7 handy tips to improve SEO for WooCommerce Product Pages

It is an undeniable fact that SEO plays an essential role in boosting sales for WooCommerce. And doing WooCommerce product SEO is one of the most important parts of this long process. The higher rank your product pages hold, the more conversions you achieve. This must be 99% true.

Your store is having dozens of products, but you don’t know where to start. Don’t get confused. Every problem has a solution. There are also dozens of useful methods for you out there. And what you should do right now is just scroll down to see our ultimate guide to product page SEO best practices in WooCommerce.

What are the product pages in WooCommerce?

Every WooCommerce store has either only one or multiple products. Based on these products, you will have to create different pages, each of which shows the features, uses, prices, and many more of every specific product. They are called WooCommerce product pages.

In some ways, the main purpose of the product pages is to let customers see:

• how your product looks like;
• how much money they have to spend on the product;
• which benefits they will gain from thát product

It sounds simple, but it’s not really. To have an optimized product page, you need to do a lot more things. That’s the reason why we are here to tell you about WooCommerce product SEO.

Nowadays, instead of directly going to visit a website, searching on Google is what potential customers often do when they want to buy any products. Therefore, it is so important to make your products visible in search engines so that customers can easily find them. To do product page SEO effectively, you should refer to our instructions below.

You may be interested in Top 10+ Best Free WordPress SEO plugins for WooCommerce store

How to improve SEO for product pages in WooCommerce

1. Focus on keyword intent

Keyword intent? What does this mean? People will enter some phrases on Google to look for the thing they need. That may be some type of knowledge, a place to go, or a certain service/product. Through keyword intent, we can analyze the searchers’ purpose.

To build every product page SEO, you should focus on hunting for the phrases expressing the desire or intent to purchase goods instead of the informational keywords that are often used for blog posts.

When someone wants to buy a product, their search often includes:

• Transactional phrases (free, cheap, sales, buy, deals, coupons, and so on);
• Descriptive elements covering the products’ size, colour, and material (big, small, white, black, cotton, fibre, and so on);
• Phrases to show specific features and purposes (3 tier desk tray organizer, camping tables for beach, camp, picnic, and so on);
• Target audiences (children, men, women, people under 30, and so on).

In short, for effective WooCommerce product SEO, it is advisable to be as specific as possible based on keyword intent so that potential customers can easily find your products on search engines. Depending on the type of product, you will create different sets of keywords. Basically, you should follow the steps below:

• Step 1: Match your product with users’ intent to come up with potential keywords.
• Step 2: Use some keyword tools like Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner to select keywords based on search volume, trend, and competition.
• Step 3: Refer to your competitors to collect more keywords.
• Step 4: Divide your keywords into various types, including main keywords, sub-keywords, long keywords, and short keywords.
• Step 5: Naturally add these keywords to titles, descriptions, alt texts, and URLs in a proper way.

2. Give a descriptive product title

For some kinds of pages like “About us” or “Pricing”, titles are not really important. Even people sometimes search for how to hide page titles. But when you build a product, category, or shop page, the title is always the first part that draws the attention of the audience and Google as well. The handy tip here is as specific and descriptive as possible.

First of all, you have to show the audience the product’s name. Then, it’s time to think of inserting keywords properly. After the intent-based keyword research, you already have a list of keywords for your products. But of course, you cannot add all of them to your title because a lengthy title is not SEO-friendly. Instead, you should focus on only one target keyword. For the remaining keywords, you can put them in other parts like product descriptions.

Following is our WooCommerce product SEO guide for an effective title:

• Show the product’s name together with its basic features and functions;
• Add a target keyword that can help rank;
• Include descriptive elements to attract potential customers
• Limit the number of characters (less than 70 characters)

Note that it is advisable to create a unique title if you want to be highly appreciated by Google. Besides, avoid using little-known phrases. Try to make your title clear and readable.

Here is an example of writing a product title that can fully meet the criteria above.

3. Write a smart product description

During the WooCommerce product SEO process, this is certainly the most important task for product page optimization. Here you will let your customers see how your products benefit them.

On the WooCommerce product page, there are two descriptions for you to cover. They are often called the long description and the short description. If the former includes detailed information about the product, the latter should be short and to the point.

How to write a product long description

This part should be long enough to cover almost all the product information. Besides, it follows the criteria of an SEO article.

First of all, it is necessary to design an easy-to-follow structure for this description with some headings (H2, H3, H4,…). While writing the description, you naturally add sub-keywords, long-tail keywords, and related keywords to it. Besides, if possible, you should design your product page SEO with some bullet points and tables. Google loves this structure.

Regarding how to arrange information, it is advisable to mention the most valuable information as soon as possible because visitors mostly won’t spend time reading the whole description. Therefore, make sure that they will get how beneficial is your product before leaving your page. Please put yourself in their shoes to write it. This factor will considerably affect their purchasing decision.

How to write a product short description

Different from the long description, this one often covers the most outstanding point of the product. This part will be displayed before the long description. Therefore, it needs to be short but appealing to make customers excited to read the part below.

In this description, you only focus on pointing out the dominant feature of the product instead of describing them in detail.

In short, with these two descriptions, besides the primary keyword, you can add many other keywords for WooCommerce product SEO. But keep in mind that they must be relevant so that your customers can read your descriptions smoothly.

4. Use SEO-friendly URLs

Considered one of the basic elements of WooCommerce product SEO, URLs also greatly contribute to boosting your products’ rankings. So how is an SEO-friendly URL? Which factor do you need to optimize for an SEO-friendly URL?

To have a standard URL for SEO, you should:

Set permanent link

To optimize the URLs for SEO, you first need to set the permanent structure by choosing Setting → Permalinks. Here is the place for you to set up the general structure of product URLs.

