Woocommerce SEO

WooCommerce – Your All-In-One eCommerce Tool Nowadays, it’s an undeniable fact that customers are praising the convenience of online shopping. This has also made digital retail a crucial part of your business. However, making an online store can be extremely overwhelming, and choosing a reliable platform requires hours of research.  You will get 100 ways to direct traffic to your website, still, Search Engine Optimization stays on top. Ultimately it’s the art of making your website rank higher in the Google Search Engine Results.  Before moving ahead with an eCommerce platform, you need to compare all different opportunities. This allows you to find a platform that fits the bill for the requirements of your business and allows you to expand your operations in the future.  When talking about eCommerce platforms, there’s no way you haven’t heard about WooCommerce. It’s being used by over 2.3 million eCommerce stores across the globe. New eCommerce merchants prefer WooCommerce because of its ease of usage, flexibility, and power.

What is WooCommerce?  Typically, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin used to sell things on your website. It provides you a simplified way to create and manage an online store. It provides great flexibility with numerous important features such as tax management, inventory, shipping integration, and secure payments.  WooCommerce is undoubtedly the most famous and prominent eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Along with its integrating capabilities, you can enjoy an amazing SEO value for your eCommerce store. Let us have a look at how it works.

How Does WooCommerce Work? 

WooCommerce is built in a way to provide you an easy-to-access eCommerce platform. From your WordPress dashboard, you’ll gain access to a control panel that can be used to manage your store, add new products, customize listings, and process existing orders.  To get started, you need to install the plugin on your existing WordPress website (If you have one) and register an account on WooCommerce’s official website. There’s no subscription required to start your eCommerce store and you can easily install the plugin for free.

Why opt for Woocommerce? 

There must be some prudent belief for which people are showing great faith in Woocommerce. Following are some interesting stats that will establish your faith in Woocommerce:

• Of all the traffic directed to eCommerce websites, around 38% comes from search engines.
• Well over 42% of the people willing to visit an eCommerce website, begin from a simple google search.

SEO Optimization strategies for Woocommerce:

SEO makes it dead simple for your website to rank and boosts your ranking possibilities many folds. It’s in your best interest to know the best practices of SEO optimization in Woocommerce.  Product Description: maintain a habit of adding product descriptions, not too long ones but informative and to the point. Bite-sized content that is search results friendly.

Optimize your page titles: your page title should be such that it clearly describes the content of your pages. You can even have a category of pages that help the shoppers to explore exactly what they are looking for. This will also demote the inter-page competition on ranking.

Use breadcrumbs: for those who don’t know what breadcrumbs is, it is a thread of pages you have opened and shows the path you have taken to reach the destination where you presently are.  Breadcrumbs are not only for the ease of the visitors but also helps google estimate how well structured your website is.

Hassle-free site navigation: the easier it is for the visitors to surf on your website, the more likely they will spend more time on your website. Make sure you display the links to all the important pages on the homepage. You are also advised to add links to all the footers on your website.

Write Meta Descriptions: there is no direct connection between meta descriptions and ranking on search results, still do it as a long-term investment. It is seen over the past that pages with sound meta descriptions tend to have a better click-through rate.

Benefits of WooCommerce For Your Business 

Here’s a quick rundown of the top 9 benefits that WooCommerce brings to your business:

• It’s Highly Modular 

WooCommerce comes with a great set of features and capabilities that can be further extended with the help of plugins, just like WordPress. Due to this, retailers using WooCommerce can have the best of both worlds – They have access to hundreds of plugins made exclusively for WooCommerce as well as thousands of WordPress themes and plugins.  It has also given rise to a community of developers who add a specific functionality by building extensions. This is certainly not possible with monolithic applications at any cost. Whether you’re a big or small retailer, If you’ve got the right set of plugins, there’s nothing better than WooCommerce for your eCommerce business.  The standard plugins will surely enhance the functionality of your store in terms of payments, shipping, product handling, and a lot more. WooCommerce also provides you with numerous additional plugins developed by them when you use their store.

