Brendan Tully0 Comments
May 25, 2022
Most e-commerce websites acquire most of their traffic through Google and other search engines. Obviously, the higher your site appears within the search results, the better. As you might know, SEO optimization is the best way toward the top pages of Google’s (and other search engines’) search results. So, if you’re looking for the best SEO plugins for WooCommerce to help you improve your business, you’re at the right place.
We’ve optimized hundreds of e-commerce websites, most of which were WooCommerce. Over the years, the SEO optimization grew more complex, so as of now, there are several fields we need to cover when improving your site’s SEO:
As always, here’s an audio version of the article, since the technical stuff can be better explained in spoken word.
Now, let’s start with our list of SEO plugins we typically use when boosting our clients’ sites.
The first step towards improving your SEO is getting a high-quality SEO plugin. To prevent you from getting lost in the sea of SEO plugins, some of which are free and others paid, here are the best SEO plugins and tools we usually recommend to our clients.
Rank Math is the SEO plugin that makes SEO optimization simple for anyone. We suggest you go with the paid version, since it provides a great solution for the sitemasters who take marketing seriously, especially if the site comes with many features that are WooCommerce or e-commerce specific, including stuff like product schema and product map.
In our experience, Rank Math is the best SEO plugin currently available. It comes with a bunch of handy features, like automatically injecting alt tags and title tags for images, based on the page names. This is very important for product pages where image SEO is often neglected as the alt tags and title tags will match the products, and so improving the SEO.
For example, building a WooCommerce site with a hundred products and then editing the alt tags and title tags for each product image would require a lot of time. Messing with these fields for each product, one by one, is pretty impractical, and the short-term payoff is unlikely to be big. On the other hand, using a plugin such as Rank Math will save you lots of time and energy, since it let’s you complete all these actions automatically by setting up a few settings, which only takes five to ten minutes.
Rank Math also measures and tracks keyword ranking, runs an SEO analysis, and offers more than 15 built-in modules that you can enable according to your preferences. It’s easy to use, their site provides plenty of guides that will walk you through the setup and everything else, and they also offer a free plan, so you can give it a try without spending a cent. Once again, our recommendation is to go with the paid version.
This is another plugin we typically recommend to our clients. It can be very beneficial for your WooCommerce site, since it offers numerous features such as SEO Custom User Roles (let’s you manage SEO without handing over the control over site), Local SEO (which helps you improve your local SEO as well as the rank on Google Maps), Advanced eCommerce SEO support (which lets you optimize categories, product pages, etc), Social Media integration (for control over the appearance of thumbnails on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) and many more.
Same as Rank Math, AIOSEO also offers both free and paid versions of the plugin. The key difference between the two plugins is that All in One SEO is a bit more technical, so it might suit a more experienced site admin better.
This tool is totally free of charge, and is irreplaceable from the SEO perspective. It lets you know what’s going on in the search results, how your pages are ranking, what keywords do users use to find your pages, and your overall site speed. Google Search Console also informs you of any possible errors or issues with Google indexing the site.
Google Search Console is very easy to set up, and it directly integrates with Rank Math. This allows you to pull in errors, issues, and data from Google Search Console into the Rank Math plugin in the backend of your WooCommerce website right away.
You probably already know about Google Analytics, but since it’s so important we must say a word or two about it. This especially goes to the newbies in the field of SEO: use Google Analytics and make sure that the e-commerce tracking is turned on.
This way the sales data gets pushed into Google Analytics, where it’s processed so you can see where the sales are coming from. It also tells you which traffic source the visitor used to find your website – paid search, SEO, email, marketing, or whatever else. Google Analytics is totally free, so you have no excuse not to use it.
Although it’s not a plugin, Google Shopping can be of great help. Simply put, it’s a service that allows users to research products online and compare product prices on different sites.
While the free model is helpful, the paid version can help you move your site to a whole new level. The clicks with Google Shopping are usually cheaper than the standard search ads or adwords, so the paid model is worth a try.
