How To SEO A WooCommerce Store
You will need a woocommerce SEO guide to help you build out your WooCommerce store and attract even more high-quality traffic. E-commerce is pretty competitive. You are oftentimes competing with some of the biggest names in your particular niche. However, it is not impossible. Let’s go over some ways that you can work on the SEO of your woocommerce store.
Site Navigation Structure
Before you do anything, you need to sit down and draw out how you plan to structure your website. The URL is important but you also want to have great flow for those that are visiting your online store. Drawing it out on a piece of paper can help you stay organized. You need to determine the categories and how you are going to have them divided up. For example, if you run a shirt company. Do you want the categories by:
- Color?
- Size?
- Sleeve length?
- Men and women?
- Maybe prints and solids
Determine the layout
When you really start to think about it, you will soon realize that there are a lot of options. This is why following a woocommerce SEO guide will keep you from getting sidetracked and confused. Determining the correct site structure first is most important. You also want the URL to have keywords in it. So, you wouldn’t make the URL women and men, but women’s-tee-shirts and men’s tee shirts for an example. These are called long-tailed keywords. Finding phrases that people will search for to find your products using these long-tailed keywords – these are keys to your success.
Keyword research
Another high priority in this WooCommerce SEO guide is keyword research. You should do some research on what keywords are actually getting searched. You would be surprised by the different results that might come up. There are many ways to do keyword research and it is important to the overall success of the e-commerce SEO campaign.
Once you have your keywords and the structure planned out, you are ready to begin the design of your WooCommerce website with proper structure and keywords that will help with what they call On-Page SEO.
Build your site as if you are a real company. Even if you are a drop shipper or something similar. Everyone is trying to get into e-commerce. With that said, it is important that you build your site right. Be sure that you have a privacy policy, terms, and conditions and proper contact info that is in clear view. If you don’t want to use your real phone number to get a Google number, they are free to use and work on your cell.
Content Development
Proper content development is another key aspect of this woocommerce SEO guide. Most people want to skip over this completely, which is why most people are not successful. You have to put in the time to get the results. You will not only need products, but content as well.
What is content? Well, content is not just images and videos, however, those are certainly nice and needed for an e-commerce store. Content is words. You need words on your pages written around the keywords and phrases you found during your keyword research. This may be on the category pages or you should form a blog of sorts.
The content should be presented in a way that entices people to actually read it. You will want to have some nice graphics and images as a part of your blog or even videos. If you are writing on your category pages, you will want to put the content below the products. This will ensure better user experience. Also, be sure that you put in the proper headers to your content as you would expect them to flow. Starting out with header 1 and then header 2 and so on.
Image Optimization
This might come before step 2, it all depends on how your workflow goes. But, you will need to ensure that all your images have a proper keyword name. Most people don’t do this step, but it certainly is a great one. This will allow Google to know more about your website from your images. The images must also be small enough to load quickly. It is recommended the images be less than 1200 pixels on the largest side. This will help your website have the proper speed for better user experience but also helps with SEO too.
Be sure that your images are done in a professional manner. Crop the image if need be and resize it. There is software out there that can take the background out of the image or make the background white. Don’t cut corners on your images. Hire a professional if you have too. Do not use other people’s images for your own site, unless you are selling their actual products.
Important information for visitors
When working with e-commerce SEO it is the same as any other website. However, keep in mind that the category pages are similar to landing pages. The product pages almost never are found by the search engines. So, on those pages just be sure that you have all the information that you would want if you were to be purchasing the product from you. Things such as color, size, dimensions, and such are things that should be included in the product description. Make the descriptions all unique and describe what the product does. Try to write content that is hitting on the emotional side of your customer.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is super important for your On-Page SEO. You want to internally link the pages as it seems appropriate. Be sure that it is done fairly randomly. Have you ever read a piece of content or a webpage and found links inside the words on the page? Those words are what we are talking about when we say “Internal linking”. You will want to use some of the keywords and phrases that you found during your keyword research to link out from. All the pages should be linked together in some fashion. The blogs should also be linked out to the web pages.
For a more advanced WooCommerce SEO guide, you can even get into Silo linking in this section. These are things that have a pattern and are not as random as they look.
External Linking
Once you have the site built, the content on there, the images optimized and your internal links completed. You will need to find some external links that are authoritative. These links could be a large competitor or maybe a blog that is in your niche. Something that the search engines already trust.
Schema & Technical SEO
Now that you have your site set up, it is time to add schema and other technical SEO tactics to ensure that the website can be crawled effectively. You should have a sitemap installed that tells the search bots where to find you. You need to be sure this is all set up and your website is ready to be crawled. Once you have that, you can submit your sitemap to the search engines.
Off-Page SEO
Before you start off-page SEO be sure that your site is crawled. This will give you a good idea of what keywords are naturally ranking a bit higher and what you should attack next. The keywords that naturally rank a little higher, means that it will take less effort to get them to rank further.
Off-page SEO is just that, it is work that you do on other sites that will help your Woocommerce SEO. You need to set up your social profiles complete with your logo image, a small paragraph about your store and what you sell and a link back to your store. There are 100s of these, so this is going to take some time. But, it is important. Also, take time to go back and put your social profiles such as your Facebook page, Instagram, Pinterest, and more on each of the other pages. That gives them more authority. This will further build the trust of the site.
A side note about SEO
Every Woocommerce SEO expert out there do things a little differently. However, you could also develop citations for your website as well. This means that you would fill out all those directories that you find online. Many people don’t find you by those directories, but those sites have pretty high authority and good merit with the search engines.
Building out links
Foundation links are great too. Getting a mix of social profiles and web 2.0 links. These 2.0 properties and some citations, bookmarking sites, and other free to blog on sites are great for getting some more branding started and some links coming in that are pointing to your site. Many of these pages have trust with Google and can pass the trust onto you. Keep building the blogs on the 2.0s out. Be sure that you continue to build the 2.0s out and make them look like real blogs. Fill out the information, set a theme, and such. Most people don’t do this because it takes more time, however, it is effective.
Find some patience.
Be sure as you do these things that you take some time in between each step. SEO is not something that happens quickly over time. It is a slow process of building your e-commerce site.
Does Your Woocommerce Store Need SEO Help?
For more information on how to improve your woocommerce stores SEO, contact 1st on the List today by calling 1-888-262-6687 or email us at [email protected].
