If you have recently founded an e-commerce business, you might have already decided to use WordPress to build your new company’s website.
However, you can bolster WordPress’s usefulness as an e-commerce tool by augmenting it with the WooCommerce platform. This is already popular with online merchants due to the ease with which it can be set up and customised.
WooCommerce is, for example, compatible with various plugins — many of which can bode particularly well for your SEO efforts.
Some of these plugins have been designed to directly enhance SEO, while others do so indirectly by adding to the website’s functionality. We have picked WooCommerce add-ons from both of these categories in order to compile the following list.
Yoast WooCommerce SEO
Key to the appeal of WooCommerce as a platform is that it is free to download. While the same cannot quite be said about many of the optional extensions available for it, some that do come with a charge can easily justify it — with Yoast being a good case in point.
Yoast’s WooCommerce SEO plugin is an all-in-one SEO tool which can be used for content analysis, automatically refining technical SEO and easing the optimisation of product listings for search results. The above are just selected examples of the uses to which the plugin can be put.
It’s worth pointing out that this add-on is offered in both a standard and a ‘premium’ flavour. Unsurprisingly, the latter comes with a higher fee, but would also give you priority access to new features and tools — and is Yoast’s most popular WooCommerce SEO plugin.
All in One SEO
For one practical reason or another, you might not be able to go for the Yoast option. The next best thing would be All in One SEO — or AIOSEO, as this plugin is known in abbreviation. More than three million website owners have used AIOSEO with WordPress.
Of course, the name of the SEO game is to get websites ranking higher on SERPs (search engine results pages). It’s therefore reassuring that AIOSEO has been optimised for getting you results with Google and other popular search engines.
With AIOSEO, you can expect to take less than 10 minutes setting up any advanced WordPress features you want to utilise. These can include XML sitemaps, SEO keywords, social media integration and scheme markup for SEO.
Product Import Export for WooCommerce
As your online retail firm grows, it could come to stock tens of thousands of items. However, the wider the range of products you do offer, the more you could struggle with managing the product database.
Fortunately, with the free plugin that is Product Import Export for WooCommerce, you can easily import and export various WooCommerce products to your online store. That’s because, using the plugin, you can create a CSV file containing the product details.
Ensuring the accuracy of the information on your website is crucial for instilling trust — and, as a result, encouraging your website’s SEO profile to flourish.
Booster for WooCommerce
Given that the range of WooCommerce add-ons available is quite considerable, it would obviously be convenient for you to be able to use just one in place of several. That’s very much what the all-in-one Booster for WooCommerce plugin aims to achieve.
Furthermore, using Booster’s features would not require any programming knowledge on your part. The options you have with Booster in your digital toolbox include customising the checkout process, generating PDF invoices and supporting multiple payment methods.
Currency Switcher for WooCommerce
Over time, international customers could become crucial to your company’s growth. In preparation for this potentially happening, you could install the Currency Switcher for WooCommerce plugin so that overseas shoppers are able to specify a currency.
You could allow for your store to display the currency used in the customer’s location. Through inserting simple code snippets into webpages, you could add currency switcher widgets, too.
WooCommerce itself describes Currency Switcher as “a powerful extension that automatically updates currency exchange rates and shows your customers their preferred currency anywhere on the website.”
Smush
Your online store is likely to have many images, including of attractive products it stocks. However, one problem is that the more photos your site has, the longer it can take to load as a result. This would be worrying, since Google penalises slow websites, as TechRadar indicates.
Fortunately, the Smush plugin can come to the rescue, enabling you to compress and optimise all of your site’s images and consequently ease the strain on its load times. All the while, the quality of these pictures will remain intact.
Broken Link Checker
With the passage of time, your website has probably amassed high numbers of both internal and external links. However, links are vulnerable to breaking — for example, if you rearrange webpages within your sitemap, or external pages to which you have linked are deleted.
Since it could obviously be onerous and time-draining for you to look through all of your site’s links manually, you could instead leave the job to the WooCommerce plugin with the wonderfully self-explanatory name of Broken Link Checker.
This add-on can detect faulty links as well as assist you in rectifying them — such as those on posts, pages and comments.
Internal Link Juicer
Link building is a thoroughly tried-and-tested technique for strengthening a website’s SEO profile. However, while many of the links on your site could link to other websites, you should still be careful not to overlook the power of internal links.
Furthermore, you could get help in building those by utilising Internal Link Juicer — which, working semi-automatically, takes account of your keywords to insert internal links in places where they would make contextual sense.
Internal Link Juicer boasts an “intelligent placeholder feature” where “anchor texts can be diversified and the amount of possible links boosted with little effort.”
