No online business owner would want to remain unseen on the internet and see the products lying unsold in the warehouse. Such a scenario can only be averted through the practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This ongoing process helps improve the ranking of your eCommerce store across search engines, generates more organic traffic and ultimately boosts sales. The top result on Google enjoys 31.7% of the clicks, per a survey of around five million search results by Backlinko.
Regarding eCommerce stores, WooCommerce is undoubtedly one of the leading platforms today. An increasing number of eCommerce stores are using WooCommerce as the preferred platform for its various benefits and features. But with competition in most segments increasing at a breakneck pace, the number of WooCommerce stores is also increasing considerably. This necessitates a WooCommerce-based online store owner to invest in WooCommerce SEO to achieve a higher ranking on the search engine results page (SERP) and thereby attract more visitors to the website.
Implementing WooCommerce SEO best practices means your site gets better visibility and increased visits when people search for related products and services in a search engine. Appearing on the first page or top of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) enables you to drive more traffic to the site and achieve higher sales. WooCommerce SEO optimization activities comprise developing the webpage around a focus keyword that should fit seamlessly and logically. Focus search words can be used in the meta description, permalinks, image names, product pages, alt text, and the whole of the site’s content. This does not imply cramming the page with the keywords as it is an illicit act, and you will be penalized for that.
To help an eCommerce store climb up the search results, you may avail of WooCommerce SEO services that take care of everything related to SEO. The vitality of SEO can be recognized from the fact that every year big enterprises spend over $65 billion on Search Engine Optimization, as revealed by Web FX. The task of optimizing a WooCommerce site involves the following activities:
Cutting it to the chase, WordPress is a Content Management System that too a behemoth. At the same time, WooCommerce is a standard plugin integrated into WordPress to convert it into an eCommerce site. It provides the facilities to place and sells services and digital and physical products through features like shipping, backing different payment options, cart functionality, and so forth. Let us glide through each system to grasp their work and understand how WooCommerce and WordPress differ.
WordPress is a content management system, which at its core, enables editing and designing a website. Although, it is strapped to the required functionalities that make an eCommerce site. WordPress is an open-source apparatus certified under GPLv2, which implies that the software can be used or tweaked by anyone free of charge; according to Envisage Digital, of a total of 1.3 billion websites, WordPress powers over 455 million websites worldwide, including big names such as Rolling Stones, Microsoft, and many others who employ the platform to set up the online store.
Wordpress.org is a free and open-source option that is self-hosted. You require a domain name, install the software on a web host, and curate a website that belongs to you. While WordPress.com is less flexible and is a paid option offered and powered by WordPress.org.
One can easily alter and customize the site’s functionalities through different themes and plugins, free and paid, available in the plugin store. You can effortlessly install and integrate the plugins to tailor your WooCommerce store, that not only enhance your store’s appearance but also boost customer experience greatly and up the WordPress SEO optimization. More than 60,000 WooCommerce plugins support you through your online business journey.
As discussed earlier, the WooCommerce SEO plugin extends the ability of a regular WordPress site and transforms it into an online store system. You are free to create an eCommerce site from zero or incorporate a shopping cart feature into WordPress. There are over five million WooCommerce-powered stores worldwide, while the recent market share of WooCommerce is a whopping 29% of the top million eCommerce sites.
Akin to WordPress, WooCommerce is also open-source software, which allows you to customize your eCommerce store the way you please and require. The functionalities can be further extended using plenty of plugins such as add buy now or buy later plugin, multilingual plugin, and more. Further, there is a treasure trove of unique themes and templates you need to set up your online shop.
On top of this, no one bothers you WooCommerce about adding unlimited products, unlimited product categories, images, total sales, export and import product data, and so much more. WooCommerce facilitates multiple payment portals that help accomplish both online and physical payments with open support for Stripe and PayPal. And now, you must be clear about what WordPress and WooCommerce stand for.
So, you have considered starting a WooCommerce store and anticipate great traffic and higher sales. As a first thing, you would require optimization of both your product page and product categories. According to Statista, retail eCommerce sales in Canada are expected to grow from $34868 million in 2022 to $40.3 billion in 2025. Then, indeed, there is a dire need to curate an alluring and optimized product page that attracts visitors, increases sales, and boosts your online presence—considering product page customization if you aspire to accomplish more than just availing products for your eCommerce store.
