Introduction
Present-age customers are more into eCommerce websites more than ever before. Even in the COVID situation, eCommerce websites and businesses made record-breaking sales.
With the constant change of trends in the marketplace, the trend of eCommerce has changed a lot. Therefore, your focus should not be limited to making your WooCommerce based website aesthetically appealing. However, you should also focus on eCommerce SEO to effectively draw more customers to your website.
To implement an excellent user experience via the front end, you need to enhance the back end as well. As a result, you must work on the technical SEO of your eCommerce store thoroughly. We have come up with Technical SEO Tips for eCommerce Stores that you can easily apply to your site.
Improve Your WooCommerce Site’s Loading Time
When it comes to eCommerce technical SEO, you must devote your effort to optimizing your site’s loading speed. The time it takes to load a page on your site affects the visitors. If your site speed is more than 3 seconds, then it’s obvious that your visitors will not stay at your site.
Slow page performance also means missed revenues for your company since slow-loading
websites account for $2.6 billion in profit reduction each year.
To prevent this colossal loss, you’ll need to speed up your site’s load time. Utilizing a service like Google PageSpeed Insights, you can find out how long it takes for your WooCommerce website to load. It’s a free tool that will provide you with a wealth of details about your site’s load speed and also recommendations for how to improve it.
Let’s assume that your site speed is not up to the mark. But to improve it you can do the followings:
- Minimize the number of redirects
- Minify the codes, including HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Optimize the Images of your site
- Activate Browser Cashing
- Use external platforms to host videos on your site
You can make your WooCommerce site load quicker and offer customers an enhanced experience by optimizing the backend.
Properly Utilize the Breadcrumb
To implement proper WooCommerce SEO in your eCommerce site, establish proper breadcrumb navigation. Via Breadcrumb navigation, you can display the exact path of a certain page. It represents the order of your web pages in such a way that makes navigation easier for the customers.
Let’s say you are in Bestbuy and willing to get Prime Lenses for your camera. Look at the following image and try to understand how the navigation has been made easy. Breadcrumb has been properly utilized in the following example.
Camera & Camcorders > Digital Camera Accessories> Camera Lenses > DSLR Lenses > Prime Lenses.
Breadcrumb navigation, in essence, offers an orderly route to your WooCommerce store’s merchandise. This configuration makes it easier for both people and search engines to browse your WooCommerce site.
Create a Clean URL structure
Begin with constructing a smooth URL structure If you want to handle WooCommerce SEO like a pro. A smooth URL structure should have a logical navigation route that does not include any random digits or characters. The navigation route should clearly reveal where the customers are on your eCommerce site while surfing your site. In this way, both users and search engines can figure out where users are.
The following URL will not give you a clear idea of where you are on a website. The chances are you won’t search again on this site because of this kind of unstructured link.
www.sodashi.com.au/product/xbcnmlr0/0fscbrew
But this URL will surely give you a proper idea of your location on a website:
www.sodashi.com.au/product/clay-cleanser-with-lavender/
When creating pages for your website, ensure sure the URLs are optimized so that both people and search engines can understand them. Additionally, refining your URLs allows you to incorporate your keyword, which may help your website look more relevant and rank higher in associated search outcomes.
Put Structured Data on Your Website
While executing WooCommerce SEO for eCommerce, putting structured data on your to-do list is a must. You may use structured data to improve your product listings and rank higher in search results. This is because structured data gives search engines the required info or hints about the content of a page.
Furthermore, while promoting WooCommerce products via Google Ads, you must include structured data. You will need structured data to create a WooCommerce product feed for Google via the perfect product feed plugin.
When you are providing structured data in a product feed file, creating ads in Google networks will become easier. As a result, people searching for your products online will see the ads as well as organic search results related to your products.
From the WooCommerce website, you will be adding information like the following:
- Product Name
- Product Review
- Price of the product
- Availability of Stock info
- URL of your store
All this information are essential to indicate that your WooCommerce pages are the product pages that will actually rank you up in relevant search. It will also ensure that more people click your web pages and explore your products if they have good reviews and the stock information is adequate.
Establish a sitemap in XML and a robots.txt file
While you master ways to handle WooCommerce SEO for eCommerce, you’ll come across two key site elements:
XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is a map that tells search engines ways to traverse your website. You want to use a sitemap to direct search engines to your most essential web pages so they may appear in pertinent search results.
Txt (text file): The robots.txt file specifies which pages search engine bots are not allowed to crawl or index. While it doesn’t totally prohibit bots from crawling specific sites, it helps keep them from clogging up your site with crawl queries and delaying it considerably.
The above two elements are crucial for eCommerce technical SEO since they affect whether Google crawls your site. Google must locate, crawl, and index your pages in order for them to appear in search results. These two directives assist Google in successfully crawling your site.
