Find out how our expert team at NUOPTIMA can best assist you in promoting your WooCommerce store. If you book a free 30-minute discovery call with one of our SEO specialists today, you will get an insight into our digital marketing services customised to fulfil your business goals.
Key Points
- WooCommerce is a free e-commerce platform designed to help small-scale businesses market their products and services online.
- SEO is a collection of methods aimed at making meaningful enhancements to your website to help improve search engine visibility, attract quality leads and double your revenues.
- SEO for WooCommerce is a powerful technique to gain massive popularity for your online store. WooCommerce is a great place to implement search engine optimisation. It has built-in SEO features, which you can maximise by using numerous search engine add ons, plugins and strategies.
- WooCommerce SEO is not something you can automate. It takes time and hard work to succeed, but it becomes much easier with the help of a professional.
Whether you plan to build your own WooCommerce store or have already made that business idea a reality, you will understand that establishing an online shop is just the first step. The next critical action you should take is to promote your shop and convince people to buy from you. In this article, we will discuss the basics of WooCommerce SEO and share some of NUOPTIMA’s SEO tips that work well with successful WooCommerce stores.
What Is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is one of the biggest e-commerce trends these days. This commercial platform is a plugin built explicitly on WordPress to help merchants grow their business online. With its open-source nature, you can set up your own store and customise it according to your preferences and requirements. What’s more, business owners can leverage this powerful content management system (CMS) by utilising its essential features, from inventory control and payment system to customer service, shipping integration, etc.
Is WooCommerce Right for Your Ecommerce Business?
WordPress is by far the world’s top CMS platform, powering about 43% of all websites on the internet. WooCommerce gets the most out of its popularity while adding fantastic eCommerce opportunities to it. According to data presented by Built With, the current global market share for WooCommerce is approximately 29%. This translates to as many as 37,173 websites using this e-commerce platform. Those numbers put WooCommerce pretty far ahead of its competitors, such as Shopify (21%), Magento (8%) and many other e-commerce technologies. WooCommerce is, without a doubt, the best place to do business in today’s digital age.
Why Is SEO for WooCommerce Important?
If you want to improve your positions on Google and drive more traffic to your WooCommerce store, there are tons of marketing techniques you can pursue. Some of which include pay-per-click or PPC advertising, social media marketing and more. But, when it comes to targetting free, organic and high-quality traffic that lasts longer, there’s only one method you need. You’ve guessed it; we’re talking about search engine optimisation (SEO).
Search engines like Google are a fantastic source of steady online traffic. When people search for information about specific products or services, Google provides indexed results that are pre-arranged according to their quality, relevance, user engagement and other Google ranking factors. The more optimised a website, the higher possibility that it can obtain better Google positions. On that note, many website owners are hiring an SEO agency to help improve their websites and achieve their ranking goals. But why should business owners concentrate on growing organic traffic in particular?
Let’s take a look at the screenshot below containing the results of a recent traffic sources distribution analysis conducted by Semrush. As you can see, almost half of the entire web traffic comes from direct searches, meaning those visitors reach a website without a referral link from another site. It’s easy to drive immediate traffic to your site once you have a well-known branding. But if your Woocommerce store is relatively new, your biggest shot at boosting sales is to get noticed by massive organic traffic online. These people come from organic search results that are simply not ads.
According to the data, 37.5% of web traffic to e-commerce sites comes from search engines. This suggests that more people would opt for organic web pages or listings derived based on their relevance to their keyword queries. Therefore, ranking highly on search engine results pages will push you closer to your target audience.
Is WooCommerce SEO friendly?
WooCommerce is built with various SEO features, which can benefit your business. However, manual SEO configurations are still necessary if you really want to improve your website for better search engine engagement. By WooCommerce being SEO-friendly, we mean it has elements that allow you to optimise your product pages and boost their visibility on search engines. But it’s up to you however you like to enhance the quality of content you add to your WooCommerce store.
