SEO Guide for WooCommerce

SEO: Search Engine Optimization and its full importance

Improving our store to reach more organic traffic

As a salesperson, you know that there is a direct relationship between the number of people that enter a store and the number that actually buys. Depending on your category, the percentage of sales will be your own, but it falls from mature to the more leads, the more sales. So, how to naturally generate more visits to our store? Well, with SEO practices!

SEO practices aim to improve our visibility in internet search engines, for example in Google. Search engines are a very important source of visits given that the person to whom a search engine redirects to your site has already searched (and found) what they are evaluating to acquire (either information or the product/service itself). The chances that this quality traffic will lead to a purchase-related action on your site is great: it doesn't arrive by mistake, and it doesn't arrive blindly; is an individual who is looking for what you have. So we're going to present you with information to help you optimize your site to get the most out of public search results (and gain what we call "organic traffic").

Plugins and Themes

Required SEO plugin: Rank Math

To generate organic traffic we recommend installing Math Rank SEO Plugins. Not only is it very complete, but it is free.

Once installed, Math Rank offers us a Wizard installation that makes things much easier. We recommend you take advantage of it. Although the plugin is free, you are offered to activate it to get more benefits (including more accurate keyword suggestions and more variety).

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service free that Google provides. adding a small code On your site, Google collects and shows you a lot of information related to your visits, and for years it has been considered the best option to improve your content through SEO practices. If you don't already use it, let's quickly see why you should:

It gives you a complete snapshot so you can understand your site and thus better evaluate the performance of your content, products and services.

You will obtain precise information about the instances in which a potential buyer abandons the purchase, the origin of the visits, the time spent in each section, the hot zones, etc.

With the data provided you will be able to generate knowledge, test, improve results and reach the right customers.

Setting up Google Analytics is easy, but for WooCommerce sites we highly recommend setting up a improved electronic tracking to be able to establish the key actions that your users can perform on your site, and we refer to events such as:

Application of coupons, expiration or elimination of the same

Order refund

order cancellation

Order completion (that is, orders that reach the thank you page, counting those that do not)

Customers logging in or out of your WooCommerce store

Customers Submitting Product Reviews

The good news is that measuring these variables is not something that you will have to configure manually thanks to the official extension WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro.

Themes we recommend to use in your WooCommerce store

If you prefer to save money on design, and/or you don't have any experience when it comes to transforming and customizing any WordPress theme, We recommend you choose a theme that has already been designed for Woo and its SEO from the very beginning of its development..

It is tempting to “touch nothing” and continue using whatever theme you already have installed on your WordPress, yes, but consider this nonetheless: a theme is part of the programming of your site and not a mere aesthetic mask.

Thus, in a decent theme there should be variables like CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and various compatibility details that improve communication with the heart of your WooCommerce store.

The advantages and benefits of installing a theme that was built from the ground up to be used alongside WooCommerce:

The overall architecture of your site will accommodate the products for sale appropriately.

The overall appearance of your website will be much more versatile and consistent with the database.

You won't waste time tweaking or design testing to achieve a compatible look and feel for your WooCommerce store to perform optimally.

To get you started evaluating potential themes built for WooCommerce, we recommend the following:

When evaluating these issues or any other, we also recommend, since this note is about SEO, that you run the google test to determine the speed and capabilities of a subject. How to do this? On a theme's promotion page, look for the button that says “DEMO” (if this option doesn't exist, the theme you're looking at doesn't allow you to check it out online).

After entering the URL where you can see the theme running, copy the internet address from the address bar and paste it into the google tool field.

You can see a real example of this in the screenshot below:

Important note: many times the demos of the themes open inside a frame (HTML frame) preventing you from executing the test. When this happens, the URL that you should copy and paste into the analysis field of PageSpeed Insights you can get it like this:

The result of the test carried out by the Insights tool will look something like this:

Testing a Theme on mobile

To check how responsive any Theme is, or how it looks on a mobile phone (how the information is accommodated), the best thing to do is, properly speaking, do it using a cell phone.

However, to the naked eye many things can be overlooked, or directly invisible. Therefore, the online tool to check the operation of a Theme on a mobile support (tablet, cell phone) is Google Mobile Friendly.

Note: Again, remember to use the demo URL provided by a theme for this test.

This online tool puts a site through a series of tests to determine how small-screen-friendly a given Theme is. Among other things, they measure details as sophisticated as the size of the clickable areas in relation to the average fingertip. Are the areas that a finger can touch to activate something (eg a button) too close together? Is a letter too small for the human eye? An icon, an image? The results of the tests will shed light on all these aspects.

Testing Schema Markup Information

Another possible and recommended test is that you submit a Theme to an evaluation of its “Marking Scheme”.

