Your SEO Cape Town Guide To WooCommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO has the potential to take your business to the next level, but with so many factors to consider it can be difficult to know where to start. In this SEO Cape Town Guide, we explain how to optimise your WooCommerce store step by step.
Worry not, because in this SEO Cape Town Guide to WooCommerce SEO, we will lead you through the process of setting up your store for stronger search visibility and sales from better ecommerce SEO.
Furthermore, as we explain throughout this SEO Cape Town Guide, optimising product pages, categories, and overall website structure can significantly improve your Google search rankings. It’s all about SEO.
Regardless of your technical expertise, this search engine optimisation guide ensures accessibility for all. So what are you waiting for? Let’s dive in.
SEO Cape Town Guide: Why WooCommerce?
There are various ecommerce plugins and platforms available, all with their varying pros and cons and so it’s important to always use the one you feel most comfortable with.
However, we find many of the benefits of WooCommerce are due to the fact that it is an open-source plugin for WordPress, the most popular website platform technology on the market.
Not only does it allow you to leverage the most dominant content managing system (CMS), but the flexibility WooCommerce provides allows you to customize every feature of your online store, as well as the opportunity for extensions to be built simply and effectively.
Is WooCommerce SEO Friendly?
As explained earlier in this SEO Cape Town Guide, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin and remains highly SEO friendly when configured correctly.
But the setup of your WooCommerce store and aligning it with SEO techniques is up to you. It is your responsibility to include images, product descriptions, themes, products, product pages, and other content to your store and similarly, your responsibility to ensure any content you add is SEO optimised.
It’s important to understand that WooCommerce is a continuously ongoing process that must be up-kept in order to see positive results in your search engine traffic and sales.
This is where an effective WooCommerce SEO strategy becomes essential. Follow along the next eleven steps where we’ll go over how to get your WooCommerce webstore setup and SEO ready in no time!
Step 1: The WordPress SEO setup
Due to the nature of WooCommerce as a WordPress plugin, you will need to update the SEO of your overall website before you can move onto specifically WooCommerce SEO-related adjustments.
This update should consider most traditional Ecommerce SEO techniques, such as keyword research, optimisation-friendly URL structure, finding duplicate content with Google Search Console etc. Please make sure you review these aspects of your WordPress website before getting started with the WooCommerce plugin for better overall SEO results.
However, if you are pressed for time, then all you will need to do is install the WooCommerce SEO plugin. We suggest downloading and setting up the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin.
The AIOSEO plugin is great as it allows you to add XML sitemaps, plus includes legit SEO fields for all your products. Additionally it also includes effective SEO features such as rich snippets schema markup, on-page SEO analysis, and social media integration.
Once you have successfully set up the AIOSEO plugin, we can move onto Step 2, below.
Step 2: Writing Your Product SEO Titles according to the SEO Cape Town Guide
As covered in this SEO Cape Town Guide, you should optimise each WooCommerce product in the same way you would optimise a blog post for SEO.
The best place to start is to make sure your product’s titles are always SEO-friendly. These are the titles that are visible in your browser’s title bar, and that search engines utelise as the title of a search result.
To begin, edit a WooCommerce product by scrolling down to the AIOSEO settings box to find “Product Title”. Now you have two options. Either type in your own SEO title, or use the variables to generate an automatic title based on your products information.
This is where keyword research comes in handy; your SEO product title can differ slightly from the product title on your store by using keywords you believe customers are likely to use when trying to find your product on a search engine.
But that’s not all. You must also try to make your SEO product titles catchy, and more engrossing for users. Do this by utilising some long-tail keywords, which also assist search engines in finding and ranking your products higher.
However, be careful to not use any titles that might be misleading or that could “trick” users, as this will end up penalising you in terms of SEO rankings rather than boosting your product.
Step 3: Adding SEO Descriptions to Products
Moving onto just below the Title box in the AIOSEO settings, you will find a space that allows you to enter your product meta description.
This description will not appear on your website, but instead be below your product title on the search engine results pages (SERPs). So make sure you use this space to compel users to click on your product instead of a competitor. Think about it from the SEO Cape town Guide’s point of view as if it were a one liner sales pitch if that helps.
Additionally, make sure you are also using the same keywords you used previously in your product title so you can boost the possibility for ranking those wanted keywords.
Step 4: Product Slug Optimisation according to the SEO Cape Town Guide
A slug in this instance is the name used by WordPress in the actual product URL, also known as permalinks.
WordPress automatically makes use of your product’s title as the default slug, but oftentimes these slugs don’t include any of the relevant SEO keywords. Therefore, edit your slug in the products AIOSEO settings to include only your main keyword, as it must not be too long.
For example, for a woman’s purse, the slug would look something like: red-leather-womans-tote-bag-by-brandname.
Step 5: Enabling Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs essentially define a clear path or trail for the user to the one they are on and are also super helpful for internal linking.
A breadcrumb may look something like this: Products > Woman’s Bags > Tote Bags.