By default, the system will set product IDs in your URLs. It will look like that: yourdomain.com/p=123. Obviously, this one is not optimized at all. With p=123, both Google and human cannot identify what your product is. Therefore, it is also bad for your SEO.

Meanwhile, if you create a custom URL structure for your permalinks, for example, yourdomain.com/product/product-category/product-name. Then, you already have an SEO-friendly URL with a specific product name and type of product as well.

Include keywords

Apart from the titles and descriptions, you should add keywords to your URLs. In WooCommerce, your title will be often used for your URL.

Shorten the link

In some cases, product titles are perfect enough to become SEO-friendly links. But sometimes some stop words (a, an, the) or descriptive phrases make these titles a bit long. Meanwhile, these elements are unnecessary for URL SEO. Therefore, you should consider removing them from your URLs.

Besides, numbers and special characters such as commas, colons, semicolons, backslashes, and spaces need removing. Keep in mind that “short” and “descriptive” are the two most important criteria for an SEO-friendly URL. Also, don’t forget to make it lowercase.

5. Optimize product images

Today the Internet increasingly provides people with more and more information while online stores are springing up like mushrooms. To increase online sales, you should know that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In fact, almost no one is willing to purchase your product if you don’t let them see how it looks like. Therefore, while doing WooCommerce product SEO, you cannot miss offering standard product images if you want to gain more sales.

Upload unique images of high quality

No matter which items you are selling, you first should select the images with high resolution and large size. In case you want these images to be compressed for SEO, you can do it with some compressors like Tiny JPEG or Compress JPEG after that. You also can change the image sizes and effects with Canva.

Another point we want to note is that search engines, as well as your customers, won’t highly appreciate the images copied from other websites. Then, select, edit, and upload your own images.

Add keywords to images

Although images can speak louder than words, Google indexes text, not images. So are there any ways for search engines to display your images? The answer is YES. Google cannot understand what your images tell. So what you need to do is use target keywords to explain to it.

Then, the alt text and image name can help a lot. The alt text is where you can add some keywords while describing the image. With this action, your image can get indexed by Google. That being said, don’t stuff keywords.

Also, give your product a relevant name. For example, your store sells types of clothes. Don’t name them “1.jpg,” or “2.jpg”. Uploading them as “men-u-crew-neck-short-sleeve t-shirt.jpg,” or “women-black-pink-printed-wrap-dress.jpg” will be much better.

Add product gallery images

Every WooCommerce site has the Product gallery section. This image galley is where you can add more images to each product. When the product is published, your customers will see a wide range of product images. It is noted that all these images should be designed in the same size. Meanwhile, their alt texts and names should contain different keywords.

6. Add product attributes & variations

In WooCommerce, apart from the short and long description, you should show different features of the product in Attributes and Variations. Just scroll down to Product data, then you will find these two parts. While Attributes are the place for you to add more characteristics of a product, Variations offer customers various versions of that product.

Add product attributes

As the name suggests, you will add key attributes to each product. For example, your store is selling T-shirts for men; then you will add some elements such as color, material, and size.

This kind of information will be shown in a separate part that lets your customers approach every feature in a clearer way than that in the product description. In this way, people can find the product with every specific attribute more easily.

Add product variations

Attributes and variations are created in an intimate relationship. In other words, attributes work as a basis for variations.

More specifically, your men’s T-shirt page shows attributes like black (color), cotton (material), and large (size). Then, variations will give more choices for that product. For example, besides black T-shirts, your store provides customers with T-shirts in white, blue, red, and so on. Regarding the size, the T-shirts come in not only large size but also small, medium, extra size, and extra extra size.

This feature brings great convenience because it allows creating the product page SEO with changeable attributes. Accordingly, on the same product page, customers can select the item of different colors, sizes, and so on.

7. Collect customers’ reviews

Over many years, search engines have made considerable improvements in offering users the best search results. Therefore, keyword stuffing on the page content is no longer effective enough to boost your rankings, resulting in the coming of many other new WooCommerce product SEO tips. And the fact shows that collecting customers’ reviews is one of the most successful strategies.

Those who intend to make an online purchase often refer to other customer’s reviews before coming to the final decision. According to Trustpilot, 2020, nearly 90% of consumers around the world read reviews before buying any products. Meanwhile, Brightlocal, 2019 shows the statistics that 76% of consumers trust online reviews.

Besides playing a role as a hook to earn customers’ trust, this user-generated content helps you:

• naturally get more keywords related to your products;
• gain more trust from Google if your store has many positive reviews and responds to your reviews regularly;
• reduce your bounce rate;
• get rich results (rich snippets) on Google if you use Schema Markup.

How to deal with bad reviews

Encouraging your customers to leave reviews on the product page SEO is a great thing to do now. But what happens if your store gets bad reviews and ratings? Of course, it is not good for your website. Anyway, we believe that if you offer high-quality products, this situation will come very rarely.

However, if it happens, you should try to change it. In particular, it is advisable to:

• immediately respond to these reviews to show that you always take care of your customers
• make a personal connection with customers to see whether there are any problems with your product
• solve it as soon as possible if your product has some issues. Then, ask customers to delete that review.
• explain the situation to customers if it is a misunderstanding. Then, ask them to delete or change the negative review into a positive one.

For more knowledge of SEO for WooCommerce, please visit 11 Best Ways To Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store

For the final word,

Product pages are the most important pages in WooCommerce. No matter which type of product or how many products your store offers, the product page optimization is a must.

Hope that with the WooCommerce product SEO tips above, you will achieve several improvements for your sales in the near future. Keep in mind that this work will require lots of steps and take much time, so be patient with this ongoing process

Thanks so much for taking the time to our article. We are so happy to receive any contributions and feedback. Please leave your ideas in the comment box below.