The Schema Markup it is additional information that Google looks for and reads to better understand the ranking and data of your content. Through the Schema codes, the Google algorithm identifies each type of content and with which contexts it is related. A good example of Enriched Results are the customer reviews, the price of the product or additional links. Google is likely to display such information in its search results, and an example of this is as follows:

The tool Google Rich Results parses the structured bookmarks of a Theme to validate them. If there's a bug or code problem, you'll know right away.

when a topic does not have in your code the ability to point your information for rich results, the message you'll see is this:

when a topic yes owns in your code the ability to add extra information to the search result, the message we will see is this:

On-page SEO

My name is…

It may sound elementary, but the truth is that it is the tip of the iceberg of the optimization of the content of your site: where does it all start from? What is the raison d'être of your site?

On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > General to take a look at the following:

The title of your site is your brand name (for example, “tienda azul”), while the Short description It can be used to explain the essence of your trade. A good example would be "vegetarian food" or "silver jewelry and jewelry."

Security Certificates

A certificate is an encryption protocol that is applied to the transmission of data between your site, the server and the computer or cell phone of your users. In other words, it is a way to hide the data being sent and received, preserving it from malicious users. It is easily recognizable when a site has an SSL certificate because its URL or internet address starts with HTTPS instead of HTTP.

In addition, current browsers make this recognition easier and with good reason: they clarify that your data, such as your credit card number or your address, travels safely through the web (in the same way that they warn you when there is NO security ). Below we show you what a secure site looks like on your website:

We recommend that you keep an eye on whether your site has a valid SSL certificate.

If you host your site with us, please note that we offer free HTTPS encryption via Let's Encrypt. When in doubt, write to us at [email protected]

Canonizing the content

A “canonical” URL is a link or any HTML link element on our site that contains the rel=”canonical” attribute, specifying your URL to search engines preferred. How "preferred"? Yes, canonicalization is the process of choosing the best URL when there are several options, such as mysite.com, www.mysite.com Y www.mysite.com/index.php

By canonicalizing a URL, you prevent Google or another search engine index (record in your results) two or more times the same content. If content on your site is indexed twice or more, among other things, it could be penalized (deleted from the Google results record).

As the schematic above exemplifies, the canonical URL will be final, the one that you intend to be the only and exclusive address.

Note: the version you choose is not relevant in itself, but keep in mind that URLS without www have become a standard (because they are shorter to write). Our address, for example, is duplika.com (WWW is omitted from the URL).

One way to check if your site is using correct canonicalization right now is to take advantage of the online tool SEO Site CheckUp.

Important note: Canonical URLs are not limited to the main domain only, but to any internal content on your site that could be easy target for an interpretation of duplicate content. And in WooCommerce it is not difficult for different addresses to have the same or similar content due to, for example, the category section, archives and product pages (where there could be product photos but very little text).

To prevent this, Rank Math allows you to alter the canonical URLs of any genre of content on your site. For this, look for the options within the tab Advanced as shown in the screenshot below.

Better, a simple Permalink structure

A Permalink or Permanent Link is a URL that “permanently” points to any content, preventing said link from becoming “broken”.

If you already have a store set up at this point, it's probably best not to alter this setting so that Google doesn't have to re-index your content with different URLs.

But, if you've just created a new store or it hasn't been around for a long time, we recommend that you modify these settings in favor of a cleaner URL structure. The reasons for this action are not SEO but rather so that the addresses of your products or services are more easily understandable (and memorable) for your potential customers.

The settings shown above will be adequate for most sites (unless you need a different URL structure due to your particular products or services).

WooCommerce Specific SEO Settings

After you've covered the specifics regarding URL paths for your WordPress store, it's time to evaluate the native WooCommerce settings. The first thing is to activate the Rank Math component by going to Rank Math > Desktop and clicking on the power button of the module as we indicate below.

Once this step is done, go to Rank Math > General Settings > WooCommerce and activate the following settings.

As we already recommend, it is better that the URLs are simple, understandable, and memorable. Therefore, removing unnecessary prefixes (such as shop and product from your URLs) will make your WooCommerce shop easier to navigate, and URLs, being shorter, will become easier to share.

Note: at this time it is not considered that keywords within a URL have an impact on the results ranking.

By default, WooCommerce adds /product-category/ before the actual category appears in your permalink, something that we do not recommend. Once again: the “cleaner” your URL structure is, the friendlier it will be for users and search engine results.

Therefore, instead of your site having a permanent link of this type…

…you will have a much more responsive one like this one:

As can be seen, the route looks clearer, not only more “human”, but also easier for the indexer bots. Google will also better understand the URL of your products, since the  /product-category/ (eg: decoration) has no incidence or practical SEO purpose.

