WooCommerce SEO tips for 2021 – Optimize product descriptions and headers. WooCommerce SEO is an on-going process. Expecting to optimize your store’s WooCommerce SEO for all of these ranking signals right off the bat isn’t practical. Instead, you should start with the most important ranking signals and work your way up once you’ve covered the basics.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about ensuring that your website is ranking as highly possible on the search pages. If you properly optimize your WooCommerce website, you are making it easier for your target audience to find your eCommerce store and patronize your brand.

The main focus of WooCommerce SEO is to create content around focus keywords that are relevant to the products you’ve got on your website. The keywords should only appear naturally across the relevant pages and other parts of your website structure, such as your meta descriptions, URLs, image names, etc.

This article contains tips on what you can do to complement the built-SEO functions that come with WooCommerce.

Read Also: Top 3 WordPress SEO Plugins

12 SEO Tips to Follow to Optimize Your WooCommerce Site

Target the Right Keywords

Quality keyword research for your website in general and your product pages will help you find the best keywords to use on every page of your website. With product page keywords, the key is to find the words used by your customers to find the items you have in your inventory. Some tips to help you here:

• Use short-tail keywords (usually single words) on your homepage and category pages and use long-tail keywords (two or more words) on your product pages. For example: “shoes” is a short-tail keyword while “men’s running shoes” is a long-tail keyword.
• Pay more attention to keywords used by people that are very close to making a purchase decision. Some of these include “coupons”, “deals”, “for sale”, “Buy now”, “on-sale”, etc.
• Include product-specific keywords. Such keywords are used by people looking for an exact item. Product-specific keywords can be branded, have specific features (such as size), or include a model number. Examples of such keywords include “men’s shoes Adidas” “men’s size 10 running shoes”, “men’s Nike Air Max 200”, etc.
• Pay attention to high-volume keywords. These hold the biggest potential. However, it is important to avoid options that are too competitive as you won’t be able to rank for them. Sort your keyword list by competition, and target high-volume options that have low to medium competition for the best results.

Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and Keyword.io to generate your keyword list easily.

Create Unique Product Descriptions

Production descriptions are short texts that are typically less than 200 words. They are often designed to discuss the features of the product. Use the product description to make the product page search and user-friendly by using keywords throughout the content, but also writing to keep your audience engaged.

If you are selling a widely available product, it may be tempting to reuse the manufacturer’s description of the product. However, this puts you at a disadvantage as you have wasted content real estate that could have helped your website stand out.

When multiple websites are using the same product description, other ranking factors will come into play. Can you beat other well-known websites when judged by other metrics such as popularity, click-through, bounce rates, etc.?

Treat your product descriptions like other important pages of your site.

Also Read: An Ultimate Guide to Javascript SEO

Optimize Category and Product Pages

Category and product pages simplify the indexing process and also make it easy for users to find items they are looking for. With properly optimized and product pages, you reduce the probability of multiple product pages losing possible ranking positions to other pages on your website.

The best way to optimize category pages is to ensure the main keyword covers the broader term for a group of products. For example, “Handbags” is a good category page, while “Kelly Cut” is a good product page.

The page titles for your category and product pages should reflect your keyword research. Use titles that allow you to naturally infuse keywords without harming readability to avoid losing your audience just as soon as you attract them from the search pages.

Also Read: How to Customize a WooCommerce Product Page

Simplify Your Site Navigation

Simple site navigation makes it easier for your site visitors to stay longer on your website and reduce bounce rates. If people are spending more time on your website, you will see an improvement in your search ranking.

To simplify your site navigation, make sure the main menus are easy to find. The average web user will not spend more than a few seconds looking for a page on your website. Ensure you include links to the important navigation elements in your main navigation menu. That’s where the average user will look first. Any remaining links can go to the footer of the page.

Use Breadcrumbs

Deploying breadcrumbs is another way to further simplify navigation for your website visitors. You’ve probably seen page trails like Phones>Samsung>S-Series>S10 on an eCommerce store that sells mobile phones. That page pathway is known as breadcrumbs. They are an excellent way to show the customer the path they have taken to land on a product page.

