WooCommerce SEO Tips

How can better WooCommerce SEO Turn into Real Money?

So, here you are looking for some WooCommerce SEO Tips.  Truth is, WooCommerce Optimizations really aren’t that difficult.

But all too often we see WooCommerce sites that are completely left at default.

In all reality, those default WooCommerce options really are not going to help your SEO Rankings for your WooCommerce site!

So, let’s break some of these topics down a bit further to get your store the revenue and the rankings your customers are looking for.

WooCommerce SEO

Getting the correct SEO settings for WooCommerce really should not be that difficult.  And, it’s not. That’s exactly why I launched this site, the WooCommerce SEO Courses, and helping WooCommerce Store owners to rank better is exactly my mission here.

More important than simply reading about more and more SEO Tips for WooCommerce, I want to give you an overview here of what better SEO rankings actually turn into regarding dollars and cents for your store.

It’s really incredible to see the range of WooCommerce Store owners and their thinking regarding SEO.  Some Store Owners are simply “kicking the tires” and playing around.

Yet time and time again, we see Store Owners who simply do things right, and they are making thousands of dollars monthly, and even making millions of dollars and paying the salary, rent, car payments, and payroll for dozens of employees.

Read that last sentence again.  “…..salary, rent, car payments, and payroll for dozens of employees”.

That’s real money!

That’s WooCommerce paying for a single mom’s food for her kids.  Yes: WooCommerce is responsible for paying for medical bills, paying for people’s mortgage, house payments, and rent.  Yes: WooCommerce can empower you to fuel your kid’s college fund.  Yes: You can rank on Page 1, …above Target? YEP! …above WalMart? YOU BET!

Look at result #5 up there above.  That’s a WooCommerce site.  Could it have better meta description and title? Absolutely! But look at where it’s at on that SERP page.  It’s above Target and it’s above Walmart.com’s positions.  Now, these folks followed some of the basic, fundamental SEO Tips in the WooCommerce SEO Course.  And that’s it!

Again, could their site go even farther with their optimization efforts to rank even higher? Sure!  But even following the basic guidelines of WooCommerce SEO, they are generating thousands of pageviews each and every month from this search query.

Now, who do you think is actually looking for leggings for their kiddos? Well, according to this site’s demographic reports in Google Analytics, their average site visitor is a female between the ages of 25-44 years old.  Now, I want you to watch something:

• Their WooCommerce Site ranks for a commonly searched for keyword which gives them thousands of pageviews
• Does the visitor actually buy what they came into the site looking for?
• Remember: Mommy was probably looking for leggings for their kiddo, right…..
• So maybe they buy their kiddo some leggings.  But, can you guess what actually happens?
• Even though the visitor initially came to the site via a search for their kid….
• This site normally gets sales of leggings to THE MOMMY!
  

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See how ranking high for even one good solid keyphrase can increase sales for your whole store?!?!  This store may or may not have a hugely compelling selection of children’s leggings at any given moment.  But that doesn’t actually matter.

The practical, applicable, and behavioral result is that by getting their WooCommerce SEO solidly ranking, they are now driving sales to some of their other product categories and other WooCommerce products that the consumer wants.

WooCommerce with Yoast SEO

The most commonly used plugin for WordPress SEO is of course Yoast SEO.  Now, here’s the deal folks……  when you use it on a WooCommerce site, it’s absolutely crucial that you get all of the Yoast SEO settings 100% correct for your site!

A retail store is still probably going to get a bit of revenue from foot traffic.  But an exclusive online store is almost completely dependent on their WooCommerce SEO Rankings for Search Engine Results. Sure, there can be a Tweeder chirp or Facebook post for a recommendation.  But in all reality, most of the time, a WooCommerce store is almost 100% dependent on their search engine rankings!

Getting Yoast SEO setup with default options simply will not work – EVER!

It’s nothing negative against the plugin.  Not in the least bit.  Getting the Yoast SEO plugin setup correctly for YOUR WooCommerce site is what matters!

I simply cannot tell you how many hundreds of thousands of sites that I know could rank better, rank higher, rank more often for higher volume keywords, and keep those rankings ….IF…. they would simply follow the guidelines in the WooCommerce SEO Course!

It’s not that Yoast SEO is bad – quite the contrary! Yoast SEO is great for empowering the right “options” in WooCommerce.  But does the average WooCommerce site suffer TREMENDOUSLY from all those SEO options being configured incorrectly? YEP!

Not knowing how to configure Yoast SEO will leave your site horribly destined for absolute failure!

Here’s a site…. wait, let me not share their actual URL 😉 This site, like many many many hundreds of thousands of WooCommerce sites suffers from not having any idea how to configure Yoast SEO’s settings correctly. As a result, they have over 3,700 URLs indexed in Google.

That should be a good thing, right? I mean, hey that’s a really big number – the more the merrier, right? WRONG!

