WooCommerce and positioning – is this platform conducive to SEO activities?

First, a brief explanation of what WooCommerce is all about. It is a WordPress plugin that allows you to run an online store based on this technology. It is worth knowing that stores prepared on the basis of WooCommerce offer a much greater possibility of adapting to the specificity of the selected sales model. This is because they are not subject to the limitations of SaaS platforms that offer standardized solutions.

That is why stores based on WooCommerce are eagerly chosen by entrepreneurs who:
– they run e-commerce activities on a larger scale – they offer a large number of different products,
– want to gain more independence when designing the functionality of the store,
– they expect to own an open store – in the case of stores on SaaS platforms, it is different, because if you stop paying the monthly subscription for website maintenance, you actually lose all of its data.

And what does the matter of matching WooCommerce for positioning look like? You could say that this e-commerce plugin gives you good opportunities for effective SEO activities, provided you use its full potential. What does this mean in practice?

Is it worth positioning your store in WooCommerce by using additional plugins?

The big advantage of WooCommerce is the “openness” of the system, which allows you to enrich the technical facilities of the e-store with various additional functionalities. This is done with the help of dedicated WooCommerce plugins. Of course, there are also those that support the positioning of WooCommerce stores. Yoast SEO or All In One SEO Pack are most often mentioned in this context.

Indeed, these WooCommerce extensions can assist you in positioning your WooCommerce store, but… the scope of their capabilities is limited and they act as recommendations. The aforementioned plugins and the like allow primarily:
– initial and automatic optimization of e-shop meta tags,
– better control over building the so-called breadcrumbs,
– easier tracking and elimination of duplicate content,
– creating better optimized content for SEO,
– creating friendly URLs.

However, in order for them to work properly and bring the intended results, they must be properly configured – at least in terms of the selection of keywords for which the WooCommerce store will be positioned.

It should also be remembered that meta tags and friendly URLs, while extremely important, do not exhaust the tasks that must be performed to position an e-store using WooCommerce. You should also take care of a number of other issues, and above all, coordinate all SEO activities within one coherent strategy. There is no room for mistakes here. They will result in “burning of the budget” for positioning and a waste of time.

Therefore, it can be said that using SEO plugins for WooCommerce is a good option, as long as it is part of a broader, secure SEO strategy.

WooCommerce – how to position? Alone or with the help of experts?

In theory, activities related to the positioning of the store on WooCommerce can be carried out independently – especially those related to the preparation of the already mentioned meta tags or the preparation of content for individual subpages. However, the question is whether this is really a good course of action. Acting on your own, you may have a problem, among others with choosing the right keywords or their proper placement. It can also be a challenge to write good texts – that is, texts that will meet SEO requirements and at the same time will be attractive to the visitor. It all takes time, and poorly planned (or unplanned) activities may end up wasting positioning potential.

What does the positioning of WooCommerce stores look like with professionals?
– It is preceded by an in-depth SEO audit – as part of it, experts look at, inter alia, actions of your store’s direct competitors, the specifics of your business, and assess what changes need to be made in the store on WooCommerce in order to position itself well.
– A work plan and schedule is developed – positioning of WooCommerce stores is a rather tedious and time-consuming process that takes place in many stages. Therefore, you have to wait for the effects of the actions taken and higher results in SERPs.
– Appropriate keywords are selected – i.e. those that are related to the industry of your business, but can also be effectively positioned. Remember that the greater your competition on the market, the more difficult it is to quickly gain a high position for the most popular phrases. This process takes time and requires a lot of money.
– Activities are constantly monitored – experts keep their finger on the pulse and make sure that the positioning of the WooCommerce store brings the intended results.

It is worth knowing that specialists also use a very wide range of advanced SEO tools. At least that’s how we operate at Paraphrase-Online.com. This allows us to take very precisely targeted actions, thanks to which you reach customers with the offer of your store who may be really interested in using it. As a result, the cost of acquiring one customer in relation to the expenditure on positioning and advertising the store on WooCommerce drops by as much as several dozen percent. That is why more and more e-commerce business owners are choosing professional positioning.

How to position stores on WooCommerce?

Effective store positioning on WooCommerce is a component of many factors, both on the technical and substantive side. Only when all these elements “play” can you perceive the desired positioning results. What actions do you need to take to be successful?