With this, the user can go back to a specific page by quickly clicking on the part of breadcrumbs they’d like to return to. WooCommerce themes generally have this feature enabled by default, but if yours doesn’t, you can activate it in the Search Appearance tab, under SEO in your WordPress dashboard.

Utilize Short and Descriptive URLs

By default, your WooCommerce product URLs will contain a long string of numbers. This will make the links less accessible to search engines and humans. You can change this to ensure your links contain the page title or product name instead.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings> Permalinks to choose a URL structure that is short and descriptive. When done correctly, your page URLs will go from yourwebsite.com/?product=123445 to yourwebsite.com/product/product-name. This URL structure will make it easier for your target audience to find relevant URLs to your website in search results.

Also Read: WordPress Coding Best Practices

Create Unique Meta Descriptions

Writing unique meta descriptions is another important SEO technique that improves your SEO, but indirectly. The description gives a short summary of what the page is about, and they appear under your page title and URL in the results.

With an engaging meta description, you can trigger enough curiosity in a user to click-through to your website. With more people opening the page (and staying), the search engines will give more authority to the page (for that search term), and thus, a higher ranking.

Create Images and Videos

Including a video on a product page can improve the organic traffic from search results by more than 150%. The average web user is more likely to click on a video description than a text description because just like images, they can give deeper insights into a product in a way that a paragraph cannot.

Keep your images high-quality, but under the optimal size to avoid slowing down your page. For videos, host them on YouTube or Vimeo first, and then add the links to the product page.

Don’t forget to use Alt Text tags for your media content as this is how the search engines can “read” them. The alt text should be as descriptive as possible, incorporating the focus keywords.

Showcase Reviews and Ratings

Legitimate reviews and ratings from your audience are important for SEO because they are regarded as trust factors. If you have reviews on the product page, you are further increasing the chances of the page ranking highly.

WooCommerce displays product ratings and reviews in search results, so give your customers an incentive to say what they think about the product. Remember to only allow reviews from users with verified purchases to avoid the menace of fake link-spam reviews.

Also Read: Why Choose WooCommerce for Your eCommerce Store?

Improve Your Website Load Speed

As a search ranking factor, your page load speed has an impact on your SEO results, so it is important to optimize your woocommerce page speed. If pages take longer to load, your visitors will abandon it quickly. This will increase your bounce rates, and tell Google and other search engines that the page is a poor fit for the search term. If you can’t retain visitors that click through to your website, you won’t make any sales.

You can keep tabs on your website loading speed by using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. The former will typically show you things you can improve to reduce the length of time it takes for your page to load. However, there are other things you can do:

• Compress your image files (while retaining the quality)
• Deploy lazy-loading
• Use a content delivery network (CDN)
• Install caching plugins

Improve Your Website Security

In more than 70% of website attacks, the goal is to add malicious links or adware to your website that will redirect website visitors elsewhere. Depending on the nature of the attack, your pages can lose their SEO rank as your bounce rate will most likely increase. To prevent this, take the following steps to maintain your website security.

• Keep your WooCommerce themes and plugins updated to ensure there are no loopholes that can be taken advantage of by cyber-attackers.
• Use a security plugin like Sucuri Scanner or Wordfence to rule out an attack.
• Create strong login-credentials.

Also Read: WordPress and eCommerce Security

Make Your Online Store Mobile Friendly

Google has since deployed a mobile-first approach to indexing. If your WooCommerce website isn’t mobile-friendly, you will not get the desired results from your SEO efforts.

Also, nearly 60% of your traffic will come from mobiles so why not pay attention to your site’s mobile-friendliness? You can use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tester to judge your website. Most WooCommerce themes are responsive, but it doesn’t hurt to confirm!

Conclusion

Improving your WooCommerce site’s SEO requires some work, but it is richly rewarding. Once you have dozens of pages ranking in the search engine results pages, they can continue bringing in traffic for your eCommerce business for years, helping you to make more sales.

