13 best SEO plugins for WooCommerce you must know

As you know, optimizing your online store for SEO is absolutely crucial – but also time consuming.

There are thousands of things to do and it’s hard to take care of everything, especially given all the duties running an e‑commerce entails (for example, managing stock, preparing campaigns, improving customer satisfaction, etc.).

If you can relate (and you use WooCommerce), this is just the post for you.

We’ve compiled all the best WooCommerce SEO plugins to help you get your shop to appear on Google while also saving you time – it’s a win-win!

Ready to do some positioning?

👉 The best SEO plugins for WooCommerce (both free and paid)

As we just said, there are lots of different factors that affect your SEO.

As it turns out, it’s not just about finding frequently searched for keywords and giving them the right spot on your site.

To show up among the first search results, your website needs to offer a good user experience. In other words, your clients must find it easy to navigate, find the product they’re after, and pay for it.

That’s why this list includes plugins to:

• Improve the customer experience.
• Configure technical aspects affecting SEO.
• Optimize your shop’s load speed and images.
• Increase CTR in search results.

We’ll dig into these one by one.

✅ Plugins to improve the customer experience

Remember what we were telling you earlier.

Happy customers = better SEO positioning (and, of course, more sales).

So here are some plugins created especially to improve the user experience in your e‑commerce.

➡️ A. Doofinder Product Search for Woocommerce

Suppose you own an appliance e‑commerce.

A certain user decides to buy a fridge, so they google “online appliance shop” and your site pops up. Since they’re in a bit of a hurry, they search “fridge” right away.

But the search returns no results.

It’s not because you’re out of stock but because your product cards say “refrigerator” instead. And your internal search engine doesn’t understand that “fridge” and “refrigerator” are synonyms.

So what would this user do? They’d most likely go somewhere else to try and find their fridge.

This is called “pogo sticking” and Google considers it a sign of bad user experience.

That’s why having an advanced internal search engine is so important for SEO. It must help users find what they’re looking for quickly and stop them from leaving your site.

How?

• It understands synonyms.
• It features autocomplete functionality to show users the products as they type.
• If you don’t have that specific product, it gives users alternatives.

And this is just the beginning of Doofinder’s basic functionality that contributes to better SEO positioning and higher sales.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s a 30-day free trial you can use in your shop.

➡️ B. Breadcrumb NavXT

Breadcrumbs are those little links that pop up at the top of the page. They’re a key element of every online shop’s navigability.

Breadcrumbs allow users to click on a link that leads to the page where they were a few minutes ago without clicking on the “Back” button a thousand times.

You can use the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin to create these links.

➡️ C. YITH WooCommerce Social Login

Making users register during checkout is one of the most common reasons why they give up shopping halfway through (leaving behind a much-feared abandoned cart).

To reduce your abandoned cart rate, you can use this plugin.

WooCommerce Social Login allows users to sign up in just two clicks using their social media login credentials.

✅ Plugins to configure technical aspects of your shop

Don’t worry, we won’t get too technical. 😉

➡️ A. Basic settings

By “basic settings”, we’re referring to these two, in particular:

1. Change the titles and meta descriptions of your pages: This is essential to get users to click on your site when it appears among the top search results. This means more potential clients and improved CTR, one of the most important SEO factors for Google.  
2. Create a sitemap: In order for your shop to appear in the search results, it needs to be analyzed by Google’s tracking bot, which scrapes all the URLs it contains. This is known as “indexing”. However, Google sometimes fails to index some categories or product cards, especially in big online stores. Sitemaps help avoid this. A sitemap is a file that shows all the URLs in your website and how they’re intertwined.   

By default, most CMSs don’t allow you to change your page titles or create an automatic sitemap, hence the need to install a plugin that serves these two functions.

Which one do we recommend?

There are plenty of options, but most websites stick to one of these known options: Yoast SEO and RankMath.

The only difference between them is that Yoast SEO’s paid version is more developed than RankMath’s. That said, either plugin’s free version will do the trick.

