How To Optimize WooCommerce For SEO: Categorization, Permalinks And More!

We all know that SEO is important, but for a WooCommerce store, it’s literally the most important part of the process. After all, what good is a website that sells stuff if no one can find it on Google?

After you’ve set up WooCommerce and created the products and variations, it’s time to focus on SEO and getting those visitors!

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to optimize WooCommerce for SEO.

This isn’t a general guide on SEO. We’ve all heard about good product descriptions and keyword research ad nauseam. If you haven’t I recommend checking out Ahrefs. Instead, I’ll show you SEO tips specific to WooCommerce relating to categorization, structured data, permalinks, WooCommerce-specific SEO plugins, and more.

How To Best Setup WooCommerce Permalinks For SEO

When you create a WooCommerce product, by default, it shows a URL like this:

www.example.com/product/your-product

There’s nothing wrong with this, but for SEO purposes, you want your URLs to follow a clear structure and instead of “product”, you probably want to have the category of your product. That way, each of your products will have a URL starting with their specific category, and search engines will know that they are grouped together. This has several benefits since they can choose to show multiple products of the same category in the same search listing, thereby giving you more visibility, and showing multiple products for the same category to the user.

To modify the URL structure to display product permalinks with the category, go to your WordPress dashboard “Settings->Permalinks” as shown here:

As you can see, the default option is to just use the slug called “product”. To include the category, click the option called “Shop base with category”. This will create a subsection on your WooCommerce site called “shop”, and inside that you’ll have each product category. This might be preferable to having just the category in the name since you probably have other articles on your site with categories. By segregating the product URLs into a “shop” section, you separate the product URLs from regular article URLs.

After making your selection, save your changes, and they view any product to which you’ve assigned a category. You should now see something like this:

As you can see, the product category “music” appears in the URL. So just extend this system by assigning each of your products to a suitable category, and you’re done.

How To Best Setup WooCommerce Structured Data for SEO

Structured data is a concept where your website adds information about the item on the page in a specific format that search engines can consume, and this allows them to categorize and sort the page according to various criteria.

For a product page, this includes the price, the inventory level, the reviews, product descriptions, and more. Using structured data, sites can present this information in a standardized format to search engines for each comparison.

The good news is that WooCommerce does a great job at including structured data for your products by default. This isn’t surprising, since you enter the information in a structured manner while creating the product on the WooCommerce product creation editor. To test that this is indeed the case, navigate to :

https://validator.schema.org/

Paste the URL of your product and click “Run Test”. This will benchmark the content on your product page against the structured data requirements for products. Here’s what I get when I use this tool for my test product with any extra additions:

You can see that the tool generates zero errors and zero warnings. Google generally prefers additional fields such as aggregate ratings reviews, but they’re optional, and you might not have any ratings, to begin with, so it’s a moot point.

One way to maximize the effectiveness of WooCommerce structured data is to add as much information as possible to the WooCommerce product page during creation. Fill out everything, from coupons and deals, to expiry dates, to inventories, categories, product variations, attributes, and more. The more information you can provide to WooCommerce, the more “rich” the product listing becomes, and the more helpful it is to users, and will therefore make search engines happy.

How To Best Optimize Your WooCommerce Categories

One easy category to pick off low-hanging SEO fruit is by optimizing your categories in WooCommerce. Most WordPress websites don’t appear to care about their category pages – and this holds true, not just for WooCommerce sites, but all WordPress sites. People just optimize their posts and pages, not realizing that each category has a page dedicated to itself. The search engines index these category pages like any other, and since they contain a list of products, posts, or pages that fall under that category, they’re an extremely valuable resource if you can get customers to land on it.

In fact, optimizing your category pages can pay dividends for all the products on your site. It’s a good habit to practice systematic category hygiene, and not allow them to get out of hand with dozens of broadly overlapping categories. So here’s how to optimize your WooCommerce category pages for SEO.

First, in the product tab on the left, choose “Categories” as shown here:

On the right-hand side, you’ll see a list of all your existing categories. Choose them one by one and edit them as shown here:

Now you’ll get a text editor, where you can work your SEO magic. Don’t hold back! You can add images, quotes, and all kinds of rich media elements to these pages like this:

For now, WordPress hasn’t extended the Gutenberg editor to category pages, and that sucks. But I’ve found a way that you can work around that limitation by replacing category pages with actual pages. However, the linked tutorial is for normal category pages, and to replicate it for WooCommerce categories, you’ll need to create a page hierarchy that reflects the one you chose in the first SEO step. And if Automattic decides to release Gutenberg for category pages, you’ll have to copy/paste your category code to the default WordPress categories, which can be hard to maintain.

So if you can, stick to the regular text editor that WordPress provides you, but know that you have the option for a richer WooCommerce category page as well if that’s what you need for your SEO.

LiteSpeed Caching with SirsteveHQ for WooCommerce SEO

Google has claimed that they incorporate various page speed metrics into their ranking methodology. Personally, I’m skeptical of these claims because Google doesn’t have the same incentives as you. I’m pretty sure they lie about a whole bunch of ranking factors – for example, they claim that search CTR doesn’t matter. But in any case, it’s hardly a secret that having a good site speed for your WooCommerce store is extremely valuable, if not for SEO, then for your customers. The less time they have to spend waiting for your page to load, the better.

Unfortunately, since WooCommerce is so database-heavy and the content is so dynamic, traditional methods of caching don’t work very well. You can’t use static caching techniques to improve page speed, because you need key elements in the WooCommerce interface, such as the cart items, prices, taxes, and shipping information to change depending on the customer.

The best way to solve this problem is to use a caching system like LiteSpeed with SirsteveHQ. LiteSpeed has WooCommerce-specific optimizations, such as respecting the dynamic elements and enabling the purging of items from the cache – like inventory – upon certain triggering events. With SirsteveHQ, you can get LiteSpeed caching for free – something that very few hosts provide.