WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system for websites. WooCommerce, is the most popular ecommerce store for WordPress. With the two combined, online retailers have an incredibly powerful platform from which they can scale their digital business.

WooCommerce integration is incredibly simple within WordPress and it can seamlessly work with various other digital services as well.

While the extensive features list, ease of use and ability to add further plugins is well documented with respect to WooCommerce, today we shall discuss search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store.

Basic SEO checklist for WooCommerce based WordPress stores

For the uninitiated, WooCommerce is already SEO friendly. Considering its base is on WordPress, it already complies with all search engine norms.

However, similar to on-page SEO that you need for each of your webpages or posts, your products within WooCommerce needs a basic list of on-page SEO that would make them discoverable on the search engines.

Some of these are as follows.

1) Title

Typically most online stores would have simple titles for their products such as ‘red shoes’ or ‘men’s sneakers’ etc.

That is a wasted opportunity. Search engines index up to 60 characters for the title of any web page. You have 60 characters to play around with so that users can find and click on your product URLs.

For example, you could write ‘red shoes’ or ‘red shoes for women’ or ‘red party shoes for women’ or ‘red party comfortable shoes for women’.

Notice even with the longer phrase in the title, it is much below 60 characters. However, with that title, I have covered the keywords what most users are likely to search on Google.

Hence take the time for each of your product titles and ensure you cover the most important keywords. Just take care that it should read naturally and not feel like abrupt keyword stuffing.

2) URL or Slug

The slug of your page refers to its URL and the words it contains.

Sometimes, websites have weird numbers or other characters in its URLs for product pages. You need to ensure the title of your product is also in the URL.

For example, if your product title is ‘red party comfortable shoes for women’ and your domain is xyz.com – then your slug should be xyz.com/red-party-comfortable-shoes-for-women

3) Image Alt Text

I am assuming as a digital store, all your listings would come with multiple images showcasing your product.

Regardless of how many images you have, you need to define ‘alt text’ for those images.

Alt text is that text that shows up when the image is still loading. They also appear when someone puts their mouse over the image.

The alt text is always indexed by Google and is an important ranking factor.

Ideally your main product title should be the alt text of your first image and then you can play around with more keywords in the other images.

4) Product Description

Your item description is where you can really build a SEO friendly product page.

You do not have any restrictions on the number of characters you can use over here.

Hence apart from actually describing the product, its functions and unique selling points, please do utilize this section for inserting important keywords and key-phrases.

Of course the text should have a proper flow and the user should not feel like keywords are being inserted arbitrarily just for SEO purposes.

Also keep in mind, repeat your product title in the description as well to reinforce the importance of it to the search engine spiders. However, do not keep repeating the same keyword over and over. Keyword stuffing will spoil your overall page rankings.

5) Use Tags

Your most important keywords that you feel users will use on search engines should be inserted as tags on the product page.

Most SEO plugins also use these tags as meta keywords and they form a significant part of your on-page SEO.

Tags should ideally describe the product, show the category and use searchable words. Do not try to insert too many keywords here especially if they do not appear in your product description or title.

6) Optimize Categories

Regardless of whether you are using WooCommerce or any other digital store platform, you should optimize your product categories and organize them in your sitemap.

Unlike post categories in WordPress that typically do not get indexed by search engines, product categories for online stories are important for SEO.

Organizing your categories will also help users as well as search engine spiders to navigate your website properly and index each and every product on the site.

7) Work on Loading Speed

Over the past few years, loading speed of each webpage of your site has become a key driver in search engine rankings.

The faster your site loads, the better it is for your rankings.

Here, you can use plugins available within WordPress to ensure pages and products load faster. You can use caching plugins, image size reduction plugins etc.

There are a number of such plugins available that are compatible with WooCommerce and you must use them to increase the loading speed of your digital store.

8) Use SEO Plugins

There are plugins such as All in One SEO, Yoast SEO, RankMath SEO etc. that make all of the above listed tasks quite simple.

You must use any one of such plugins to ensure your on-page SEO is complete and as per guidelines used by search engine spiders.

Most of these plugins will have a free version and a paid version. The free versions are quite comprehensive themselves and can do all of the above given points and much more.

Final thoughts

On-page SEO for WooCommerce stores are crucial to the overall success of the website.

The good news here is that both WordPress and WooCommerce make on-page SEO easy enough for any store owner regardless of their expertise on the subject.

Just follow the points given above and you should be fine.