Acowebs are developers of WooCommerce Discount Rules that will help you personalize your stores. It supports the additional option with feature-rich add-ons which are woocommerce product addons, that are lightweight and fast. You can easily update your store with these add-ons and enjoy a hassle-free experience, check out the best options for additional woocommerce custom product options.

Introduction

The Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO is also a solid match since both provide robust SEO tools that outrun almost any other candidate.

As an all-in-one solution, along with basic tasks, Shopify provides a wide range of apps to improve your SEO performance. Meanwhile, WooCommerce inherits powerful blogging features from WordPress to greatly increase the visibility of your website online. It also has a more diverse list of SEO plugins compared to Shopify. In this article, we are going to show you:

• How the SEO features of the two platforms differ from each other
• How they should influence your decision.
• Which shopping cart should you choose for the following SEO criteria?

And now, stay focused!

Table of contents

1. 1. Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO features

Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO features

Speed & Uptime

Let’s kick off the battle “Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO” by the first factor Speed & Uptime. A speedy website can significantly improve end-user experience and is recognized by search engines. In fact, search engines are normally very secretive about the factors that are part of their algorithms. As proof, Google explicitly said that the speed at which a page load is one of those factors affecting SEO.

A website with high uptime will be marked as reliable by crawlers, keeping web ranking stable on SERP. The speed and uptime of a website can fluctuate significantly from month to month, and you’d better regularly review them.

On Shopify, sites are generally quick to load, especially for the upper grades of your Shopify edition where your site is hosted on a dedicated server. On top of that, it is estimated that Shopify sites are reliably “live” more than 99% of the time.

Shopify has apps that can be added to enable the uptime reviewing feature. For example, an app named ShopStatus facilitates store owners to track their site’s performance themself.

In contrast, due to its self-hosted nature, there are a lot of things to do to improve WooCommerce overall performance. The speed and uptime of WooCommerce are primarily not so good without support from third-party services, especially for larger sites that are getting a lot of orders.

Woocommerce Seo Urls

Luckily, there are a variety of solutions available to fix speed and uptime for WooCommerce sites. For instance, one can change the web host provider or change the login page URL to enhance speed and uptime. Even simply purchasing a faster theme could also be a considerably effective method.

SSL Certificates

An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) is a type of digital certificate that provides authentication for a website and enables an encrypted connection. Plus, the certificate helps to safeguard and allows sensitive data to be privately transmitted over the web or internal network. Therefore, it plays an important role in eCommerce sites to secure personal and credit card information that users submit to.

Both Shopify and WooCommerce provide SSL certificates authentication features but in quite different ways.

The superb Shopify is itself capable of providing SSL certificates to stores after its custom domain has been properly added. Still, the best part is yet to come. SSL certificates are activated in Shopify for your store’s checkout, and for any content that’s hosted on your domain. All by default! Plus, customers who access the original URL will be automatically redirected to the encrypted online store.

In WooCommerce, it costs you a little effort to set up SSL certificates. However, you have plenty of options to fulfill the tasks. For self-hosted websites, it’s usual to reach out to SSL certificate providers to pay them a fair amount of fee. However, with WooCommerce, you can also afford free options! WooCommerce recommends users get free SSL certificates from a preferable certificate authority named Let’s Encrypt. But as a trade-off, the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate is limited to functionalities compared to traditional ones. For instance, its SSL certificate is not verified by a specific company and makes web users place less trust.

Please notice that WordPress/WooCommerce URLs need to be updated after the installation of an SSL certificate. At this point, it’s considered another disadvantage of WooCommerce compared to Shopify in the Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO comparison.

Auto XML Sitemap

XML Sitemap is a plain text file and is used to describe and structure data on the internet. It is located in your webserver to help search engines find and index your content.

An auto XML sitemap is considered a heavy-weighted SEO facilitation factor. For an eCommerce website, maintaining an XML is not something you want to perform manually. Especially when your online store contains hundreds to thousands of unique products.

A good eCommerce builder should automatically generate an XML sitemap whenever there’s a data amendment to your website. Great to know that Shopify online stores have built-in SEO which enables automatic XML sitemap file generation. The sitemap file is located at the root directory of your Shopify store’s primary domain name. This sitemap file is automatically generated and links to separate sitemaps for your products, collections, blogs, and webpages.

