In the world of ecommerce platforms, plugins, and shopping carts, there are a lot of technology options. WooCommerce for WordPress leads the way in terms of market share.
All of the various ecommerce platforms have their own pros and cons in terms of features, content management, and overall integration with your business.
Many of the benefits of WooCommerce come from the fact that it is a plugin for WordPress, which is also the most popular website platform technology in the world as well.
My website team utilizes WooCommerce with WordPress for the work we do for clients, and we continue to invest in our processes centered around that technology for digital marketing and driving sales for our clients’ businesses.
We’ve used it for over a decade, and while other popular platforms have emerged, we find that it has the flexibility and opportunities we need to implement the SEO tactics we need in alignment with our broader SEO strategies.
Why Does Any Of This Matter?
You may already be using WooCommerce or another ecommerce platform.
I’m all for whatever platform works best for you. There are definite SEO ceilings that you’ll hit in what you can do on different platforms.
WooCommerce will have ceilings, too, if you aren’t leveraging how you can set it up, how you handle your WordPress optimization as a whole, and how your overall SEO strategy is defined.
I hope that if you’re in WooCommerce or are deciding which platform to choose and have SEO in mind, this article will help you on that journey.
What Makes WooCommerce SEO Unique
WooCommerce SEO is unique because it is within WordPress. Much of what you’ll do to optimize a WooCommerce ecommerce site falls in line with what you’d do for a WordPress site overall.
Overall, SEO-friendly benefits of WooCommerce within WordPress out of the box or with light configuration include:
Analytics: WooCommerce has extensive analytics and connects easily to Google Analytics, so you can blend first and third-party visitor data.
Content: Easily mix WooCommerce’s ecommerce functionality with WordPress’ content management.
Organization: Easily organize and manage product categories, tags, and attributes.
Best Practices
Most WooCommerce and WordPress best practices align with broader ecommerce SEO best practices.
That includes managing the technical, on-page, and off-page aspects of ecommerce SEO within an overall strategy and at a tactical level.
If you’re new to SEO or want to ensure you’re not missing anything, I recommend checking out SEJ’s SEO intro guide.
Getting Started
Before you optimize, you’ll want to ensure you’re ready.
I highly recommend working on developing your action plan and goals before you start.
Knowing your current performance and researching what keywords and topics you want to target are big parts of both.
WooCommerce Analytics
I recommend using Google Analytics (GA4) as your primary analytics data source and platform for WordPress.
Going deeper and specifically into ecommerce analytics that you can integrate into GA4 from WooCommerce, the GTM4WP plugin is a great way to get that data.
Don’t skip out on measuring the data you want and need from your site for your SEO and broader marketing goal tracking.
I recommend prioritizing data before you get deep into optimizing so you can capture baseline data to measure against if you don’t already have it in a good place.
Transactional Emails
Another foundational thing you’ll want to do is set up transactional emails. Several email platforms integrate with WordPress and WooCommerce.
A favorite of my team’s for ease of use and doing the job well is Mailchimp’s transactional email functionality.
It was formerly called Mandrill and can handle post-purchase email communications like order and shipping confirmations.
Mailchimp can also be used to create automated email campaigns based on customer journey or shopping behavior, such as cart abandonment emails, win back, etc.
Functionality like this is essential to get the most out of our SEO investment, and for traffic, you work hard to drive to the site and into the shopping cart.
Keyword Research
Knowing what words, phrases, topics, and terms are related to the subject matter you want to rank for is critical. Beyond that, validate that people searching for those topics are your potential desired audience.
There are many great third-party audience and keyword research tools like Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
They are paid tools with varying subscription levels but are leaders. They have their respective strengths in helping you research topics that align with your content, products, and categories and dive deep into the right targets for your SEO plan.
Build your lists, map them out to your content, and use them as context as you work through the optimization best practices to follow.
Technical SEO
Like with any site, and to follow broader UX best practices, you want your site to load quickly, be indexable, and not have anything holding it back.
Several specific technical factors you need to consider, configure, and monitor can hold back or unlock your opportunity for rankings compared to peer sites.
Indexing
It is essential to have your content found.
That starts by ensuring you have a clean XML sitemap and robots.txt file. Plus, go into Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and third-party validation tools to ensure everything is as intended.
Use the Yoast plugin (or similar) to adjust settings for your XML sitemap and robots.txt files.
Yoast is great at giving you options to include or remove from those files, so you don’t have to touch the code or manually adjust those files at all. You can get the settings to your liking and then submit them for validation through the Console/Webmaster Tools.
Image from author, November 2024
Page Experience
There are a lot of data points and best practices on page load times, site speed, and other factors that Google looks at for “page experience.”
Overall, you want to pay attention to core web vitals and page load times to ensure that you have fast-loading pages that don’t harm image quality and content richness for users.
The core web vitals include:
I strongly recommend getting familiar with these three aspects of core web vitals with SEJ’s guide.
Imagify and WP Rocket are recommended plugins for image optimization and caching to improve page load times and overall site performance.
Screenshot from Imagify, November 2024
Accessibility
Making your content accessible to all, including those with visual impairments, is important.
That includes coding to common ADA standards and ensuring that alt attributes and other cues are included.
Not a plugin recommendation here – I recommend using a third-party tool like PowerMapper.com to audit pages to get the helpful information you need to adjust page elements to meet the standard that your legal counsel advises (I’m not a lawyer).
Structured Data
Using extra context cues and opportunities to categorize, catalog, and mark up your subject matter is important. Leverage it where possible to get specific information for your industry, especially using specific product attributes.
Again, you can tap into the power of the Yoast plugin to add basic schema markup to pages on your site.
I recommend reading more about Schema and how it works before diving into the implementation if it is a new concept.
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Canonical URLs And Permalinks
Web stores inherently can have complexities and struggles with duplicate content.
Whether you have a product that appears in multiple categories or are just dealing with the “out of the box” way that WordPress and WooCommerce generate many separate URLs for a single page, you need to include a single “canonical” version for the search engines to index, show in the search results, and aggregate all link value to.
I recommend Yoast here again for handling canonicals.