The marketing industry is still dominated by Google and the rules that it sets up in regard to SEO. Whether you’re creating web pages or writing your marketing and promotional content, you need to have SEO in mind at all times.
This is true, especially when it comes to your WooCommerce store hosting as you want customers to find your store easily, so you could maximize your number of sales. Not sure where to begin? Here are ten essential WooCommerce SEO practices your store could use today, and help you see a huge increase in sales!
1. Use Keywords/Phrases
“The art of using keywords in your content isn’t dead. In fact, it’s just as important today as it always has been. However, with the rise of voice control on devices such as smartphones and FireSticks, keywords are quickly adapting into key phrases” explains Taina Vargas, SEO Manager, and Contributing Writer at HuffingtonPost.
Let’s say you were selling ‘running trainers.’ Instead of a customer searching ‘running trainers’ into Google, they are much more likely to say ‘Google, what are the best running trainers for under $50.’ This means you need to start implementing these kinds of phrases into your content.
You must use strong and focused keywords where they naturally fit. Keywords can easily be used in meta titles, descriptions, alt texts, URLs, and more. Having a strong keyword usage technique is best for WooCommerce SEO. Working with an SEO agency will help you create and maintain an updated keyword marketing strategy designed to lead customers to your site.
You could source keywords and phrases yourself or use online tools, such as SEMRush and Moz to help.
2. Avoid Plagiarism
It was once believed that Google used to penalize websites and stores for having plagiarised content, whether or not it was intentional. However, in recent months, it’s become clear that Google doesn’t merely penalize websites, it doesn’t index the page if any copied content is detected.
However, this means that your customers won’t be able to find your pages, which will be a huge problem for you. Unique and original content is the key factor for improving WooCommerce SEO. A plagiarism checker will help you figure out how much of your text is plagiarized. After a plagiarism test and finding duplicated chunks (sentences) in your text with the help of a plagiarism detector, you can work on removing them before publishing any article. This tool gives results in percentage and also provides you the source from your text matches. So you can easily avoid plagiarism. Fortunately, you could use tools like Essayroo and Boom Essays to check your content to make sure that it’s 100% original.
3. Use Proper Formatting
This is more of an umbrella term that could refer to a ton of different aspects of your WooCommerce store. For example, you’ll want to consider the length of your content to make sure it provides value to the readers and doesn’t come across as spammy.
For this, you’ll want about 2,000 words, which you could check using Easy Word Count. Likewise, make sure your larger pieces of content use headers and subheadings to break up the text. Also, ensure to format added content, such as testimonials and reviews, using tools like Cite It In so that your entire store is optimized for mobile devices.
4. Check Store Content Quality
Consider how much content your eCommerce website has and the amount of written text that your readers are subjected to. For example, you’ll have your website content, your page descriptions, your product descriptions, your terms and conditions pages, your FAQs pages, your promotional content, your blog, and much more.
You need to invest a proper amount of time in making sure that this content is perfect. This means editing your content, proofreading your work, and making sure that everything is perfect, including spelling, grammar, and the punctuations that you’ve used. Not only will this give you a better WooCommerce SEO ranking, but it will also improve your user experience. You could use tools like State of Writing and AcademAdvisor to help with these processes.
5. Use Unique Title Tags
One of the most common problems that WooCommerce stores face is using duplicate title tags in their content. You need to pay special attention to the tags you’re using to make sure that they’re 100% unique and do not clash with other pages in your store.
This may lead to repeat keywords or phrases in some places, but you could always settle for using the tried and tested method of ‘brand-mode-item-type’ that you could follow to create these tags.
6. Analysis & Update
Just because you have to invest time in your web store and make sure everything is up to date doesn’t mean the job is done. SEO is a continuous process where you must always be aware of the guidelines.
Something that ranks highly today may actually be penalized tomorrow by Google, which could damage your business. Use tools like Ahrefs and Academized to make sure you stay up to date with everything that’s going on, so you could stay one step ahead at all times.
7. Optimize Product Descriptions and Headers
Product descriptions are crucial elements for your WooCommerce SEO. As product descriptions are short pieces of content, the product description headers must be clear, and search engine friendly.
To make WooCommerce SEO successful, you need to use appealing product descriptions that must be concise and relatable so that your customer can connect to your product. Technical details can help the customer understand why the product is unique.
You can use the pre-written product descriptions, but a good practice is to write your own product descriptions using focused keywords. It is a helpful practice to make your WooCommerce SEO better.
8. Optimize Images on Your WooCommerce Store
Ecommerce stores usually have several products along with images, the sizes of these media files play an important role in website ranking. Large media files hinder the loading speed of the website and affect your ranking.
For a WooCommerce store with lots of product images, it is paramount to optimize your product images. One of the best ways to optimize your WooCommerce store’s images is to compress them. This shrinks the size of your images without changing the dimensions.
You can use the Lazy Load technique or the WP compress plugin for image optimization. This technique will reduce the file size of your images and have a positive effect on the speed of your website; improving WooCommerce SEO.
9. Enable Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs links are good for internal linking and show your customer a clear hierarchy or structure of your store. Your customer can move back to the previous category or landing pages easily.
If your site has an enabled breadcrumb, it will also appear in the search result. This means when a Google search query results in the link to your website, They get a clear idea of your site structure without entering it.
10. Optimize Store Speed and Performance
Make sure to optimize your store speed because the fact is no one likes slow-loading websites; not even Google. Your store speed and performance is an important factor of WooCommerce SEO.
There are many methods by which you can adopt for your store optimization. Here is a Cloudways article on 23 tips to speed up a WordPress site for better performance. One more thing you can do is test your site using the Pingdom speed test tool and improve the scores by understanding the suggestions and comments.
Conclusion
Optimizing a WooCommerce store doesn’t have to be an overwhelming or daunting task. By following these ten simple steps, you can easily boost the sales of your store, sometimes even by as much as you could think!
Disclaimer: This is the guest post written by Gloria Kopp, She is a digital marketing strategist at Australian Help, and a regular contributor at Engadget and Paper Fellows blogs. Besides, Gloria is an author of the Studydemic educational blog, where she shares her writing and career advice with students.”
Jamil Ali Ahmed
Jamil is an Organic Search Manager at Cloudways - A SEO friendly hosting Platform. He has 14 years experience in SEO, and is passionate about Digital Marketing and Growth Optimization. Jamil is a Minimalist, Observer, Loves Nature, Animals, Food, Cricket & Mimicking :)