While Shopify has many built-in generator features, WooCommerce relies on third-party plugins to automatically generate XML sitemaps. There are a couple of plugins that you can use to create a sitemap for the WooCommerce website:

Though each of the two platforms has its own method to create a sitemap, the level of convenience is almost the same. Concluding that WooCommerce requires a further minor act to complete the quest by adding plugins.

301 Redirects

301 Redirects (or URL redirect) is the feature that is used to redirect users or search engines from one URL to another. It helps you to ensure your customers can still find what they’re looking for after you’ve made changes to your product’s URL.

Shopify allows users to create a URL redirect when you change a URL to your store. It’s very simple to create one by following a few simple steps.

Right from your Shopify admin interface, go to Online Store > Navigation, then click URL Redirects. Proceedingly, it is all about getting old and new URLs so you can redirect your visitors to.

With Shopify, keep in mind that only broken URLs should be redirected. If the old URL still loads a webpage, the URL redirect won’t work. Geosoft oasis montaj.

On WooCommerce sites, WordPress will attempt to automatically handle basic URL redirections. For example when you change the title of a product page in WooCommerce. However, redirects with complexity aren’t handled this way. So it’s recommended that to perform 301 Redirect on WooCommerce, you should install plugins that provide such features. There are bunches of plugins available, you should choose carefully one that can meet your expectations.

If you’re opposed to adding plugins, it’s alright, you can create 301 Redirects using the .htaccess file. This method is applicable since WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform and you can have access to your server. You can look up for this file by accessing your server’s public_html directory via FTP or File Manager. It’s where you can set up URL redirects manually. For specific instructions, visit the WooCommerce redirect guide.

In this Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO factor, it’s quite simple for Shopify users to create 301 Redirects as the platform has this feature built-in. Meanwhile, WooCommerce has diverse ways to create redirects since it allows plugin installation.

Blog

Google puts lots of weight on the number and quality of links pointing to your site. So apart from the contents that appear on store sites, one should definitely spare efforts to create a prominent blog. Not only would it be a place for newsworthy discussions, but also a place that could attract precious external links. Accordingly, the blog is another essential factor involving Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO comparison.

Some of the eCommerce platforms do not include a blog as a standard feature, but it’s not the case for Shopify. It’s very simple to set up a blog and create a blog post on Shopify. The blog design is part of the Shopify site’s design theme and can be customized by editing the Liquid code.

To help diversify the customer’s intention of visiting blogs, Shopify supports multiple blogs operations. This allows you to segment the kind of information you distribute based on your customers’ interest to attract even more traffic. You can even add apps to customize blog functionality which can be found on Shopify Apps Store.

Knowing that WordPress is itself a dedicated blogging system, definitely, WooCommerce will inherit a lot from this to create blogs. Accordingly, you can easily create a blog for WooCommerce by adding a post right from the WordPress Admin dashboard. You can also boost blogging experience with WooCommerce by purchasing eyes-catching blog themes available on ForestTheme and many other marketplaces.

Apps and Plugins

Both of the platforms have an enormous stock of apps and plugins that can help immensely improve SEO performance. In this factor, comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO is the ultimate definition of “Battle of Giants”.

Here are some of the best SEO apps for Shopify verified by their vast community.

• SEO Image Optimizer: An one-click-install SEO app that helps promote Google Image search rankings for your store.
• Plugin SEO: An app that analyzes all the key areas of the website that influence SEO performance.
• SEO Doctor: Prominent as its name, this app helps troubleshoot SEO issues and show you how to fix them easily.

WordPress SEO plugins are not particularly designed for WooCommerce but all websites powered by WordPress. However, adding SEO plugins is a great way to optimize your WooCommerce store. Some of the best SEO plugins for WooCommerce are as follows:

• Yoast SEO: An outstanding all-in-one plugin, proven by the figure of 5 million downloads and thousands of positive reviews.
• All in One SEO Pack: Great plugin for beginner WooCommerce users because of its simplicity automatic operation.
• WP Smushit: An ideal plugin that helps optimizing images uploaded to WooCommerce to increase website speed.