• It Can Be Used To Sell Anything 

The flexibility of WooCommerce is one of its most praiseworthy features. If you have a product idea, you can easily sell it to the world with WooCommerce. The typical products include digital products, physical products, appointments, subscriptions, and a lot more. Whether you want to sell a slew of physical products or a single digital product, WooCommerce certainly acts as a Swiss Army Knife for your eCommerce journey. A nontechnical person with zero knowledge in the technical domain can easily handle the products on the website.

• It’s Full Of Insightful Analytics 

If you’re aware of the way customers are interacting with your products and store, you can easily serve them better and sell more products. WooCommerce provides you a large set of statistics and analytics on a clear and easy-to-understand interface.  Moreover, it also allows you an option to integrate it with external analytics applications such as Google Analytics with the help of extensions. Reliable information about the practices and habits of customers and knowledge about the hotspot areas on the website will enable the owner to bring about the necessary changes in the products or the promotion model to serve the customers better than you currently are.

• It Provides Quality-Oriented Content Management 

It’s so exciting to realize that an eCommerce application is built for the most popular content management system in the world. This makes WooCommerce a world-class product as far as content is concerned. Moreover, as you may already know, content is a crucial part of eCommerce marketing, search engine optimization, and sales optimization.  With the combined power of WordPress and WooCommerce, you can enjoy a great slew of content management options including landing pages, blogging, product descriptions, and email marketing. Furthermore, SEO plugins compatible with WooCommerce such as Yoast WooCommerce SEO make it extremely easy for you to make your content search engine friendly.

• It’s Made For Selling 

WooCommerce is an all-in-one tool you’ll ever need to sell anything. It’s meant for new eCommerce retailers to get started with selling online. With hundreds of payment gateways available to integrate with your store and numerous shipping methods with shipping classes and zones, there’s no way you’ll miss out on anything.  WooCommerce provides you a simplified backend for managing refunds, stocks, emails, orders, and a lot more things to help you manage your eCommerce store efficiently. It also allows you to choose from thousands of free and premium mobile-optimized themes or build a customized one according to your needs.  There’s also a detailed documentation guide that provides you everything to get familiar with WooCommerce and start your eCommerce store.

• It’s Cost Efficient 

If you’re a new retailer looking to get started with selling online, the price must be a concerning factor for you. It’s the first thing a budding business will consider. There are several eCommerce applications ranging from a thousand dollars per year to free. However, price doesn’t define the capability of your application. WooCommerce is an extremely competitive eCommerce application in the market.  The fact that it’s free makes it a great choice for entrepreneurs who want to take advantage of it without bearing heavy charges or proprietary software licenses. It’s also worth noting that you may still have to pay for third-party extensions and payment applications but they’re not affiliated with WooCommerce by any means.

• It’s Built For WordPress 

Many retailers consider the dependence of WooCommerce on WordPress to be a limitation. However, it’s rather a strength of the application. WordPress is extremely popular, functional, and flexible. It acts as a great foundation for business websites and is trusted by millions of enterprises all around the world because of its security, fast, and ease to use. Due to this, WooCommerce also inherits all the reliability and strengths of WordPress and uses it to provide an amazing eCommerce experience to entrepreneurs.

• It Has An Amazing Developer Community 

The best part about WooCommerce and WordPress is that they both are open source. This simply means that retailers can feel free to add or change core features, make custom themes, and build new extensions. This kind of capability is not possible with less popular eCommerce applications because you’ll need to hire a developer to work on these platforms.  WooCommerce retailers can enjoy great support from a large community of WooCommerce professionals and open-source developers. If you’re looking to make some changes in your WooCommerce store, you can easily find a person to handle the job for you.

• It Copes Up With Business Growth 

While considering different eCommerce applications, it’s a wise decision to keep the growth of your business in mind. Your store might be operating on a low level now, but it’ll surely grow with time. Therefore, you must choose an application that can easily manage a big store without getting complex with time. WooCommerce supports your online store throughout its growth, from tiny to gigantic. It can be easily scaled from a handful of products to a range of thousands of products. Furthermore, it can easily manage the growing traffic in your store.