Utilize Canonical Tags
This is the last item in our list of WooCommerce SEO tips for an eCommerce site. Canonical tags are important for SEO since they notify Google which URL reflects a page’s principal copy. Pages are quite often updated, deleted, and replaced as your site develops and scales.
You may wind up with duplicate pages as a result of this approach. Similar content on the same site or across different domains might be considered identical content. If you have an identical page on your site more than once, search engines will be confused and won’t really know which page to prioritize for ranking.
You may inform search engines which page is the “primary” page with the canonical tag, and it will rank that page higher in Google search results. This is why you’ll want to apply canonical tags for your WooCommerce website in the following places:
Assuming your items contain different page URLs for various sizes or colours, you’ll need to use a canonical tag to direct search engines to the significant product listings.
When it comes to Product Options, If your items have different page URLs for different sizes or colours, you’ll want to use a canonical tag to direct search engines to the main product listings.
But when it’s about products on multiple pages and if that product is listed in numerous categories, you’ll like to pick the primary page for that product detail page and use the canonical tag.
For Index Pages, You’ll really like to utilize a canonical tag to designate the main page when you’ve got product category pages that span numerous WooCommerce product pages.
Bonus WooCommerce SEO Tips
Ensure the security of Your WooCommerce Site
Website security is an important aspect of WooCommerce SEO for an eCommerce site. Users entering essential personal information when purchasing things on your site want to feel protected when doing so. To guarantee that visitors are comfortable purchasing from your site, you must safeguard it.
Obtaining a Secured Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate can help to safeguard your website.
To boost SEO, SSL security is an integral part of any website. You should go with an SSL cert that is suitable for eCommerce. Let’s say a wildcard SSL would be a great choice here. Different CAs offer such SSL security including Comodo positive SSL wildcard, RapidSSL wildcard, GlobalSign wildcard. It secures the main domain and subdomains easily.
SSL certificate ensures that critical information is encrypted and safeguarded. The closed padlock icon and “HTTPS” in your address will alert users that your WooCommerce site is secured.
Optimize Product Descriptions
Websites’ product descriptions are usually short, but they must be handled as little pieces of text. This entails making an effort to ensure that product descriptions and headers are concise, clear, and optimized for search engines.
Product descriptions must emanate an expressive attraction to assist shoppers in connecting with your product in order to thrive in WooCommerce product SEO. It should arouse demand for your product while also utilizing logic to explain technical intricacies and demonstrate why it is special.
Additionally, start making your product descriptions more appealing and understandable by formatting them.
Product descriptions and headlines are treated by Google in the same way as any relevant content on your WooCommerce shop. They provide vital information about your product page, as well as the targeted keywords for which it should be ranked.
You may employ pre-written product information, but crafting your individual descriptions with the proper emphasis phrases can help your WooCommerce shop rank higher in google search results.
When it comes to determining whether part of a description is unique, Google isn’t always accurate. It’s best to write your own product descriptions, just like the WooCommerce website’s content.
Install the Best WooCommerce SEO Plugins
WooCommerce has a number of extensions and plugins that you may use to improve your online store. With so many WooCommerce product SEO plugins to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which ones are ideal for WooCommerce SEO.
Yoast WooCommerce SEO: It is the top WooCommerce SEO plugin for WooCommerce and a must-have for any WordPress site. You may choose a target keyword for each page of your online store with this SEO plugin. Yoast SEO gives you suggestions about how to utilize the target keyword to obtain the greatest results after picking it.
Broken link checker: This tool assists you in detecting 404 issues on your website so that you don’t have a high bounce rate. So, This extension is only useful if your web page contains enough content. It is one of the top SEO plugins for WooCommerce because of its capabilities.
Autopilot SEO for WooCommerce: This WooCommerce SEO plugin is required for all WooCommerce sites. When you use this tool to integrate your WooCommerce site, it will automatically choose important keywords within your web pages and connect with social networking websites and search engines.
Leverage Schema Markups on Your Site
If you are looking to include rich snippets in your search results, using schema markup is the ideal way. For a deeper grasp of this phrase, Schema markup is a piece of code that you add to your WordPress site to help search engines provide users with incredibly useful search outcomes. You can include rich snippets by utilizing the All in One Schema.org Rich Snippet Plugin in your WooCommerce plugin.
Final Words
It is evident that the WooCommerce website’s lifeblood is SEO. Although SEO is not instantaneous, it may provide you with the required results in as little as 6-8 months.
You should not risk messing up the site’s coding and causing worse complexity in your WooCommerce site. Perhaps, these WooCommerce SEO recommendations for 2023 will surely provide you with a better grasp on how to enhance a WooCommerce website for better Google search engine rankings.
Author Bio:
Atanu Das is a professional content writer who is actively writing SEO-optimized content. For the last four years, he has been writing creative content on WordPress, WooCommerce, Google Merchant, eCommerce, and other topics. He is currently working as a content writer at Webappick – a giant WordPress Plugin development company.
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