I also recommend the Redirection plugin if you have pages that move, discontinued products, or need to permanently 301 redirect a specific page to another.
Be mindful of how you use canonicals and redirects, and always validate with tools like Screaming Frog or other lightweight redirect testing tools.
You want to avoid conflicts between multiple plugins that can send the wrong signal to the search engines or provide a bad experience for your users (sending to 404s, redirect loops, etc.).
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are links on interior pages that show a user (as well as a search engine) where they are on a site in terms of the navigational path or depth.
They allow users to see how far they are drilled down into a specific product category, blog category, or other interior section and a way to click to go back upstream.
They are typically coded into your WordPress site theme as a default element. The Yoast plugin is great for adding schema markup to them for WordPress/WooCommerce.
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
On-Page SEO
On-page ranking factors and SEO aspects for ecommerce SEO that you’ll want to have covered in your WooCommerce site include:
URLs
Beyond the technical aspects of implementing canonical tags and trying to manage duplicate content to get the search engines to index and rank a single version of your pages – including categories and products – you don’t want to miss the opportunity to include important contextual keywords in your URLs.
Use WordPress’ native page naming conventions and tools to put meaningful keywords (without going overboard or stuffing) into the URL string.
Tags
Like any SEO plan, you’ll want to have an optimized custom title, meta description, and heading tags on each page.
Like any large or enterprise site, if you have many products, find ways to scale tag creation with data-driven content where possible.
Use Yoast to create custom titles and meta descriptions on each page.
Much like copy and URLs, though, also look at how the defaults are set up to pull in dynamic elements and set any that you can use.
That way, you can build formulas for how the tags will be created that don’t require you to write custom tags for each page to reach your unique tags per page goals.
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Copy
A unique, optimized copy can be a challenge for ecommerce sites.
Much like tags, you might have trouble doing it at scale. Or, you may have a lot of similar products.
Find ways to invest in the manual time to write to best practices, avoid duplicate content, and scale it programmatically where possible while maintaining high quality.
Images
Image file attributes are an area where you can include relevant, contextual keywords describing the image’s subject matter.
This is important for product images, product category-level images, and any content on your site.
They are important in terms of meeting accessibility standards – and also, to the search engines – to understand the context of an image.
Manage these in the media center in WordPress at upload or later by editing images through the media tab or going into the page and clicking on the image to review and edit properties.
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Product Reviews
User-generated, unique content can help add contextual copy, supplementing the copy on a product page.
Added context and another type of potential schema element can be added to product reviews.
My team leverages and recommends the stamped.io plugin for easy management and implementation of reviews.
However, many great review management plugins are available, and they vary in cost, implementation ease, and complexity.
As a bonus, Stamped will also send out post-purchase requests for reviews.
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024
Off-Page SEO
Ecommerce SEO, like most SEO, requires off-page factors to build upon your technical and on-page/content-focused tactics.
These factors are more general and least tied specifically to WooCommerce, but shouldn’t be left out of your SEO plan:
Links
Seek high-quality, industry/context-relevant inbound links to your products, categories, and content.
That includes natural associations like manufacturers, partners, affiliates, PR-related mentions, and other quality natural sources.
Social Media
Sure, there’s debate on whether it is a direct ranking factor.
Regardless, link to your site from social media content to build context and connections and seek out areas of opportunity across the social media landscape to gain links and mentions.
Engagement
Seek out other opportunities for engagement and mentions online.
Whether part of a PR plan, influencer strategy, or other ways your brand gets mentioned, leverage them.
Seek them out, and look for high-quality content to reference yours.
Popular SEO Plugins For WooCommerce
You can boost WooCommerce with other WordPress plugins, many of which are free.
Here’s a recap of the plugins I noted that are related to individual items you’ll want to optimize.
My team’s recommended WordPress plugins to use with WooCommerce (and in many cases in general for WordPress) SEO include:
Yoast: SEO plugin that will create an editable sitemap and robots.txt files, help you change product metadata from product pages, add basic schema, handle canonicalization, breadcrumbs, etc.
Imagify: For image optimization for page load time and site speed optimization.
WP Rocket: For caching to improve site performance.
Redirection: For creating any 301 redirects you need as part of an SEO strategy.
Stamped.io (Or similar service): For managing customer product reviews.
GTM4WP: Allowing you to implement enhanced ecommerce tracking for Google Analytics.
The great thing, for the most part, about these plugins is that if you have some WordPress experience, you may not need a developer to set them up.
Like any plugin, your WordPress infrastructure might impact your access level and any custom aspects required to implement depending on how they interact with other plugins or functionality.
Wrapping Up
At this point, it is probably pretty clear that a lot of the great things about SEO that we can manage in WordPress also translate over to WooCommerce.
And more broadly, you can implement ecommerce SEO best practices in WooCommerce as a whole.
I made it clear that my team uses WordPress and WooCommerce pretty exclusively right now.
We have had plenty of experiences with Magento, Shopify, and other platforms that left us frustrated as there were things locked down that we couldn’t control or optimize.
Or, as an admin or user, we weren’t able to edit content and manage the site as efficiently as we could with the more user-friendly controls within WordPress.
I’m not saying the other platforms aren’t right for you and your business. I would put each of them through an honest test before you create a new store or consider re-platforming.
There are definitely pros and cons to any platform, and my goal is for you to find the right one. If it is WooCommerce, great – and happy optimizing with the information I shared in this guide!
More resources:
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