Google Shopping brings more great features, such as Smart Shopping Campaigns, where Google uses its AI or big data to find the customers who are looking to buy a product such as yours.
There are a couple of ways to set up Google Shopping, so let’s focus on setting up the free version first. To do so, you need a Google Merchant Center account. That’s Google’s platform for managing the Google Shopping Feed. Getting an account in Google Merchant Center is totally free.
Now that you have an account there, you should move on to the verification process, to prove Google that you own that web address and that site. Next step is to put data into categories on Google Shopping, so you get the feed up and running. It takes a day or two for Google to approve the products in the feed. Later on, there’s a number of other settings, but at this point, the free section on free listings in Google Shopping should be live.
From there on, you’ll be able to set up a Google Ads account and set up the paid ads. You’ll also need a plugin to set up the feed. There are some Google Shopping Feed plugins available for free, and those should be enough to get you started.
Anyway, we still recommend choosing a paid plugin since it will grant you more flexibility and much more control over the feed. That means you’ll be able to tweak the feed as necessary to put the products in the right category.
Google Shopping is partially based on SEO and partially on how much you pay them. This implies that having the good data and the full product descriptions in Google Shopping Feed is extremely important when it comes to competing and showing in search results.
The plugin we typically recommend when it comes to Google Shopping Feed and Google Merchant is called YITH. We use the paid version of the plugin, since it comes with numerous features. YITH is easy to use and does everything we need to do from a site optimization perspective. On their website, you’ll find the detailed instructions on how to set up the feed.
Another part of the SEO game is SEO audit. It’s very important that you do SEO audits on your site on a regular basis, especially for e-commerce websites, since they usually consist of many pages that constantly undergo changes, which means there might be a lot of broken links or 404 errors.
404 errors are bad for site speed, bad for SEO, and bad for the overall user experience, so you want to avoid having 404s on your site. This especially goes to businesses that offer products that go out of stock or go out of season. Running an SEO audit is a simple way to resolve this kind of issue.
Our plugin of choice for this job is SEMrush. This plugin will help you research and analyse your competitors, research keywords, build great backlinks, and more.
It’s important to note that you should do an SEO audit every two to four weeks. This will help you fix the broken links timely, and also let you know if there are any SEO issues or SEO optimization items missing across your website. You might be surprised how often things such as SEO title tags and SEO meta descriptions go missing, and those are effective across the whole site. Individually, these issues won’t break your SEO, but all of them combined can cause problems.
When it comes to SEO maintenance, using audit tools to fix problems across the site is pretty basic. This action isn’t an improvement, but rather a fix, which is especially important from an e-commerce site’s perspective. With this type of site, products come and go regularly, so there’s a risk of ending up with pages filled with products that disappear over time.
Our suggestion here is to take the link of the product that you want to remove from your site, and redirect it back to the category the product belonged to, to the next relevant page, or to the replacement product. Without doing so, those product pages will get linked over time, and cause further issues. In case you just delete these pages, you will lose those links over time and your site will be bleeding a bit of SEO link juice. So make sure to have your SEO audit tool in place in order to avoid bleeding that SEO juice.
Now that we’ve covered plugins focused mainly on SEO, we should take some time to focus on some other factors that affect your SEO. Site speed is one of the most important ones, since it’s a part of Google’s algorithms. These are the tools we usually recommend to our clients.
WP Rocket is a paid plugin. It’s very user friendly, and probably the most popular speed optimization plugin that’ll help you handle site speed, caching, image optimization, and more. After you’ve set up an SEO plugin, installing WP Rocket is the next most important step.
Image optimization is another important factor when it comes to improving the SEO of your WooCommerce sites. E-commerce websites are mostly visual, and a lot of images cause a lot of large pages. That’s why compressing images and using the new nextGen image formats can significantly reduce your page sizes.