WooCommerce SEO category is critical for the success of your eCommerce site. It promises a higher ranking for competitive keywords rather than ranking single-category pages. Having well-optimized categories facilitates the website owners in reaching their desired product choices without much fuss.
While working on WooCommerce SEO of your eCommerce store, it is crucial to optimize product category pages to ensure a higher ranking on search engines and procure higher traffic and sales conversions. Generally, people search the product using specific keywords such as “black men T-Shirt,” and general search words may also be used in certain cases. Optimizing the category page for these keywords ensures its ranking and increased website traffic. This way, you also avert the possibilities of one product page competing with the other concerning SEO for WooCommerce products. This implies that you can rank the category pages for general search terms while individual product pages for specific keywords. Practices of optimizing category on WooCommerce involves the following WooCommerce SEO tips execution:
With no second thoughts, absolutely! WooCommerce is the most prominent eCommerce store that has seen about 42,842,572 downloads and is still counting and pushing more than 28% of the world’s online stores as WooCommerce itself. However, a myth has been raging around that it is particularly apt for small stores and not large online shops since most WooCommerce SEO users are small-scale business holders. And now, it’s time to dispel the misconception about WooCommerce SEO 2022 and others.
Considering WordPress SEO WooCommerce, which is integrated into the biggest Content Management System ever, i.e., WordPress does nothing but scale up the sales, bring in higher traffic and drive in more revenue.
Working on WordPress SEO optimization of your online store means higher visibility in SERPs and thus increases the possibility of getting clicked by the users. The stat by IM Learning Center is more than believable that Google’s first SERP grabbed 3.8 times higher backlinks and hence more traffic compared to those drudging below it. This justifies the big companies forking over $65 billion on SEO to grow their business. SEO for WooCommerce involves focusing on several data-driven plans to enhance your visibility in SERPs, such as Page Speed, Domain Age, Spelling & Grammar errors, Website practicality, Publishing frequency, backlinks, and other off-page and on-page factors.
A common query is, “will the online platform be able to endure the high growth of my business?” Scaling refers to the proportionate maintenance in performance of the online store without affecting its page load speed and uptime.
Four elements potentially influence the scaling of WooCommerce stores. Let’s check out.
Unlike common apprehensions around WooCommerce SEO for large businesses, it is a great option. Countless developers persistently work on building and adding every conceivable feature you would want to have in your online shop. These attributes and plugins facilitate marketers to scale their online stores to incredible feats. You need to perfect WordPress SEO for both category and product pages to land a good number of sales and immense traffic to the online store.
The difficulty is more than valid, and seeking a resolution implies the most fitting solution for your business. SEO is a make-or-break factor in the sales and success of your store. Shopify and WooCommerce have specific elements that greatly influence the platform’s Search Engine Optimization.
Shopify being an all-rolled-into-one solution avails a variety of applications to maintain different functionalities, including SEO performance. WooCommerce, since it is integrated into one of the most powerful Content Management Systems (CMS)-WordPress – intrinsically enjoys solid blogging attributes to upgrade your online website in SERPs. Further, according to data, on WordPress.org, WooCommerce uses 4228 plugins, comprising SEO plugins, to maintain its features and serviceability.
Let’s parse through the subject blow-by-blow to understand how Shopify SEO differs from WooCommerce SEO, what supplants the other, and why.
Google’s Algorithm Speed Update has brought home the vitality of page speed to the website’s rankings. It can indirectly affect SERP rankings by raising the bounce rate and paring down the dwell span of the user.
The surveys conducted on the matter reveal astonishing data. OfficialBryanGrey.com claims a loss of 53% of the visitors simply because it took higher than 3 seconds to load. While 47% of the site visitors expect the page to show up within 2 seconds and no more, as per OfficialBryanGrey research.
Coming to the uptime factor, a website with higher uptime relishes greater traffic, higher sales conversion, and a lower bounce rate. John Mueller, a search advocate at Google, explains that a site experiencing downtime for more than two weeks is detrimental to its health and rankings, leading to increased bounce rates and plummeting the visitor count and, ultimately, sales.
Shopify sites stand positive on the speed element and typically load fast, particularly if the site is hosted on a dedicated server. Shopify’s websites are live and prancing reliably for 999.99% of the time, as disclosed by Shopify itself. So, you don’t miss out on your potential sales.