Remove parental slugs

slug is the name given to a fragment of the route. For example in www.mitienda.com/vehiculos/accesorios/aromatizador , “vehicles”, “accessories” and “air freshener” are slugs (from the server's point of view, these are the real names of folders and files, just like you would see them on Mac or Windows).

We therefore recommend removing these so-called “parental slugs”, that is, the fragments of the product URL that precede the product itself. To do this, activate the following selection:

This recommendation can be useful in contexts where you do NOT make any use of categories. After activating this option, WooCommerce will remove the slug from the main category of the product permalink URL.

Disable the automatic tag generator of your WooCommerce

The benefit here is getting rid of categories from your store because your store could contain standalone products (i.e. you don't guarantee the creation of a whole new category in your WooCommerce store).

After enabling it, prevent WooCommerce from loading a meta tag generator in the header of your website's source code (revealing the version of WooCommerce your store uses, which is of no use). For convenience, it will remove the following line from your HTML code:

Remove Schema Marker

This option is useful for prevent Schema structured data from being added to category pages of products (in accordance with the new guidelines of Google).

WooCommerce Product Page Layout

Using a properly chosen WooCommerce product page layout is one of the key points crucial when choosing the theme of your store.

The presentation page of your product or service is transcendental. Without having properly foreseen its details, aesthetics and possibilities for the user, your sales will undoubtedly be affected.

Our recommendation is that you pay attention to the following details before choosing and buying a theme for your Woo store:

Think like your potential client would: what information do you expect to read before and clearly? What things will catch your attention before and what things after?

Put the accent on the benefits and not so much on the features.

Use the information from buyer reviews in your favor (make sure the ratings are clearly visible).

Your product description should be easy to understand.

Take advantage of your product data by thinking about the rich snippets that Google can display (thanks to Rank Math).

Write enticing phrases that serve to sell instead of thinking about keywords for Google.

Do not lose sight of the quality of the images (especially for themes that allow zooming). And do not forget to write the ALTs (alternative texts) of all the images of your products.

Rank Math makes it easy for you to write the META information for titles and descriptions, so take advantage of it.

For this, go to the editing page of your product and scroll the screen to the bottom. With Rank Math installed, you will see the SEO META fields, the space where you can customize all the settings of the product you are editing:

Breadcrumbs

The "breadcrumbs" or breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs: Links that appear at the top of product pages to make it easy for your site users to jump to the category page in question or to previous destinations.

They can be thought of as a kind of map: they indicate to the user where they are located within the site (in the example above, within the section of WiFi signal repeaters).

The utility of Breadcrumbs does not end with the user; Google uses them to change the way your website appears in search results.

To enable breadcrumbs with the Rank Math plugin, head over to Rank Math > General Settings:

Note: once activated, take a look at the additional options (for example, you can choose the separator character between the fragments of the route).

Organize the Store with Categories and Tags

Getting used to using Labels from the beginning of the upload of products in your store is an SEO practice that also has practical purposes for your users. This becomes even more radical when your store has been transformed into a multi-product eCommerce.

On the one hand, your potential buyers will be able to find related items immediately (simply by clicking on one of the tags of the product they are viewing. Ex: “nails”). But it also allows you to position yourself in the results of internet search engines with greater precision and strength for such characteristics (eg: "nails").

At the beginning and with the first products, adding Product Labels may seem easy, but we recommend you think ahead. Therefore, it is convenient to have a structural organization scheme in mind as soon as possible.

Organize your products with Categories and Labels (tags)

The first step is the tip of the iceberg for the second, because, if you haven't done it, you should think about the categories in which your products and services can be grouped.

Probably, the number of categories, when well thought out, is not high.

Once this is done, you can then healthily divide both products and services into subcategories. For example, if a category were “garden and plants”, possible subcategories would be “accessories”, “fertilizers”, “indoor plants”, “decoration”, etc.

Keep in mind that many times a subcategory can exist within two category groups; For example, if the category were “men's shoes”, and your store also offers women's clothing, the “sandals” subcategory probably exists for both categories (among many others). Remember that a subcategory's display name can be repeated across categories (like “sandals”) but the “slug” is unique (ie, the way a snippet displays in the URL path).

With respect to labels or TAGS, its purpose is to keep a record of the common characteristics of a product (measurements, colors, materials, manufacturer). The best way to create effective labels is to think about what really defines and gives a product its appearance: its characteristics., as long as they are not so important as to deserve a category.

Schema Marker for WooCommerce Stores

Activating the star indicator (ratings)

Having Rank Math installed in your WooCommerce store, this step is done automatically. Even the fields will be displayed aggregateRating Y Reviews from the actual reviews that customers leave through the functionality of Ratings natively integrated into WooCommerce.

Remember that if all the products lack valuation, you'll get a warning in Google's structured data testing tool. This is normal, and it happens because the tool will look for these fields without finding them. To solve it, encourage your acquaintances to leave Ratings and the “aggregateRating” and “review” errors will disappear.