This site (which I’ll not mention in this blog post) is horribly suffering from thin content.  I will go through this site’s Yoast settings in the course though.  But until this site fixes their settings, there’s nothing at all that they will ever be able to do that will compensate for those THREE FRIGGIN THOUSAND++ site links that have absolutely ZERO relevance to their WooCommerce Store.

This site’s problem is that they have simply installed Yoast SEO and left it at default!  Either no one ever loved them enough to tell them, or they simply decided that they know better and they’d like to be stubborn enough to leave their site’s content scattered among dozens and dozens of post types and thousands and thousands of URLs.

—> Again, NONE OF THESE THOUSANDS of URLs are helping them AT ALL! <—

SEO Friendly URLs for WooCommerce

If you’re concerned about SEO Friendly URLs for your WooCommerce site, please listen carefully.  Do not ever let some sales page to some plugin tell you that you can NOT make your URLs have any SEO value by default – YOU CAN!

And, sometimes, some of these plugins are more headache, more work, cause more conflicts, and create a mess of your WooCommerce site once the plugin fails to stay updated (with either WordPress updates and/or WooCommerce Updates).  Please stick to the fundamentals of SEO for better WooCommerce URLs.

I go over every bit of how to make sure your URLs are SEO friendly in the WooCommerce SEO course.

And, obviously, we do NOT want this information getting out to everyone on the innertubes all willy nilly all over the place.  This is WooCommerce, this isn’t Jim-Bo the local chiropractor’s website. This is WooCommerce!

And, as we can see from the example above, some WooCommerce Store owners are perfectly content to do SEO wrong!

Should that bother your wallet when someone else screws up their site? Nope 😉 That just makes it easier for you to rank higher!

Keyword Research for eCommerce

Throughout the last ~10 years, here’s the one phrase that I’ve told people over and over again regarding Keyword Research for their WooCommerce site:  Never Trust You!

Here’s what that means for us today….  I never realized how important the word empathy would be in SEO. But in the last few years, I’ve seen that word come up quite often in discussions, Mental Health topics, and business meetings.

Heading up my first WooCommerce site almost a decade ago, I just thought it was natural that no one really trusted their own judgement.  Turns out, I was wrong.  Today, there are way too many WooCommerce sites where folks continually insist that THEIR OWN PERSPECTIVE is what-they-need.  And, that could not be farther from the truth!

When the “rubber-meets-the-road” if your’e not using some type of OBJECTIVE tool for keyword research, you’re doing it wrong.  Plain and simple.  I can’t even begin to go over all the free keyword research tools in one blog post (and, yes they are obviously detailed out in the course), but there’s a bigger picture message that needs to be heard:

You need to use data -not opinion- to do your keyword research for your WooCommerce site’s SEO!

It will absolutely amaze you how many times Y-O-U, with only one mindset & one perspective, will find different keywords that provide thousands and thousands more search traffic than what you -yourself- initially thought.

I was talking with someone who cleans up infected WordPress sites as a service.  Now, they initially thought that they needed to rank for ‘certain key phrases’. So, I put those key phrases into the keyword research tools & we determined that no matter what he did, even if his site ranked #1 for that key phrase, his initial phrase that he wanted to rank for was only searched for 110 times a month!

Now, once we did some keyword research for his WooCommerce products, we were able to find the correct phrases that were searched for over 2,600 times.  BIG DIFFERENCE, right?

Trust Data – not you- when doing keyword research.  Your site’s revenue will appreciate the additional perspective!

Track Your WooCommerce SEO Efforts

I’ve got to say that I really don’t think most WooCommerce site owners are not doing any position tracking.  That needs to change!

While SerpStat and SEMRush both have free tiers, they are both awesome tools (even if you just paid for 1 month), and both require zero setup, there is also a totally free tool called SerpHacker.  While SerpHacker is forever free, it does take a bit to setup.  That’s why I keep pointing people to at least get a month of SEMRush or SerpStat.

Either tool, either free / free tier / or paid-for-at-least-a-month, which ever your choice, I want you to start tracking your SEO results.

Feel free to go through the WooCommerce SEO course, and email me if you need help.

But the point here is to START Tracking your SEO Positions!

Some WooCommerce store owners will notice that they have absolutely zero rankings to report at all.  DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED! After you’ve gone through the course, give it 30 days after you’ve resubmitted your URLs to be indexed, and then check to see where your rankings are.

Again, focusing on the fundamentals –DONE RIGHT– will take your WooCommerce SEO much farther than what you might initially realize.

It’s amazing how much revenue can come from simply tracking your SEO efforts and watching what works, and possibly more importantly what isn’t working.

If your WooCommerce site isn’t ranking, I want to encourage you again to start taking the WooCommerce SEO Course today.  Now, knowing that you will, a competitor will, or you won’t, I still want to leave you with some WooCommerce Tips and advice:

Never believe that it’s simply not possible. It is!

It is very possible -even though there are millions of WooCommerce sites- it is very possible for you to get your WooCommerce site to rank higher and higher every day for your products.

Stop Reading. Start DO-ing!