WooCommerce SEO: product and category pages that actually get found

WooCommerce SEO comes down to three things: category pages that rank for the big searches, product copy that is not on twenty other stores, and filters that do not create hundreds of empty pages. WooCommerce’s technical foundation is fine. The work is in the volume. A store with 400 products has more than a thousand fields to fill in, and nobody does that by hand.

Below are nine improvements, in order of what pays off most. Our example is a bike shop in Portland with a WooCommerce store of 380 products.

The basics of WordPress itself, such as permalinks and your sitemap, are in WordPress SEO. This article covers what makes an online store different.

1. Start with your category pages

People search for “electric cargo bike” or “20 inch kids bike”. Rarely for an exact model number. The page that should rank for that broad search is your category.

On most WooCommerce stores the category page is a bare list of products. Without text, Google does not know what the page is about.

Give every important category:

• a title with the search: “Electric Cargo Bikes: 24 Models in Stock”
• a short intro above the products, two or three sentences
• a longer text below the products: what to look for, which types exist, who they suit
• answers to the questions customers ask in the shop

The bike shop has 22 categories. Six of them drive most of the revenue. That is where you start.

2. Write your own copy for your best sellers

The manufacturer’s description appears on every store that sells the product. Google shows one of them, usually the biggest.

You do not have to rewrite all 380 products. Take the twenty that sell most. For each, write:

• who it is for
• how it differs from the model next to it
• what you know about it from the shop floor or the workshop
• sizes, weight, delivery time, warranty

“We assemble this bike ready to ride and fit it to your height” appears on no other store. Sentences like that make the difference.

3. Give every product its own title and description

By default WooCommerce builds the title from the product name and your store name: “Hauler Family C380 - Portland Bike Co”. That works, and it can be better.

Add what someone wants to know before they click: “Hauler Family C380 Cargo Bike: Test Ride in Portland”. The rules are in writing an SEO title and meta description.

With hundreds of products, this is the work that gets left undone. It is also the work that is easy to automate.

4. Keep your filters out of Google

Filters are handy for visitors. For Google they are a trap. Every combination of brand, color, size and price creates a new URL. A category with four filters can produce thousands of near-identical pages.

Google then has to wade through many worthless pages before it reaches your real ones.

What to do:

• make sure filtered pages point to the main category with a canonical. Your SEO plugin usually handles that.
• set filter URLs to noindex if your filter plugin allows it
• create a separate category for a combination people really search for, such as “electric cargo bike with belt drive”

Check Search Console under Pages. If you see thousands of URLs with ?filter_ or ?orderby= in them, you have this problem.

5. Make sure Google can read your product data

Google can show a product’s price, availability and rating in search results. For that it needs structured data: code that states the price and whether the product is in stock.

WooCommerce adds the basics itself. An SEO plugin with a WooCommerce extension adds brand, SKU and reviews.

Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test. Paste a product URL and see whether Google recognizes price and availability. More about this code is in JSON-LD schema markup.

6. Fill in the alt text of your product photos

A store has many images. On most stores they are called IMG_4821.jpg and have no description.

Alt text like “Hauler Family C380 cargo bike in matte black with rain cover” helps in two ways. People find you through Google Images. And visitors using a screen reader know what is shown. How to approach it is in alt text.

7. Link your pages together

A product page linked only from its category is weak. Add links:

• from a blog post about “choosing a cargo bike” to the three models you recommend
• from a product to the accessories that go with it
• from the category to your buying guide

Breadcrumbs help too: the line “Home > Cargo Bikes > Electric” above a product. Turn them on in your theme or SEO plugin. More in internal links.

8. Handle out-of-stock and discontinued products

A product that is temporarily out of stock stays. Say when it will be back in stock.

A product that will not come back gets redirected: to the successor if there is one, otherwise to the category. If you delete the page without a redirect, visitors and links land on an error page.

If the bike shop takes last year’s models offline every fall, that is easily eighty error pages a year. With redirects to the new models, the value of those pages is kept.

9. Watch speed, especially on mobile

Stores are heavier than regular sites. Many images, many plugins, a cart that loads on every page.

Three things that do the most:

• shrink images before you upload them
• remove plugins you do not use
• good hosting suited to an online store

Test a category page and a product page at pagespeed.web.dev, on the Mobile tab.

What can you automate?

Task	Automate?
Titles and descriptions	Yes
Alt text	Yes
Internal links	Yes
Finding technical issues	Yes
Copy for your best sellers	No, you write that yourself
Setting up filters and redirects	No, you or your developer do that once

The top four are the work that is never finished in a store. Every new collection brings new empty fields. Software can keep up with that. That is how automating SEO works. Which plugins with AI exist is in AI plugins for WordPress SEO.

A WooCommerce store runs on WordPress. GreatCompany Automatic works there through a plugin, next to your existing SEO plugin. Read how GreatCompany automates SEO for WordPress.

And when customers ask ChatGPT?

“Which electric cargo bike fits three kids and a narrow garage?” Questions like that increasingly go to an AI assistant. The answer names models, and sometimes stores.

What helps: clear product data as text, your own product copy and reviews. How to get AI to recommend your products is in agentic commerce for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento.

What could be better in your store?

GreatCompany is opening in the US soon. Join the waitlist and you will be among the first to see which errors we find in your store, how many pages have no description and whether ChatGPT names your store or a competitor’s.