Correcting SKU and Availability errors in your Schema

SKUs is the unique identification code assigned to an item or service in your Store (in English, Stock Keeping Unit). As we mentioned at the end of the previous point, these errors are corrected by adding the corresponding information in your product form as we show you in the screenshot below:

Correcting Brand errors in the Schema of your store

To fix the brand warning error, go to Rank Math > General Settings > WooCommerce and choose one of the available fields to use as brands of your product.

Note: If you sell a single brand in your store, you probably don't want to rely on the use of tags and categories. In this case, we recommend using the following filter adding this code to the file functions.php of your theme (ideally using a child theme) or using the plugin Code Snippets:

// Add Brand for Products add_filter( 'rank_math/snippet/rich_snippet_product_entity', function ( $entity ) { $entity['brand'] = 'Rank Math'; return $entity; });

Important note: In the example, remember to replace “Rank Math” in the third line of code with the unique brand name you use on your site.

Always use the Schema Check Tool to make sure everything is going well.

Schema configuration for GTIN, ISBN and MPN

If you want to display structured data for GTIN, ISBN, and MPN, you can do so using custom product attributes in WooCommerce.

A viable alternative is to use a plugin like Product GTIN for WooCommerce.

Fixing the “priceValidUntil” warning in your Schema

There are two options before the warning priceValidUntil of Google Search Console: the first is to ignore it (because the only thing that the warning indicates is that it will not be displayed in the search results) or you can add a sale price scheduled only for a certain period of time (so that it becomes obsolete for itself).

conclusion

We believe that the advantages of this powerful plugin called Rank Math have become clear: it not only improves the SEO of our site in general, but also of our store in particular, product by product. It is easy to install and customize, and it is duly documented both in our guide and in the help of its own interface.

Hoping to have been useful to you, we suggest you write your doubts in the comments. If you are a Duplika customer, you can write to us at [email protected] so that we can advise you.

We are here to help you. Thanks for reading, and good selling!

We leave you with this list of frequently asked questions and answers.

Typical Questions and Answers

Is it important that I improve the SEO of my store?

Yes, of course. Improving communication between your information and search engines not only translates into more organic (and quality) traffic, but you will also improve organization and communication between your store and your potential customers.

Is WooCommerce SEO Ready?

Yes. By default, WooCommerce is programmed with SEO in mind; in fact, it is the platform that offers the most control and versatility compared to other similar frameworks.

Should my labels Y categories of products?

When you read no, the justification is limited to preserving your store from duplicate content in the eyes of Google. But if the content of your categories and tags contains different and unique information (and a small number of products), then you will benefit from allowing those pages to be indexed as they will allow you to rank for a range of search terms from the potential buyer's perspective. (such as when a user searches for "men's sports shirts").

Regarding tags, we recommend that you allow indexing if your store has more than 100 products. Otherwise, the indexing of the categories will be enough and will keep you from being penalized by Google.

How to fix Search Console errors in my WooCommerce?

If Google Search Console reports problems with your structured data (whether on one or many pages), we recommend that you review the steps in this guide to make sure you've set everything up correctly.

Does my site need to be encrypted with HTTPS / SSL in order to run WooCommerce?

Not for technical purposes, but making your store secure using SSL is already a problem. protection standard for all online stores in the world. If your site can still be accessed via HTTP because you don't have HTTPS, we strongly recommend that you add an SSL certificate as soon as possible. In addition to working as one more SEO factor, it is the way to prevent the sensitive data of your users from being violated (eg: credit card numbers).

If you host your store with us, send us an email to [email protected] that we will resolve it for free and immediately.

Where do I get photos of my products?

From an SEO point of view, it's best if your images are original (read: get the photos from a hired photographer or yourself).

If this is not possible for you, there are sites like Burst, Gratisography Y fancycrave, prepared to solve all or most of your imaging needs.

How to show rating stars in Google results?

In this guide we have covered that aspect. If for some reason Google still doesn't show your product reviews in its results, use the google schema verification tool to make sure that your enriched data can be read correctly.

However, it is worth clarifying that Google will not always show the rich data of a site, and this is part of the search engine's black box. The variables for Google to decide to show yours are many, and that the Schema information is correct is only one of these variables. To better inform you about this, we recommend that you read the google guidelines.

How do I get Google to show the price of my products in its search results?

As we discussed in this note, if you are already using Rank Math, and the WooCommerce SEO module is active, this is done automatically. We recommend you review this guide where we explain step by step how to achieve it.

My store is slow, it often goes offline, it contains errors... What can I do?

We recommend you evaluate move with us 🙂 The process is safe and free. We offer specialized servers for stores with state-of-the-art hardware. We are here to help you. Check our WooCommerce plan here.