Begin Your Online Venture With WooCommerce  After going through the exciting benefits offered by WooCommerce, you might be surely convinced to use it for your online business. If that’s the case, here’s a quick guide that’ll help you get started with WooCommerce in five easy steps:

Find A Good Hosting  To start using WooCommerce, you need to have a self-hosted WordPress website. There are several hosting platforms that provide you pre pre-installed WordPress server with WooCommerce and Storefront themes installed along with necessary eCommerce-specific plugins and security features such as an SSL certificate to keep your store safe and secure.

Install WordPress  Once you’ve purchased a hosting and if it doesn’t provide you a preinstalled interface, you need to use the open-source WordPress platform to lay the foundation of your store.

Activate WooCommerce  After you’ve set up the hosting and WordPress, you need to install WooCommerce. All you need to do is navigate to the Plugins section in your WordPress dashboard and search for WooCommerce. Once found, you need to install and activate it to gain eCommerce capabilities on your WordPress website.

Choose A Theme  When you activate the plugin, you’ll be automatically redirected to a setup wizard that’ll help you set up your store in a couple of minutes. It’ll ask you to choose a theme of your choice. You can feel free to use the default one or purchase a premium theme.

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: which one is the best pick

All three of them have something unique and outstanding that can outperform the others in a particular domain. Let’s just find out which one of them is the best suited for you.

Shopify vs Woocommerce

We need to be aware of the fact that Woocommerce is freeware and thus has certain limitations, but with Shopify, there is no such thing.  Moreover, it doesn’t come with dedicated hosting whereas Shopify does. In the case of Woocommerce, you will have to look for dedicated hosting all by yourself.  But the domain where Woocommerce outperforms everyone is the affordability factor. Shopify on one hand charges $9 to $179 monthly depending upon the plan opted, Woocommerce is absolutely free to use as we have already mentioned it is freeware.  Woocommerce has an edge over Shopify when it comes to offering unlimited product attributes because Shopify fails to offer unlimited product attributes.  With Shopify flexibility tends to get restricted because you don’t get to choose beyond their three default product attributes, but thankfully there’s nothing like this with Woocommerce.

BigCommerce vs Woocommerce

BigCommerce offers some very exciting and appealing features, but one of the biggest drawbacks with it is that it doesn’t offer a free plan or a subsidized entry plan. It is very costly and asks for huge investments in their plans upfront. But being a freeware Woocommerce is absolutely free.  With BigCommerce you get free hosting and both paid and free-to-use themes for your website, but in the case of Woocommerce, you will have to buy a dedicated hosting for your website. BigCommerce has a much bigger customer database than Woocommerce for understandable reasons, therefore it is easier to know your audience with BigCommerce.

The Takeaway 

In a nutshell, WooCommerce acts as a highly reliable eCommerce platform that’s not only fast but secure and easy to use as well. It can be easily configured according to the needs of your eCommerce business. Opt for WooCommerce today and cash in the never-ending benefits to leverage your online business. Happy Selling!

 Frequently asked questions:

• Is WooCommerce a good choice for Ecommerce?

This WordPress facilitated extension is currently serving nearly 25% of all the websites on the internet! That’s one-fourth of all the websites currently active on the internet. Certainly, we don’t need anything other than facts to establish the dominance of WooCommerce. Easy to adapt, robust features, great services, and cost-effectiveness are the aspects that enshrine WooCommerce.

• What is WooCommerce integration?

Since WooCommerce is an extension brought by WordPress, there must be something to bridge them. WooCommerce integration is a plugin that can convert your existing WordPress website into an eCommerce website serving all the functions of a normal e-commerce website. This plugin was launched in 2011 and became an instant success, it was majorly popular among the people who were looking to launch their online stores and were in possession of a WordPress website.

• WooCommerce free for WordPress? 

Not just for WordPress users but everyone! WooCommerce and even WordPress are free to use the software. This is one of the leading reasons why WordPress and WooCommerce are increasingly popular. However, it’s not completely free, if you are looking for adding additional features you will have to buy plugins and add-ons on pay per use basis. They offer complete control to users, with a great degree of customization always available at their disposal.

• What is WooCommerce Storefront?

This is a WordPress theme offered by WooCommerce to completely vanish the plugin/theme conflicts that may arise. WooCommerce Storefront basically is a theme that integrates with the core plugin of WooCommerce and considerably enhances the performance and speed.