Ease of use

Ease of use is an essential factor that contributes to the Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO clash.

Like most of the other eCommerce platforms, Shopify is not explicitly designed for SEO. However, its built-in functionality plus the diverse availability of apps makes it a tough challenger. Shopify’s SEO is well-equipped enough for sites to thrive. It has all the core features you need for eCommerce SEO, and they’re generally very simple to make use of. SEO apps for Shopify are also easy to install and operate, especially due to technical-free nature.

Originally built in a dedicated blogging platform, SEO friendly is considered a big yes for WooCommerce. With the WordPress editor, you can easily edit body content, URLs, meta descriptions, alt tags, and other page elements to optimize product pages. It can greatly benefit from the help of plugins which are vast for WordPress. And those plugins, of course, could also make it hassle-free for users to make use of. It’s Yoast SEO that can be given out as clarification for an example.

Cost

Last but not least, how much you have to pay for SEO plugins and apps also matters in the Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO. A great eCommerce builder is expected to cover all bases including SEO factors. However, sometimes you need more advanced options to facilitate your online growth, that’s when this factor needs to be considered.

For Shopify, you’ll still need to pay when adding SEO apps to your website, and the price is reasonable for those top-ranked apps. The average monthly charge for an app available on the Shopify app store is usually around $20. That amount is actually not a good offer for beginners. However, it’s fascinating to know that some of the apps provide free plans!

Paying for WooCommerce is considerably less expensive compared to Shopify since the pricing plan for plugins is flexible. It ranges from individual to agency purchase, providing both monthly annual payment options. For example, the average yearly charge for the premium version of Yoast is $89. Also, the availability of free versions is far better than Shopify’s.

Following this Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO factor, WooCommerce is slightly more favorable than Shopify. However, your choice should always rely on certain circumstances to best utilize financial resources.

Conclusion

In the battle Shopify vs WooCommerce SEO, it’s a tough decision to call out the winner. They are superbly robust platforms, enabling your products to appear in front of the right people. Both of the two platforms provide apps and add-ons that boost your store’s SEO performance.

With WooCommerce, you have full control over every aspect of your store including the parts that affect SEO. In the meantime, Shopify SEO is also easy to manage. While WooCommerce has the marvelous Yoast SEO as a companion, Shopify has its wide range of integrations in the apps store, too!

Yoast Woocommerce Seo Nulled

When it comes to technical requirements for SEO, Shopify has the edge on other platforms due to many of its integrated features. For example quicker loading speed for all pages, SSL certificate authentication by default. As opposed to Shopify, you have to buy the SSL certificates for WooCommerce sites yourself. You can either create it for free but it requires technical skills to perform the task.

Shopify is clearly the one to beat in the list of ready-made SEO-friendly eCommerce platforms. Meanwhile, WooCommerce, powered by WordPress and has plenty of integrations with reasonable prices, reinforcing itself in every ranking competition for SEO.

Finally, it should be a narrow win for Shopify in SEO. About which eCommerce suits whom better, it should depend on overall platform assessment rather than just SEO. Check out our comprehensive comparison between Shopify vs WooCommerce for a broader view about this.

What is the most optimal choice to migrate your store?

If you already have a website and you are considering making a switch from Shopify to WooCommerce or vice versa, here we have the optimal solution for you. With the help of LitExtension, switching to another platform is no longer a big deal. We offer an advanced automated migration tool that transfers all of your data to another platform quickly, with a high level of security and accuracy. Currently, we are supporting migration among 90+ most popular platforms.

Woocommerce Seo Coalition

You can refer to this complete guide on Shopify to WooCommerce migration to see the whole process of switching eCommerce platforms with LitExtension.

Woocommerce Seo Best Practices

To have your doubt cleared in a blink of an eye, we provide a free Demo Migration feature for you to check it on yourself how the process works. Should you have any questions, please contact LitExtension Team! Join our Facebook Community to get more eCommerce tips and news.