If you’re not a tech whizz, you will easily find yourself overwhelmed with too many WooCommerce SEO plugins and other self-hosted extensions that must be installed to run properly. And, that’s precisely why it’s still worth having SEO experts working alongside business owners who want to explore SEO for WooCommerce.
Our SEO team at NUOPTIMA is here to help assess potential SEO strategies for your business and curate expert solutions to any issues you may encounter while launching or growing your WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce SEO Tips from NUOPTIMA
Obtaining higher positions on search engines doesn’t happen overnight. It will take some time for your SEO efforts to show optimistic results. But, it’s clear to see why search engine optimisation is a go-to strategy among powerhouse marketers. Learn a thing or two from NUOPTIMA’s best advice for ranking WooCommerce stores on search engines.
Perform Keyword Research
SEO won’t be a success if you skip this part. It’s more like sailing without a compass when you don’t know what you’re optimising for. Thus, choosing the best keywords that align with your products and services is a great way to ensure that you’re going in the right direction.
Conducting keyword research is easy when you have analytics tools like Ahrefs. Remember, the key to finding the most relevant keywords is to understand what ranks for your competitors. Let’s say you’re selling digital cameras on WooCommerce. In that case, you must search for page listings related to your product. Choose the ones that rank near the top search results and copy their URLs.
Go to Site Explorer on Ahrefs, enter the URL into the address bar and hit enter. It should give you a summary of all the keywords used in the article that rank highly on search engines, just like what you see in the above photo. You may use those keywords in your own content to leverage their popularity.
Optimise Product Images
Online shops need to have pleasing images of their products. Optimised images do not necessarily have to be of high quality as they can drastically affect the loading speed of your website. To optimise product images, try to reduce the image file size without compromising its quality. In addition, include alt texts to images so that visitors with impaired vision can understand what’s in those pictures. If you can also add your targeted keywords to the photo’s file name, title and alt descriptions, the better.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
A 2021 survey suggests that 63% of British respondents use smartphones for online shopping. That’s why Google is very particular when it comes to a website’s mobile-friendliness. To meet Google’s requirements, you must focus on enhancing your mobile user experience.
Create Shareable Content
To say that content is king for any SEO campaign would be an understatement. When writing copies for your website, think of popular content types like case studies, product demos or how-to blog posts. Don’t forget to optimise your content by placing optimal keywords, writing engaging title tags and meta descriptions, linking to authoritative website sources and more.
Take Advantage of WooCommerce SEO Plugins
As this platform provides different SEO plugins and extensions, it’s best to use everything in your power to help boost your search engine rankings. By maximising those features, you will be able to:
Enhance site structure.
- Improve sitemap for quicker search engine access.
- Organise products’ tags, categories and descriptions.
- Fix errors and warnings.
- Include focus keywords per page.
Improve URL Structures
You’re not optimising your overall website correctly if you don’t emphasise the structure of your URLs. It’s best to keep URLs short and constructed in a way that is most intelligible and shareable to users. To adjust URLs for product pages on WooCommerce, just go to WordPress, click settings and choose permalinks. Ideally, URL structures should contain keywords related to its content. Be sure to use logical words and avoid long ID numbers in your URLs.
Enable Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are another essential element that improves your overall site structure. These are small text paths located in the upper portion of product pages.
Enabling breadcrumbs makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your website, for example, moving back to previous category pages without losing the currently displayed one. While WooCommerce allows this functionality, you can still make the most of its SEO benefits by having SEO plugins installed by a professional.
Final Thoughts
WooCommerce is an incredible option for small business owners looking to expand online. Thriving in a digitally-driven market, it’s essential to do SEO for WooCommerce right. With our top SEO tips in mind, you should be well on your way to ranking your WooCommerce store. An important reminder is that SEO is not a one-time thing but an ongoing process. If you’re determined to take your WooCommerce site to the next level, our SEO professionals at NUOPTIMA are thrilled to give you a hand. Reserve a free discovery call with us so we can discuss our services further.