Good hosting
When you decide to create a store based on WooCommerce, you need to put it on a properly selected server. What does it matter for the positioning of WooCommerce stores? Very big! A good server means a stable connection to the network, which translates into faster website response to the browser query. Put simply: stores that open quickly, without unnecessary delays, are better rated by Google’s algorithms. That is why it is worth investing in hosting with a proven service provider and choosing the server parameters so that it can “bear” the traffic in the store. Remember: good positioning of WooCommerce stores can lead to a significant increase in visits to it. Your server must be fully ready for this!

Store code optimization
The speed and reliability of the e-shop operation depends not only on the quality and bandwidth of the server. The website code itself is equally important. If it is buggy and full of unnecessary loops and bugs, you may have difficulty opening individual tabs correctly. Such a barrier makes the rating of the WooCommerce store drop, and getting a good position is simply difficult.

Similar problems may be caused by various “barriers” to accessibility to the website, which make it difficult for users to use the e-shop. These can be, for example, aggressive pop-ups that appear right after opening the page. Such elements should be abandoned – both for the sake of Google’s robots and for the customers themselves. Their pop-ups and similar unnecessary extras can also discourage you from staying on the site.

Adequate amount of content in the WooCommerce store
Positioning WooCommerce stores makes sense when they are filled with the right amount of valuable content. They cannot remain empty and operate only on slogans and photos, because … then there is not enough space for the use of previously selected key phrases. So how much content is appropriate? It cannot be defined unambiguously and in a standardized way – it is possible thanks to an in-depth SEO audit. During it, the most important keywords are identified, the way they are distributed throughout the website, and ultimately the level of text saturation.

It is worth remembering that the content for positioning the store on WooCommerce should appear not only on the home page and subpages with the main product categories. Over time, it is worth supplementing them with deeper nested subpages, as well as considering preparing a blog that will provide the possibility of long-tail positioning.

The quality of texts in the e-shop
The quantity is the quantity, but the quality of the content is even more important. Why? First of all, because the texts are not written strictly for the positioning of the WooCommerce store, but with the customers in mind. It is worth remembering that a person who clicks a link to your store may need specific and substantive information. If in return he receives, colloquially speaking, “gibberish”, he will quickly close the page and go to the next one.

But that’s not all. Also, Google’s algorithms promote reliable content on the topic. Those that are not excessively and unnaturally saturated with keywords, but discuss the issue to which the tab is dedicated.

In order to prepare the content for the positioning of the e-store on WooCommerce, it is also worth remembering about the key SEO rules. Good texts for an online store should:
– contain appropriately selected key phrases in reasonable saturation,
– have headers that organize the content – both at the H2 and H3 levels,
– have a high substantive value,
– use bullets and different ways to highlight the content.

If you want to ensure their high quality, entrust the preparation of texts to a professional – preferably a copywriter cooperating with an SEO agency. The agreement of specialists in these two areas will result in the preparation of content that will engage the recipient, and at the same time will be well received by algorithms. And that’s the most valuable combination.

Meta tags – the basis of effective WooCommerce positioning
Texts alone are not enough. Meta tags are also needed. What are they? In a nutshell, this is content that is not displayed directly on the website in a very visible form, but is carriers of important information for Google. The most important are the basic tags of the page, i.e. meta title and meta description. Title is displayed, among others in the tab bar, and both of this brief information is presented in Google search results. So they also play a marketing role.

When positioning stores on WooCommerce, ALT tags assigned to images are also important, as well as those regarding the precise description of products.

Optimizing Your Images
When you sell a product online, you obviously need to show it to your customer. Therefore, you need attractive images that will help you visualize the message. However, you have to be careful. A very large number of photos, which will have a “heavy” format, will make the page open slowly and start to jam. And that’s the nail in the coffin of any SEO efforts. That is why, if the audit shows that the photos load too slowly, it is worth to “slim down” them by switching to another format, even at the cost of a slight loss of quality.

Friendly urls
In other words, URLs are the addresses of individual product pages. What do these look like in your WooCommerce store? Positioning requires that they contain legible information about the content of the tabs. Therefore, they should not present a sequence of random numbers or letters, but take the form of a verbal message with an appropriate structure. Friendly URLs make it easier for Google to index the page, and thus increase the chances of their optimal positioning.

