with SchemaPro. Just buy the plugin and then install it. Go to settings->Schema Pro and click add a new schema.

This will open a setup wizard that will make adding schemas really easy. Just click the Product button and then click Next.

Now you will need to choose where you want to show this schema. So click the dropdown to enable it on all single product pages.

Lastly, you will need to match up each attribute so that SchemaPro can automatically add the product schema tags to your WooCommerce product pages.

Go through the list and match up all of the items (most should already be connected automatically).

For reviews, make sure you set them up like this:

Here are all of the required fields you will need to select in order to have no errors on your product schema tags.

• Name
• Image
• URL
• SKU
• MPN
• Availability
• Price Valid Until
• Price
• Currency

So just set values for all of these and your tags will be set up correctly. You can also enable schema on any other elements you want on your WooCommerce site.

Testing Schema Tags

In order to make sure your schema tags are set up and installed properly, you need to check them using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

This will show you each schema you have on a certain page and any errors that the schema has.

Be sure to fix any errors that are detected as these will not show in Google. Warnings are recommended to be fixed but will still provide Google with the data it needs to show your data in the SERPs.

Building Content for WooCommerce

One of the best ways to scale your WooCommerce store and get a lot of organic traffic is to build content on your site in the form of articles, blogs, and videos.

This type of content attracts the most visitors, as well as backlinks, shares, and authority.

Content Marketing, as its called, uses content to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers.

Keyword Research

Before writing a single word, you should do some keyword/content research to find high trafficked topics in your store’s niche.

If your store sells headphones, then your content should be all about headphones. We use Ahrefs to find great content ideas and it will only take you a few minutes.

Let’s go to the Ahrefs content explorer and type of our WooCommerce store’s niche or keyword.

Sort by organic traffic and you will see the highest-trafficked content that includes your keywords in it. Find topics that you could replicate and check out the length, quality, and authority of the article.

This way you know that the content you create and drive a lot of traffic to your store.

But how do you write content that gets ranked?

Long-Form Content

Long-form content means creating content that answers a ton of questions and gives a lot of value around a certain topic.

Most long-form content is longer than 3,000 words in length and includes multiple media types like:

• Images
• Text
• Videos
• Graphs
• Slideshows

When you use all of these elements, you can share your content on multiple platforms and generate maximum exposure.

There are a ton of different types of long-form content that you can create on your WordPress website, but here are some of the most popular ones:

• FAQ pages
• Resource Pages
• Guides
• How-tos

These types of content are known to get more visitors and more backlinks, which is good for SEO!

The best way to ensure that your content is valuable and gets ranked its to copy off your competitors. I know, it sounds like cheating, but its a really good idea.

You don’t have to blatantly steal your competitor’s content but generate similar content that provides more value and is longer and you will surpass them in the SERPs.

Long Product Descriptions

The days of having a 50-word product description are over. The ideal product page should be similar to a well-written Amazon product listing.

Your product page content should have every single thing about the product, how it works, how to use it, who it’s for, images, youtube videos, infographics, and audio clips. It should also be over 1000 words but the longer the better. The more content you have on your product pages the more chances you can rank for long-tail keywords not to mention educating your customers on your products.

This graph from Canirank shows the correlation between longer content and higher rankings:

So most pages in the #1 and #2 positions are over 1900 words according to this graph. So make your product description long and full of answers about your products.

If you have a wholesale or dropshipping store, write your own custom product description instead of using the manufacturer product description that everyone else is using.

Promoting Your Content

Once you have built a bunch of long-form articles on your WordPress website around your store’s niche or category, its time to promote your content, generating more shares, backlinks, and traffic.

Social Media Sharing Incentives

One of the best ways to get more shares of your content and products is by offering incentives for shoppers to share your products.

You could offer shoppers 10% off if they like and share your Facebook Page. Not only will this create more visibility of your store but it will increase the chances of getting backlinks and more shares.

Blogger Outreach

Reaching out to popular bloggers or influencers and requesting a review or article on their blog can give you very strong backlinks to your product pages. When someone reviews your product, they often link back to the product in reference and this can help you rank higher in Google.

You can also pay some bloggers to write about your products and include a high-quality backlink. Be sure to find bloggers that are in your target demographic so that it resonates with your target customer and product niche.

Simply Google ‘your product‘ + blog and you will get a large list of blogs about your product:

Now, you can simply visit the blogs, contact the owner and ask them if they would like to review your product for a free sample. Most people love free stuff and love the chance to add more content to their website as well. This is a numbers game, so contact as many as you can and you may see that 10% are willing to give you a review or backlink, but just a few can increase your rankings immensely.

Guest Blogging

Like Blogger outreach, you can reach out to blogs in your niche and ask them to write your own article on their blog or website. This way, you are in control of the content that appears around your backlink and you can educate your potential customers on your product… Not to mention add a juicy backlink to your site in your guest post.

Similarly to finding blogs to outreach to, you can simply do a Google search for ‘your product’ + submit guest post and you will see a number of places that accept guest posts:

Read the guidelines of each website as they are usually all different.

Some require 600 words minimum while others required 1500 words. You may find that some of them do not accept backlinks or are paid so watch out for that. If you are willing to pay, then it can cost anywhere in between $20-$2,000 depending on the website you are trying to submit a guest post on.

I would look up the website in Ahrefs and see how much organic traffic it gets, how powerful the backlink will be and if it’s worth paying for.

For example, the first listing we found for HumorousHomeMaking.com is a pretty powerful backlink and it has great organic traffic so if it was paid, we would most likely pay as it would be worth it in organic traffic value.

Quora

Using Quora is another great way to get more referral traffic and high-quality backlinks from a high DA website. Quora is a question and answer platform with completely user-generated content. You can simply ask a question about anything and the community will answer.

To get more traffic and backlinks from Quora, simply search for questions in your product niche and answer them. Don’t just use 5-word answers but provide a valuable answer to the question and then you can add a backlink to your ecommerce store or product page depending on the answer.

Don’t just spam every answer but look for questions you can bring value to and answer them to the best of your knowledge and provide a backlink to your product or website. Over 6 million people visit Quora every day so you can get a lot of exposure if you answer the right questions.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, there are a lot of ways you can optimize your WooCommerce store for SEO. Luckily, WooCommerce is backed by WordPress, which is one of the best platforms for an optimized website.

Just implement the ideas shared above and you will start getting organic traffic to your store in no time.

Tyler Horvath

Tyler Horvath is an SEO Expert with over 15 years of experience in search engine optimization, popular blog author and WordPress SEO expert.