Search engine optimization, or SEO, can make the difference between success and failure for an online store. If you use WooCommerce, you already have a lot of ways to improve your SEO using WordPress. Keep the following WooCommerce SEO tips and plugins in mind to help improve your business.
Use the Yoast SEO Plugin
WordPress sites that use WooCommerce can also make use of the Yoast plugin, which provides SEO-related feedback to every post and page you put out. Yoast analyzes your website for keywords, sentence structure, and dozens of other items, making sure that you get the best SEO optimization possible. You can also use it to easily set up metadata for each page and blog.
Optimize Your Images
Clear, high-quality, and fast-loading images greatly improve your site’s appeal and public visibility. When creating your images, make sure to include an alt tag that is descriptive of the topic. This serves two purposes. First, alt tags help to improve your SEO. Secondly, should the image fail to load, your customers still get an idea of the image’s purpose.
Always Pay Attention to Keywords in Content
Develop a list of keywords that you want to emphasize in your products and on your website. Add and remove keywords based on the trends you see through market research, but keep them in mind whenever you develop content. Everything you add to your website, from blog content to news updates to images and videos has an impact on SEO.
Create Content Your Customers can Use
The usefulness of your content will drive traffic to your website and go a very long way toward improving your visibility in the market. Ideally, you should produce content that customers will find useful enough to return to and even bookmark in their browsers. How-to guides, tutorials, and step-by-step advice are all examples of good evergreen content with lots of potential for reuse.
Be Proactive in Customer Contact
Don’t develop a website and then just sit back and let customers come to you. Instead, provide them with plenty of ways to get extra information by signing up for a newsletter or receiving other email updates. This requires you to be a bit more proactive, but it makes customers feel more respected. You can also archive your news, creating more SEO content in the process.
Provide Space for Customer Reviews
Offering a way for customers to provide feedback accomplishes several important things. It gives customers a feeling that their say matters, and it draws the attention of other potential customers. Reviews also generate SEO by themselves, increasing your visibility across the Internet.
Generate Strong Meta Descriptions
Most of the time, your meta description only becomes relevant when somebody comes across your website in a search engine. That doesn’t mean that you should use automatically generated meta tags and descriptions, though. Taking the time to create a relevant meta description with the proper keywords increases the odds of customers clicking on your site when they see it pop up in search results.
Avoid Stop Words in Titles
Search engines ignore certain words in meta tags and titles, and those in the SEO business refer to these words as stop words. These words are commonly used in normal language, but provide little use in search algorithms. Examples of stop words include are, at, the, and on. Make sure to eliminate the use of these words in meta tags and URLs wherever possible.
Create a Site Map
Creating a site map and submitting it to search engines helps to get your website indexed and crawled. It also serves as an important organizational tool that allows you to keep track of what you have on your own website. If you aren’t sure how to create a site map, several plugins, such as Sitemap Page, can help you do this.
Use Descriptive URLs
The URL structure of your website can have a major effect on your SEO. Avoid using numerical-based URLs in favor of a short portion of the title that is known as a slug. The spaces in the words should be separated by hyphens and you should avoid stop words. WordPress gives you the ability to select this option automatically under Permalinks, and you should use it.
Use Headings
Many people simply use bold text instead of a heading when writing content. Make sure that all titles use “Header 1”, and all subsections under that change accordingly such as “Header 2” for the first subheader, “Header 3” for the second subheader and so on. Usually, it’s smart to only go down to “Header 4” and leave it there for additional headers. You should be able to adjust the settings of your theme to ensure the headers all look uniform, though by doing this you tell search engines that these titles are important.
Using the tips above, you can generate a lot more SEO visibility for your website. These tips are all easy to implement for anybody making use of WordPress and WooCommerce.
