Last Updated on June 29, 2018

You’ve set up your WooCommerce store but you’re not getting any traffic. You wonder what you’re doing wrong. Have you optimized your product pages for SEO? If not, that could be one of the reasons why you’re not getting any traffic. In this article, we’ll teach you how to optimize your WooCommerce products for SEO.

Why Optimize for SEO?

You can do all the link-building you want but if the pages that you want to rank for are not properly optimized for SEO, then you’ll have a hard getting ranked on top of Google.

Still, traffic is just a metric and what really matters is your conversion rate. Even if you are getting thousands in traffic but they are not converting, you still have a problem. On the other hand, you can’t convert anyone if you are not getting any traffic at all. Essentially, SEO and conversion optimization go hand-in-hand.

You have to optimize for SEO to make sure you are attracting the right people to your WooCommerce store.

Steps on How to Optimize WooCommerce Products for SEO

Identify What Keywords to Optimize For

Normally, it will be difficult to rank for regular keywords. For example, if you are selling digital cameras, it will be difficult to compete with Wikipedia or Amazon unless your WooCommerce store is already an authority on digital cameras. So optimizing for the keyword “digital cameras” won’t work for you. This is where long-tail keywords come in.

What is a Long-Tail keyword?

Compared to a regular keyword, long tail keywords are longer and more specific. Instead of optimizing for “digital camera”, you can optimize for specific camera models or for specific features of digital cameras. Optimize for anything unique about the product that you are selling. A few examples of long-tail keywords can be “digital camera for underwater photography”, “digital cameras for beginners”, or “sports action digital camera”.

Do Your Keyword Research

Don’t start optimizing until you do your keyword research. You can use whatever keyword research tool you have at your disposal. We can also recommend Ubersuggest. Just pop in a basic keyword and you can get a list of long-tail keywords that you can optimize for along with some valuable search data. You can even filter the keyword ideas and remove negative keywords. You can also export the keywords into a handy CSV file.

Add the Long-Tail Keyword to Your Product Page

To help with optimizing your WooCommerce Products for SEO, you can use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. The plugin provides detailed information on how you can optimize your products for SEO. It also has a boatload of other features that will help boost your SEO. Just install the plugin and you’ll gain access to the SEO optimizations block on your WooCommerce product editor.

When optimizing products for SEO, input the long-tail keyword that you wish to target on the “Focus Keyword” field. After doing this, you can see the analysis section below will show you recommendations on how you can improve your product’s SEO score.

Generally, you will need to add your focus keywords to:

1. The article title
2. The first paragraph of the article
3. One of the heading tags
4. On the body of the article
5. In one of the image alt tags
6. In the URL/slug

You don’t need to force yourself to do every little thing that the Yoast SEO section recommends. Just use it a rough guide since it does recommend the currently known best practices.

Improving Content Readability

Google now also considers content readability as an SEO ranking factor. So it is important to ensure that your product descriptions are easy to read. In some cases, you may have to use some technical terms when writing your product descriptions and that’s totally fine. Depending on your products, that may actually be best practice. Still, it’s a good idea to check the readability of your content.

The Yoast SEO section also gives recommendations on Readability. Just click on the readability tab and you’ll see the problems that need to be addressed.

When creating your product descriptions, you can also use Hemingwayapp to optimize its readability. You can also use this tool when writing blog posts.

Now that you know how to optimize your content for SEO, people who are interested in your products are now more likely to find your products. If you need help with SEO optimizations, the Wooassist Team can help. We’ll start off by doing an SEO audit of your site so we can determine what needs to be addressed and move forward from there.

Optimizing your WooCommerce store does not end with product optimizations. There are other optimizations that need to be done to ensure you are maximizing your conversion rates.