Is WordPress WooCommerce any good for SEO?
WooCommerce is a popular open-source plugin for WordPress, allowing businesses to run ecommerce stores within the WordPress CMS environment. Out of the box, WooCommerce is very SEO friendly as it runs alongside WordPress, which is one of the most popular and well setup mainstream CMS when it comes to SEO performance.
Depending on which theme you decide to use for your business, you will be entitled to all the familiar plugins and options native within WordPress. WordPress is well known for its comprehensive SEO setup guides as well as flexibility when it comes to customisation.
With leading plugins such as Yoast and RankMath, WordPress is often one of the first go-to considerations for businesses looking to select a CMS for ecommerce efforts or otherwise. It contains a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require a great deal of coding knowledge, and with the correct WooCommerce bolt-ons, is a worthwhile investment for brands looking to improve their ecommerce SEO offering.
Do I need to set up SEO for my WordPress WooCommerce store?
If you’ve selected WooCommerce as your chosen ecommerce option, then there will be a degree of required setup across pages from an SEO standpoint that your team will need to consider. WooCommerce, like many other WordPress SEO plugins, gives you the option to customise and provide data for a variety of fields that can aid your visibility on search rankings on core pages.
This includes key on-page SEO elements such as page titles and meta descriptions, though extends to the option to flesh out detailed product descriptions on product pages, improved hierarchy and website navigation, URL naming, schema markup and more.
You can look at downloading additional plugins such as All in One SEO or Yoast WooCommerce to aid with this. Ensuring that all potential fields within your ecommerce setup within the WordPress WooCommerce environment are optimised as best possible by your team is a prudent strategy to ensure better visibility and revenue in the long run.
Do I need to install a plugin for SEO to work on WordPress WooCommerce?
WordPress WooCommerce is technically a plugin in its own right that resides within the wider WordPress CMS, although there are many extensions and additional plugins that can offer you additional flexibility and features.
From its default setup, WordPress alone (and by extension, WooCommerce) offers a good deal of SEO features in order to optimise your online store. However, if you’re in need of further customisation, such as the ability to flesh out structured data (heavily advised for product pages) or the ability to edit elements such as sitemaps, then use of a WordPress WooCommerce plugin is worth considering. Many of these are free, or at the very least require a modest subscription payment.
As with any third-party plugins or extensions of course, make sure your team are assessing the impact of these from a performance and security perspective. Some plugins may also interfere with the existing code and functionality of your website too, so have your team perform some research initially.
Do I need an agency/consultant to set up my WordPress WooCommerce SEO?
WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin is well known for its ease of use and functionality, in particular when it comes to businesses who may not have much experience with SEO or coding. There are plenty of guides to assist you on how to optimise your store pages from within the CMS, and many options simply require a simple filling out of a field or a toggling of a setting or functionality.
That being said, the same rules still apply in terms of investing in a SEO professional to ensure that you get everything right from the setup and beyond. Having the right keywords / topics mapped to the right product pages, ensuring elements such as URL structure and navigation is optimal from an SEO perspective as well as HTML elements such as structured data markup for product pages will still require the implementation and testing of an SEO agency or consultant. This will also allow you and your business to focus on some of the higher-level strategic elements of running an ecommerce store.
What are the alternatives to WordPress WooCommerce for SEO?
When it comes to running an ecommerce store on a popular CMS, there are plenty of potential alternatives. Popular CMS platforms such as Wix and Squarespace are easily customisable and have perfectly respectable SEO credentials.
Focusing more on ecommerce, you may want to consider other merchant platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce Cloud/Magento, or NetSuite. Many of these platforms will have their pros and cons in terms of SEO performance. A potential argument in favour of WooCommerce of course is that given it resides within WordPress, a CMS that has been known for SEO performance and customisation for some time, it may have the edge on some of the more ecommerce-specialist platforms when it comes to SEO.
If you’re not sure which CMS to invest in for ecommerce, then a potential alternative is to develop your own custom one. This is of course heavily dependent on whether you have the required development resource, though a custom CMS has the potential to allow you better control of elements such as page speed performance (a crucial revenue driver for ecommerce projects) and coding tweaks. The downside is that a sandbox CMS may not be too user friendly for non-developers.
Who are the best SEO agencies for WordPress WooCommerce websites?
Unlike some of the other well-known ecommerce platform providers, there isn’t an available list of accredited or partner agencies except for solely within its VIP offering. The VIP offering agency partner list will allow you to filter by location, vertical and speciality, though of course this will only apply to brands signed up to the Enterprise WordPress VIP programme.
In truth, given that WordPress is one of the more popular CMS often recommended within the wider SEO industry, then most respected SEO agencies worth their salt should be more than capable in offering WordPress WooCommerce setup and consulting solutions.
How does WordPress WooCommerce SEO compare to Shopify SEO?
Both WordPress WooCommerce and Shopfiy offer commendable SEO functionality, and ultimately effectiveness in terms of SEO is down to implementation by the user.
Shopify has some limitations in terms of URL naming, though it is strong in its performance and site speed areas. Its tiered pricing plan also means that you may have to upgrade in order to access more bespoke areas of SEO, such as your team being able to customise canonical URLs.
Given WooCommerce resides within WordPress, you are able to benefit from all the existing popular SEO plugins and tools, many of which have good freemium options. WordPress also has the clear edge on Shopify when it comes to content creation, being primarily a blogging platform. If your brand is looking to bring in long-form guide content or blog posts to capture additional streams of traffic (particularly in the informational or consideration stage of the buying process), then curating a brand voice further using a blog can be key.
How do I improve the SEO performance of my WordPress WooCommerce website?
SEO, whether it’s for ecommerce or otherwise, is not a one off setup activity. It requires ongoing optimisation, strategic pivoting and constant adapting to change.
Once you’ve gotten past the initial launch and set-up page, make sure your team are constantly assessing performance in terms of visibility or search rankings. Are there any issues in some of your core product or money pages not ranking where they should be? How are users interacting when they come on your site, and where are the potential drop offs?
This is where a constant test and learn approach within the WordPress WooCommerce environment, tweaking content, product descriptions and structured data all backed up by a solid content strategy should be adopted at all times.
WooCommerce SEO Case Study
Manufacturing company with large ecommerce store moves to WordPress WooCommerce, unlocking greater customisation for enhanced SEO visibility and fresh leads.
Problem: A large B2B manufacturing company, that had most of its business through word of mouth distributors, was looking to break out from its old and inflexible CMS where the newly-hired marketing team had little control of the product inventory pages.
Solution: The website was migrated to WordPress WooCommerce, allowing the team greater flexibility to edit the migrated product inventory pages and perform daily on-page SEO improvements. Along with a targeted link building campaign, visibility for the brand shot up, and they were able to draw in a fresh array of distributors through organic leads, moving away from a reliance on word of mouth and a long-term client base.