These breadcrumb pathways also make an appearance in search results, giving your website a little extra advantage in terms of ranking.
To enable breadcrumbs, navigate to the AIOSEO General Settings. The great thing about the AIOSEO plugin is that breadcrumbs are automatically added to your site’s code. However, you must toggle the switch displayed in order to activate breadcrumb navigation links as visible on your website.
After which you will see different display settings; click on the block that reads “Gutenberg Block”.
Now you can edit any post or page where you would like breadcrumb navigation to be displayed by adding the AIOSEO – Breadcrumbs block.
Pro Tip: Some WordPress themes come with already built-in breadcrumb functionality, try themes like Extra or Neve to access this perk.
Step 6: Product Categories and Tags
In this SEO Cape town Guide we emphesize It is very important to properly optimise Product Categories and Tags for SEO. Essentially, product categories and tags help you to organise the products throughout your whole online webstore, allowing customers to easily find whatever product they are looking for.
In a similar way, product categories and tags also assist search engines. In WooCommerce, each product category and tag has its own page, allowing search engines to crawl and list them.
However, many beginners commonly get confused between categories and tags and therefore end up using them erroneously. So to make it clear:
Categories are to be used for the wider semantic grouping of your products. They are hierarchical, so that you may then further add child categories to them. This is easiest understood in terms of clothing stores with categories like mens, womans, shoes, accessories and so forth.
But tags are more defined keywords that describe the specific qualities of a product. Again, like in clothing stores, a dress might have tags like casual, formal, differing lengths, colors etc.
Step 7: Product Images and Alt Text
It is pretty common practice for customers searching for products quickly to just switch over to image search. But to assist ecommerce websites, Google has removed the “view image” button from the search results, meaning that users are now forced to visit your website to view the image with context.
Fortunately, Image SEO works much like web search. Google uses algorithms, image recognition technology and AI to help people find images they are searching for. Therefore, the best thing you can do to gain traffic from image searches is to implement alt text tags to every image on your website.
Alt text is a kind of HTML attribute for owners to add some text to accompany their images. This text is displayed when the image is unable to be displayed, but search engines also use this text as a ranking factor within image searches.
When uploading a product image to WooCommerce, use the alt text field to describe what that particular image is about. There is also the option to add alt text to older product photos in your Media Library tab.
Step 8: SEO Titles and Descriptions for Product Categories
We mentioned earlier how each product category in WooCommerce generates its own page. Consequently, these pages contain high keyword density and makes them more significant for WOoCommerce SEO.
AIOSEO allows you to add a title and description to each one of your product pages so as to further optimise around them.
To do this, go to Products > Categories page and click the “edit” link below a category page. Once on the edit screen, scroll down to the AIOSEO settings and find the category title in the snippet preview.
You will see that AIOSEO now provides edit fields where you can go ahead and enter your own custom SEO title and descriptions for each product category you create.
Step 9: Google Analytics: Track WooCommerce Customers
Capturing accurate data is arguably one of the most important parts of an effective SEO strategy. Factors like where your users come from, what products they like the most, and just generally how they are navigating your WooCommerce website are key.
Google Analytics can help with tracking this information, but it might be a bit more complicated to set up. Alternatively, there is another plugin called MonsterInsights that makes tracking easier.
You can use MonsterInsights in conjunction with Google Analytics, or really any other kind of analytics tool that works for you to make data-informed decisions about your WooCommerce store and how most effectively to grow your business with reassurance.
Step 10: Optimising Website Speed and Performance
Google still considers website speed as one of the core ranking factors for a website. Therefore, faster websites always rank higher than slower ones.
Websites with slow speeds also directly impact your business as they make for a bad user experience, costing you actual money.
If you are finding your WooCommerce website to be slow, the majority of the time it is due to the web hosting. If you have eliminated all other technical factors and speed is still a persistent problem, you might have to consider switching WooCommerce hosting providers to a more optimised one like SiteGround or Bluehost.
Step 11: WooCommerce Security
A ranking factor many people forget about is how much Google loves safes and secure websites. Google is quick to mark certain websites unsafe due to things like malware, phishing and to warn users of potential scam activity.
If your website is unsecure, this could do more than ruin your Woo SEO rankings, but also drastically impact your brand reputation, having far reaching consequences outside of SEO.
You must make it a priority to tighten up your WooCommerce store’s security to protect it against brute force attacks, malware injections and data theft attempts from hackers.
There are varying degrees to which you can protect your website, but you should always at minimum use strong passwords and user permissions, install a reputable WordPress security plugin and backup solution, enable a web application firewall (WAF) and even consider moving your WordPress site to a SSL/HTTPS at some point in the future.
Hopefully this SEO Cape Town Guide guide has assisted you in creating an effective WooCommerce store that is well optimised for SEO. Now that you are up and running, ensure you are consistently using your data to readjust and tweak your WooCommerce website to remain in favorable rankings and ultimately continuing to grow your business from strength to strength!