On the other side, WooCommerce is a self-hosted, open-source platform where you need to work on its performance, including page loading speed and maintaining good uptime. Without third-party services, you cannot expect positive speed and uptime; fortunately, there are zillions. Moreover, you can tweak other factors such as altering the web host provider or login page URL and grabbing a faster theme to enhance the said aspects of the site.
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is proof of the site’s authenticity and allows encrypted mutual connection with the visitors. Furthermore, it protects confidential data while replaying it over the internal network or the web. Therefore, it has a critical role in the eCommerce sites in securing personal, and credit card details turned in by the users. Furthermore, SSL comes in one of Google’s Ranking Factors declared in 2014 and could impact the SEO, thus ranking your site.
Luckily, Shopify renders an authentic SSL certificate after adding its custom domain name. Furthermore, by default, Shopify’s SSL certificate gets into action at the store’s checkout and for all the content anchored on your domain. Coming to WooCommerce SEO, getting SSL certificates here is rather effortless. There are a lot of options to do this, even free ones. However, WooCommerce suggests users procure a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, a reliable certificate authority. However, this free document is far less functional than the conventional one. Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates that are not confirmed by any particular enterprise and may trigger low user trust. On top of this, you need to update WooCommerce/ WordPress URLs and post SSL certificate installation, which surely comes across as a con in this case, and Shopify, sort of, wins!
A robust blog drive helps drive traffic to the online store, as affirmed by 57% of the marketers, where the majority have made blogging their priority. This is the area where 60% of B2B marketers drudge and find themselves short in curating engaging content.
Further, Google heavily considers the quality and count of links referring to your site. Thus, it is imperative to create a striking blog that can facilitate attracting worthy external links. Providentially, Shopify, unlike many eCommerce sites, has a blog feature that is fairly simple to set up and get it going. The blog designs are controlled by the theme of your Shopify store, which can be customized by tweaking the liquid code. There are several apps to enhance the blog’s functionality further.
While WordPress is an unrivalled and dedicated blogging apparatus, and naturally, WooCommerce inherits a great deal of this to curate blogs. Different themes are also accessible on ForestTheme and other places to design an alluring blog to ensure a better visitor experience.
Shopify is not specifically built for SEO like other eCommerce sites. However, its inbuilt functionalities and effortless management facilities render it an unbeatable rival. Still, Shopify is equipped with good SEO features one needs to flourish in the eCommerce sector that is usually quite simple to work with. Further, there are different apps which you can easily download, install, and operate to boost your Shopify store SEO.
WooCommerce SEO-friendly is integrated with a platform that prioritizes blogging. To optimize the product pages on the WooCommerce SEO store hassle-free, you may employ a WordPress editor and plenty of plugins such as Yoast SEO. You may have to confront technicalities at some point in time.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is impacted by the themes integrated into the platform. The theme of WooCommerce comes under the technical structure of the WooCommerce store, which determines the site’s efficiency and user experience.
Following WordPress SEO tips are considered while choosing SEO-friendly themes for WooCommerce:
Here are the top recommendations for WooCommerce themes to help you find the right match for your business:
Before installing any of these, however, comprehend your requirements, take a demo of the theme and then choose the best SEO WooCommerce theme.
SEO for a WooCommerce store is a technical process requiring a certain technological prowess. This is where the services of experienced agencies offering WooCommerce SEO services come to the fore. These companies have teams of skilled professionals well-versed with the latest technological innovations to deliver the best results for your WooCommerce store.
WooCommerce is a great eCommerce platform that can integrate with a variety of plugins and extensions that are highly customizable. It offers a rich user experience and lets you create almost any kind of online store you can think of. It’s SEO-friendly, too, even if it doesn’t provide much in terms of SEO out-of-the-box. With some well-planned SEO on your part, you can improve SEO for your WooCommerce store.
If you want to attract new customers, making sure that your WooCommerce shop has a good SEO performance is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Thanks to the variety of free and premium plugins available, it’s easy to set up SEO parameters on your online store.
Yes! Adding product tags to your products is a great way to improve search engine optimization for your WooCommerce site. Product tags allow you to add additional information about your product besides the keywords already added by WooCommerce. This allows search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to better understand the relationship between pages and products on your website.
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