➡️ B. Links

You may not know this, but every time you delete a product card from your online store, you’re leaving a broken link or 404 error.

In the long run, this can be detrimental to your SEO.

If Google spots many broken links in a website, it assumes it’s not being properly maintained, so it’ll start appearing less frequently in the search results.

To put it simply: more 404 errors means worse positioning for your e‑commerce.

To stop this, there are two plugins that complement each other perfectly:

• Broken Link Checker: It spots any broken links your WooCommerce shop has generated.
• Redirection: This other plugin allows you to create 301 redirections, which means when users (or Google’s bot) try to access an existing product card, the system will redirect it to another card automatically.

Here’s a detailed guide on 404 errors and how to fix them (and even how to use them to increase sales)

✅ Plugins to improve your load speed

Amazon estimates a 1% loss in sales for every 100 milliseconds their website takes to load. Did you know that?

While losing a few sales due to slow website load speed won’t keep Jeff Bezos up at night, the rest of us simply can’t afford that. 

Let’s go over a few plugins to prevent this.

➡️ A. WP Fastest Cache

The cached version of a website is like a “copy” that’s stored in the user’s browser so the second time they visit you, the website will load much faster.

WP Fastest Cache creates this cached version automatically.

➡️ B. Fast Velocity Minify

All websites worldwide have been created with code files (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), and these files are stored on your hosting server.

Fast Velocity Minify allows you to compress those files to make them lighter (just like when you downsize a picture on your computer).

This helps improve your website’s load speed.

➡️ C. WP Rocket

It may sound somewhat contradictory, but having too many plugins is one of the main reasons behind slow websites.

This doesn’t mean you don’t need to use any plugins all, but try to use ones that serve multiple functions.

And that’s what WP Rocket brings to the table.

It’s an all-in-one plugin that optimizes your shop’s load speed. Among other functions, it creates a cached version, compresses your site’s files, and keeps your database nice and tidy.

However, unlike other plugins we’ve seen, this one is a paid tool.

✅ Plugins to optimize images

The pictures you upload to your product cards also have an impact on your SEO (in various ways).

➡️ A. Smush it

A very common mistake among online stores.

You upload a product photo that’s 3000 pixels wide and 1500 pixels tall…but it turns out your website only has a 600 x 300 pixel resolution – FAIL.

That means your photo has 5 times higher resolution (and is therefore 5 times as heavy) than what’s needed.

And this added file size combined with the hundreds of pictures on you e‑commerce can slow down your speed in a rather decisive way.

Smush it helps you prevent this by compressing all your shop’s pictures without sacrificing quality.

➡️ B. SEO Friendly Images

As you know, the “alt” label of your pictures is one of the places you should insert the keyword you want to position your page for.

For instance, if one of your product cards is optimized for the keyword “Nike Air shoes”, the “alt” of the pictures in that card should contain the same keyword or a longtail.

The problem is that it can take you forever to optimize every picture on your website if you sell a lot of products.

Hence this plugin.

What SEO Friendly Images does is fill the “alt” field with the image’s file name.

So if the image is called “nike-air-shoes.jpg”, the alt will be automatically filled with “nike-air-shoes”.

✅ Plugins to improve your CTR

We just have one plugin to recommend here: All in One Schema Rich Snippets.

It allows you to create rich snippets, which we told you about in this other post.

Rich snippets are those information segments that pop up next to your website in the search results. Alongside other information, they include:

• The product’s price.
• Its brand.
• Reviews from other clients.

And, as we told you in that post, rich snippets help your website visually stand out from the other search results. Plus, they give users extra information and instill confidence in them.

All this increases the chances of your website being clicked on – and that’s the idea, right?

👉 Now it’s your turn to optimize the SEO on your WooCommerce store

You know what’s next!

Choose a few of the most interesting plugins from this list, install them, and start working on the positioning of your e‑commerce.

You’ll see how your number of visitors starts growing in no time. 😉