Guides / WooCommerce SEO checklist

The WooCommerce SEO Checklist

A prioritized, no-fluff checklist for WooCommerce stores — technical foundations first, then product pages, structured data, feeds, and AI discovery. Work top to bottom; the early items have the most leverage.

Technical foundations

• Serve one canonical host. Pick https + non-www (or www) and 301 every other variant to it.
• Enable HTTPS everywhere. Force-redirect http to https sitewide.
• Generate an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Keep a clean robots.txt that allows crawlers (including AI agents) to reach public content.
• Fix crawl errors. Resolve 404s, redirect chains, and soft-404s on product and category pages.
• Use clean, stable URLs for products and categories; avoid query-string-only product URLs.
• Improve Core Web Vitals. Cache pages, compress images, and trim render-blocking scripts.

Product & category pages

• Write unique title tags for every product and category — no duplicates.
• Write unique meta descriptions that describe the product and invite the click.
• One H1 per page, matching the product or category name.
• Expand thin product descriptions. Manufacturer boilerplate alone rarely ranks; add genuine detail.
• Add descriptive image alt text for every product image.
• Handle out-of-stock products deliberately — keep, redirect, or de-index based on whether they’ll return.
• Set canonical tags on filtered/sorted category URLs to avoid duplicate-content dilution.

Structured data

• Add complete Product schema — name, image, description, offers, availability. Guide →
• Include identifiers — GTIN, brand, MPN. Guide →
• Add ratings via aggregateRating when you have reviews.
• Emit one Product block per page — remove duplicates from competing plugins.
• Handle variations so each variant’s schema is correct. Guide →
• Validate with the Rich Results Test and fix every error. Guide →

Shopping feeds

• Create a Google Merchant Center feed. Guide →
• Extend to Bing, Meta, and TikTok from the same source. Guide →
• Keep feeds live so price and stock never drift from the landing page.

AI & answer-engine discovery

• Allow AI crawlers and expose only public catalog data. Guide →
• Publish an llms.txt pointing agents to your feeds. Guide →
• Keep facts in the HTML, not only in JavaScript, so non-JS crawlers read them.
• Treat AEO as ongoing. Full playbook →