All In One Schema Rich Snippets
One problem with SEO is that it can feel like attempting to get out of a dimly lit cave; even when you are moving in the right direction, it can take a while before you see evidence to that effect. However, when it comes to SEO at least, All In One Schema Rich Snippets can shine a light.
Now, at this point, you might be understandably wondering what a “rich snippet” is. It is defined on the WordPress listing of the product itself as “basically a short summary of your page in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and sometimes in the News feed of Facebook”.
A rich snippet benefits SEO by providing search engines with especially important details about your business for inclusion on SERPs (search engine results pages). With this plugin, you can preview rich snippets for individual pages of your website.
Rank Math SEO
Even if you are a complete novice to SEO, using the Rank Math SEO plugin for WordPress can ease you into this field gently. This completely free-to-use add-on includes built-in support for WooCommerce SEO, and can quickly start providing you with SEO insights about your website.
After installing Rank Math, you can expect it to practically configure itself. This plugin can recommend an array of SEO settings — including social profiles and webmaster profiles — for you to switch to in order to optimise your website’s SEO performance.
Rank Math also lets you integrate Google Search Console data with your WordPress admin dashboard. This data can cover your sitemap status as well as indexing issues.
WP-Backlinks
Since a backlink acts as a vote of confidence in what your website offers, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of amassing high-quality backlinks. Yes, you do have to be careful which backlinks you garner, as some could lead your site to be penalised in search rankings.
This situation underlines the rationale for installing the WP-Backlinks plugin, which would let you monitor your site’s new backlinks straight from the WordPress dashboard.
WP-Backlinks can also assist you in keeping track of how your competitors’ websites are faring when it comes to backlinks. After all, if competitors currently have backlinks from well-regarded sites where your business doesn’t, you might be able to close this gap just by getting in touch with each website’s owner.
WP Rocket
As we have acknowledged, slow loading times can bode badly for your website from an SEO perspective. If people keep bouncing from your website out of frustration about it loading sluggishly, Google could judge that this site would warrant penalisation in search rankings.
You therefore want to do what you can to streamline your site’s load times. You could utilise a little something called browser caching — where, after loading a website for the first time, the web browser saves a copy of it for time-effective retrieval later.
The plugin WP Rocket can enable your WooCommerce site to be cached on the browsers of visitors so that the webpage will load more quickly for them on their next visit.
iThemes Security
When you want people to buy goods or services online from your website, it’s naturally important that it is kept secure. However, as warned on the WordPress listing for the iThemes Security plugin, 30,000 websites on average are hacked on a daily basis.
Therefore, the onus is on you, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, to strengthen your cybersecurity arsenal. One way you can do that is by installing the above-mentioned plugin, which is capable of enhancing your online store’s security through various means.
These include imposing strong passwords, looking over the website for vulnerabilities and picking up on unauthorised changes made to files. It takes less than 10 minutes to set up this plugin, meaning that you can secure your WooCommerce-powered website with ease.
Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
Positive customer reviews can be a crucial piece of the SEO puzzle, as they show potential customers of your business that other people have already benefited from turning to it.
Though the WooCommerce platform already allows people to post reviews to e-commerce sites, you can encourage even more reviews than usual if you install the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce add-on.
Once this plugin has been added to your online store, people who have bought from it can be automatically or manually reminded by email to return to your site to publish a review there.
You can also use the plugin to integrate your reviews with those on the Google Shopping platform. Consequently, people will be able to see your customer reviews without even having to click through to the website.
These reviews can thus act as off-site trust signals — with positive implications for your online store’s SEO, as Search Engine Land has made clear.
MonsterInsights
Though you might have often been advised to make extensive use of Google Analytics, this service comes with a steep learning curve. However, with the MonsterInsights plugin, you can tie your WordPress site and Google Analytics close together in a hassle-free manner.
Perhaps the most convenient thing about MonsterInsights is that it makes in-depth Google Analytics data readily accessible in the WordPress dashboard. Here, you can speedily see analytics reports useful for helping you to figure out what steps to take next on your SEO journey.
Setting up Google Analytics in a traditional way can be tricky, and require hiring a developer or going through the potentially weeks-long process of adding code snippets to various parts of a website. However, MonsterInsights can spare you needing to go down either route.
What else can you benefit from knowing about WooCommerce SEO?
Once you have had a good go with many of the above options, you could have a much better idea of what would constitute the WooCommerce best SEO plugin for your company’s needs.
However, even more important than what WooCommerce plugins you use is how you use them. We at Mr SEO would be happy to put you into contact with a WooCommerce SEO consultant ready to provide you with tailored advice on how to help make sure your online store is as prominent on SERPs as practically possible.
Please give us a ring on 020 34114 789 to book a free, no-obligation audit of your site’s SEO.
