For any online store, SEO (search engine optimisation) is the by far the best source of traffic.
With your product pages ranking prominently in search results, your store would automatically generate massive organic traffic, sales, and profits. What else could be more fulfilling for an online store owner?
But that doesn’t just happen.
You have to really optimise your store for search engine traffic. And if you’re using WooCommerce, you’re already steps ahead in the right direction because the plugin packs huge SEO value by default. But you still have to build on that to maximize your store’s SEO potential.
Hiring a WooCommerce SEO service is your best bet if you can afford the cost. But if you can’t, never worry. There’s a lot you can do yourself and still get awesome results.
Here are 5 highly effective SEO techniques to implement on your WooCommerce store.
1. Use clean URLs
By default, WooCommerce adds “/product-category” and “/product/” as URL base. While this makes for clean site architecture, clean URLs are great for SEO purposes. Having a URL base before your product page’s URL dilutes weakens the page’s SEO potential. So, it’s better to remove the URL base.
To remove the “/product-category/” part, we recommend the Remove Taxonomy Base Slug plugin. But we don’t recommend that you remove the “/product/” part totally because this usually causes various issues. Rather, simply change the base from “/product/” to “/p/”. With these done, you’d be left with cleaner URLs that search engines will love.
2. Use the silo structure
Silo structure is all about strictly grouping related content and pages into distinct sections on your WooCommerce store. To effectively implement this, you have to follow certain rules on internal linking and content categorization. Aside from the benefits of clean site architecture and better user experience, using the silo structure on your site helps your product pages rank higher in search results.
Understanding how to implement the silo structure isn’t one of the easiest things in the world. And it’s not something we can cover in this post. Here is a comprehensive and easy-to-understand resource on the subject.
3. Optimise your product page titles
The product title is one of the most powerful aspects of on-page SEO. But most store owners screw up this aspect by using generic product titles — the same ones used on manufacturer’s websites and several other websites selling the same items. This is plain wrong!
Each product’s title must be written to include the keywords that your target customers use as queries when searching the web for information about that product. If you play by this rule, your pages will stand out from the crowd and will have higher chances of ranking prominently in search results.
4. Use catchy meta descriptions
For starters, your meta description is the short paragraph displayed under the page title in search results. It provides additional information about the content of the page. Many online store owners make the mistake of not setting meta descriptions, leaving search engines to automatically grab any part of the page.
Crafting a powerful meta description for each of your product pages increases their chances of being clicked on by search engine users. And the increase in click-through rate in turn leads to higher rankings because search engines favor sites that attract more clicks.
5. Load up product pages with good content
Things have changed, and search engines now hate and avoid pages with thin content. Rather, they favor pages that provide value through detailed content. So, if you really want to rank your product pages in search results, stop doing the lazy job of adding only the product images and few lines of description. Rather add detailed content that provides value to the customer.
In addition to the product specs and price, explain the benefits of each feature, reveal the contents of the product pack, mention who should buy the product and who shouldn’t, and include other details that would help customers make well-informed buying decision such as links to similar or better alternatives on your site. This will improve your store’s user experience and search engine traffic.
Wrapping up
Now, we understand that there are loads of other SEO tactics that work for WooCommerce sites. However, we selectively highlighted these few because they are easy to implement, yet very effective. And ironically, they are not well implemented on most e-commerce stores.
Add these tips to other common-knowledge important tactics like link building and technical SEO, and you’d be ruling the rankings and smiling to the bank.
