Google’s business model is to return the most relevant search results on the web. That’s why people keep using them – and by ‘people’, it includes your potential customers. Being ranked on the top pages allows companies to receive more visitors and generate more leads.
Google uses complex algorithms to assess the relevance of website across the web. They have hundreds of criteria for determining rankings.
A high ranking in Google translates to more site visitors and potential revenue. But how do you achieve that coveted status?
The answer is a well-rounded website.
It should be a site built on a best-practice code base that offers interesting and engaging content users are searching for. In your case, it is an online store using the Woocommerce platform. Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your online store is one of the main factors to creating a well-rounded website.
Search Terms
What terms are your ideal clients using when searching for your service? Play around by creating synonyms, abbreviations, plurals, past tense, present tense, verbs nouns, etc. From one word, multiple search terms can be obtained.
For example, from the word car, we can get: car, vans, automobile, pick-up, etc. You will not rank for cars because it’s too popular, making the competition tight. Go for specific keyword “phrases” like “funny car stickers” or “ford car mats” to help you rank higher, and attract your ideal client.
You can use tools such as:
- Google Keyword Planner (formerly the Keyword Tool).
- http://ubersuggest.org/
- https://serps.com/tools/keywords
Once you come up with your list of keyword phrases, dedicate an optimized page on your site for each keyword phrase.
You can outsource some of the research, but the business owner or sales manager needs to check the list. There is no point optimizing your site for key phrases of products that you either don’t sell, or make very little margin from.
Help Google Find You
Assist Google by labeling your content. Everything on your site can be labeled by meta data. Meta data is not visible to the user, but helps Google web crawlers identify what your site is about.
All good website platforms like WordPress have this baked in to make it easy to add “meta data” to any page on your site.
Using our example above, “funny car stickers” would need to have a page on your site with metatags, something like:
Title: Funny Car Stickers | Bumper and Window Stickers. Car Decals
Description: Find 1000s+ of Unique Bumper Stickers & Car Decals. Tons of Funny designs available, or personalize your own!
On its own, meta data won’t do much to get you in the rankings. It needs relevant content to back up what the meta data is saying about your site. Your content needs keywords, plus synonyms, and related words. If you are writing about the topic you want to rank for, then this should happen naturally.
On-Page -> Off-Page SEO
Up until this point we have been talking about on-page SEO, which involves strategies controlled by the website owner. Wooassist can help with all your on-page SEO needs, but at this stage we don’t offer an off-page SEO service.
Our proficiency is the technical aspects of WordPress and Woocommerce, not content creation. Off-page SEO is the overall publishing and running of the website across the internet. It involves obtaining in-bound links from other websites. To do that, you need remarkable content that people will share and link to.
Improving Relevance and Authority
Linking from relevant websites is still the number one way to rank high in Google. It’s just harder now to achieve this. A few years ago, it was possible to create these links and trick Google into thinking you were popular.
Now, part of Google’s mission is to detect “un-natural” links, and mark it as deceptive and manipulative. Any link scheme is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google encourages quality content, and they define it as written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well. Choose topics that are driven by genuine interests of readers of the site. Provide useful content that people will link to, and share with their friends on social media.
With all the factors you need to consider about SEO, it is easy to make mistakes. Here is a good write-up about those common SEO mistakes that you need to avoid.
The irony is, your site will rank high in Google when there is no longer any need. If you create great content that Google wants you to, and people are sharing your content, then you can get a lot of traffic to your site without the help of Google.
Similarly, you can also optimize WooCommerce product categories for SEO. Just go to “Products” and click on “Categories” Edit the category that you want to optimize. When you scroll down to the bottom of the “Edit Category” page, you’ll see a section called Yoast SEO Settings. Fill in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields and click on Update.
Adding the quantity field to the shop page is a necessity to some stores where buying several pieces and having repeat sales are common. For example, buying canned cat food in bulk is common so if you own a store selling pet food, having the quantity field on the shop page will really help. Many of your customers will be buying again after some time. They can just add the products directly from the shop page since they know what they are buying and no longer need to see the product details.