Regular positioning of the WooCommerce store

It is true that at the very beginning of the e-store positioning process on the WooCommerce platform there is the most work. Most often, you have to reorganize the entire store, saturate it with valuable content adapted to SEO requirements, optimize its code, metadata, redirects and other elements. However, completing this stage should not end activities related to the positioning of the WooCommerce store. In the following months, it is necessary, among others:
– to add new content – e.g. to subsequent product subcategories or product descriptions themselves,
– monitoring and updating of existing texts – e.g. when it is necessary to change keywords,
– monitoring the situation related to positioning and implementing changes that will allow you to maintain the already achieved results and get even better results in SERPs,
– linking!

That is why cooperation with digital agencies does not end with a one-time preparation of the WooComerce store for SEO and is of a long-term nature.

How long do you have to wait for the SEO effects of WooCommerce stores?

It is quite difficult to answer the above question, because a lot depends, among other things, on from the industry of activity, the prevailing competition in it or the initial state of the e-store that professionals face, and ultimately the budget. However, basically you should expect that the first results in the form of increased traffic on the website will appear after about 3 months. Over time, with the skilful use of the positioning potential, they will start to turn into a greater number of orders, an expanding customer portfolio and greater profits for the company.

Do you need WooCommerce store positioning?

As you can see, the correct positioning of a store using WooCommerce (as well as many other solutions) is a serious task that requires many activities. That is why it is worth getting full support in this regard – so that the budget invested in SEO is not wasted, but on the contrary – it gives the desired results.

You need help? Contact our experts. We will not only take care of effective positioning, but also plan and implement other activities advertising the store on WooCommerce – e.g. paid promotion in social media or Google Ads. Thanks to this, you will increase your chances of increasing interest in the stores’ offer and you will start to observe an increased number of inquiries, and then – orders placed.

Campaigns aimed at generating potential customers is one of the increasingly popular advertising targets in social networks. Standard forms on the website in many cases turn out to be much more expensive than lead gen campaigns. The main reason why people choose contacts from social media platforms is the ease of filling them out. Automatically collected data made available on websites shorten the time of filling in forms, which makes them more pleasant and easier to receive.

However, campaigns with this goal are not without flaws. By keeping clicking to a minimum, in many cases the quality of the leads obtained significantly decreases.

Do you operate in the B2B industry and are you looking for new customers on Facebook? Anyone “own boss” and the nobility who do not work can also become one, and you will pay for it in the Advertising Manager. This is where LinkedIn comes in handy – a clear leader among lead generators.

How much does a Linkedin campaign cost on average?

If you use other advertising channels and start your adventure with advertising on LinkedIn, it may turn out that the budget you set is too small to effectively carry out your first campaign. The minimum daily budget that can be set for one campaign is $ 10.

Of course, you might find your first choice of target, audience, and placement a bull’s eye, but you will need to increase your budget to test other options and setups. Even though the advertising efforts on LinkedIn require a larger investment to start with, you’ll quickly find out that this is probably the best platform for generating leads for you.

LinkedIn forms

If it is relatively difficult to find the contact form on your website or the website is easy to use, it does not allow you to add additional functions, for example, to download materials by the interested person, or you simply want to shorten the customer path and without having to do it after clicking on the advertisement on the website website, you want him to download a given material or contact you – this ad in the form of a lead generation form is for you.

What does the form on Linkedin look like?

Forms on Linkedin allow you to get the most important contact information of potentially interested people in our product or service. They can also be used in campaigns with a more educational purpose, in which we offer something in return for each contact, e.g. a guide, newsletter, report or catalog, etc.

What data can we collect via the Linkedin lead generation form?

There are many possibilities. Starting from personal data, to company contact details, and non-standard questions aimed at collecting specific information about subscribers and their classification in the lead collecting system.

The form also gives us the opportunity to select the necessary conditions to submit the form (e.g. acceptance of the regulations or privacy policy).

Nevertheless, when creating a form, it is always worth bearing in mind good practices taking into account UX, i.e. limit the mandatory fields to be completed to a maximum of 3. The great advantage of Linkedin forms is their automatic filling, thanks to which the user interested in the material can easily and quickly receive interesting content, without having to fill in the fields yourself. Of course, some fields can be reserved as necessary to be entered or unchecked by the user and thus pre-verify the quality of leads and their level of interest in a given material.

The process of creating an ad and the Linkedin campaign

As with any LinkedIn Ads campaign, you start by choosing the goal that best describes what you need. Your goal is to get new leads, which means that you choose the ‘Lead Generation’ target in the conversion group. To run a Lead Generation Campaign, you need to associate your Advertising Account with a LinkedIn Company Page.