ShortPixel used to be our first pick when it comes to image compression, but even though it still does a great job, its price went up, and it’s not the first time this happened. Ever since we first used it, the price has gone up several times, so at the moment ShortPixel is 4 times more expensive than at the time when we started using it. This is why we now use the following tool.
That is the main reason why we switched to Ewww. It’s much cheaper than ShortPixel, and it’s equally great for compressing and optimizing images. Instead of having a paid cloud service to do the compression, Ewww often uses the local hosting server or the CPU power on the server to do the compression.
Another great tool we should mention when speaking of site speed is SiteSpeedBot. This is our speed test tool, which only takes around 60 seconds to run a free test of your website. It then provides you with important information on your site speed as well as hints on how to optimize your site speed and SEO. SiteSpeedBot also tests your site from various locations, so the results are going to be more precise. We should note that we also have a whole other agency called WP Speed Fix, which solely specializes in WordPress site speed.
Another site speed plugin we typically use is Perfmatters. It does some different optimizations, and it’s a great pick for more complex websites, if you want more detailed speed optimization actions.
Perfmetters is more complex and technical than WP Rocket, so it’s able to do some more complicated optimizations and technical speed stuff. It can turn particular scripts on and off and do various JavaScript optimizations. Their site provides a bunch of resources focused on technical speed optimizations, so check it out if you want more details.
Next, we’ll focus on security. This matter is crucial since WooCommerce sites deal with people’s credit cards and payment information. It happens too often that a WooCommerce site gets hacked in search of Stripe API details. In case someone gets your Stripe API key, or the API key for your payment gateway, they can send your money to themselves, so keeping your WooCommerce site secure is a top priority. Usres’ personal info is also in danger, since people create accounts to log into your website.
Keeping your security up to the task can definitely be challenging, since there’s a lot to be done in order to keep your site safe. This is why we recommend Wordfence, a free plugin that includes firewall, security scanner, Wordfence central, and other great features.
Cloudflare is a CDN (content delivery network) service which stores your website data on a network of servers spread around the world, so it can be served faster to your site visitors and customers. Even their free plan comes with a firewall built in. Their $20 per month plan, however, will provide you with a much better firewall.
Cloudflare also does image optimization and provides a feature called Automatic Platform Optimization (APO). APO is a type of edge caching, which means that web pages are cached on Cloudflare’s network. This implies that their network and servers complete lots of work and serving up pages, and so takes a lot of load off of your hosting. APO service is a great solution for busy WooCommerce sites, since it helps increase site speed.
Check our article on how Cloudflare can help you make your site more secure so it can filter brute force attacks, among other things.
Websites undergo changes all the time, so backups are very important. This especially goes for WooCommerce sites where people are pushing orders and creating carts on the site. On my site, during a busy week, there are changes happening every minute or every few minutes, even a few times in a minute, so our solution is having two backup systems. We recommend the same to you, so make sure you have a backup at the hosting level first, and have BlogVault installed as a second backup system.
BlogVault is another tool we frequently recommend to our clients. There are two reasons why we like it so much.
The first is that BlogVault specifically tells you what files are and aren’t being backed up. All backups come with some kind of exclusion of things they’re backing up which you want to be aware of before a damage has been made and data has been lost. That’s why BlogVault is great. It provides you with a list of database tables and files it’s backing up and not backing up, so you can include the excluded files and vice versa.
The other reason is that BlogVault has a real time backup feature available on the higher plans, which are not really expensive. That means each time a change, such as new products or new prices, is made on the site, it’s backed up. Again, this is especially important for WooCommerce businesses which rely on the orders and carts made on the site. With hosting backup only, if something goes wrong, you’d most likely lose a day’s worth of data, since most hosting backups are backed up only once a day. BlogVault, on the other hand, offers a real time backup option to prevent such scenarios.
This concludes our pretty comprehensive guide about the best WooCommerce SEO plugins. We hope you liked it and found it useful. If you still have any questions that need to be cleared out, or you’d like more details on a particular element or point we’ve talked about here, feel free to write to us in the comment section below.
Comments are closed.