The process of creating a campaign is no different from other goals. We start, of course, by identifying the audience. Despite the much smaller possibilities of targeting audiences than in the Facebook Ads Manager, it is much more likely that you can reach a specific target group that is actually built mostly of the audience the advertiser is looking for.

Ad formats in the lead campaign on Linkedin

The ad formats available for creating a customer acquisition campaign are the standard single photo, carousel, video ad, and two types of campaigns with ad placement in audience inboxes. Which format you choose is entirely up to you, there are no suggested formats that work best for your industry. For this reason, it is so important to test different ad placements. Some LinkedIn ad campaigns will perform much better than a mostly text-based Sponsored Message campaign with an attention-grabbing banner, and vice versa.

Advertising creations available in the lead campaign on Linkedin

The next step is to prepare the ad creative and set the detailed content of the ad, which, depending on the format you choose, has different options to complete and select. However, all goals are united by creating a leads form.

Privacy policy in lead campaigns on Linkedin

The form has standard settings and content to be completed. It is very important to have the content of the validation policy on the same domain as the page. You can choose from many data options that you need to obtain from potential clients. Creating the form ends with a confirmation window for sending contact details with a thank you.

Campaign on LinkedIn – case study

Due to the pandemic at the turn of February and March, many companies were forced to introduce radical changes in their activities, for some of them a new path was opened to reach their recipients. One of our clients dynamically used the current situation and predicted that cooperation in the field of advertising activities on the LinkedIn platform may bring tangible benefits. The main goal of our client was to reach the departments of specialists and HR leaders in order to promote the webinar on best practices in the coming period. We took a campaign to the fore with the goal of generating leads in the form of sponsored messages that go straight to your LinkedIn inboxes.

In the first week, the campaign started with great intensity and it was possible to acquire the assumed number of potential customers very quickly. By the end of the first month, the initial cost of acquiring a client had dropped by 18%. Ultimately, after 3 months of advertising activities, the campaign was completed with a cost-per-result 22% lower than in the initial period.

We were also positively surprised by the CTR (Sponsored Message Openings Rate) of over 70% during the entire campaign. The key here was the first “meeting” of the recipient with the ad in their inbox, which is influenced by the appropriate headline of the ad.

First of all, we tried not to attack potential customers with another advertisement, but to encourage them to read the entire message in a friendly way.

One of the first tests we did in the campaign was based on bid changes. LinkedIn suggests the suggested bid value at the level of creating a campaign group. This value is influenced by your chosen goals, placements, and audience selection. The starting bid of $ 0.15 turned out to be much worse than our optimization bid, which was $ 0.30, which we eventually held for most of the campaign.

Customer support for the advertising campaign on Linkedin

The client obtained support from us also at the level of advertising texts. The goal was to encourage LinkedIn users to leave personal information in exchange for invaluable knowledge and guidance. The client shared his experience in his industry with us, after all, he knows his potential recipients best, and based on the knowledge obtained from many other campaigns, we added the best strategies that we learn through testing in campaigns. Thus, several versions of messages reaching the recipients were created, which we analyzed and finally chose those whose results were in the lead.

In the meantime, we conducted a few more advertising campaigns for this client, which, thanks to the correlation, had a positive impact not only on building brand awareness, but also on a noticeable gradual reduction in costs for results.

Linkedin lead campaign – Summary

We know from our own experience that the costs of running advertising campaigns on LinkedIn can initially be a deterrent. If you operate in the B2B industry, however, you should know that it is currently the best platform for acquiring valuable customers. However, the lead-generating campaign is the final stage of the sales funnel and it is worth supporting these activities through advertisements building brand awareness, as well as through other advertising channels.

Of course, we make a reservation that not every type of business is suitable for advertising on Linkedin. It is worth conducting a preliminary analysis to check whether our clients are on Linkedin and whether they spend their time there looking for content / services or products that our company offers. It often happens that our clients are really there, so we start the campaign, but after a given period of time, we notice that the campaign does not achieve the intended results. This is often caused by the lack of a preliminary analysis of the Purpose for which our target group uses Linkedin. It may turn out that he is looking for more business solutions here, and he leaves lifestyle options for Facebook, Instagram or simply uses the Google search engine.