Catalog SEO
What to fix in your WooCommerce catalog for search and shopping results, extra product checks in the SEO box, store indexing rules and product placeholders. Nothing changes in your store.
These tools appear only while WooCommerce is active. Catalog Insights is rebuilt every time the Content Audit runs.
- Cards: Products, Ready for merchant listings, Thin descriptions, Without identifiers
- Category Coverage table
Merchant-listing readiness
A product is ready when it has an image, a price, and a brand, GTIN or SKU. The card shows the percentage of audited products that are ready.
- Identifier (GTIN): WooCommerce's GTIN, UPC, EAN or ISBN field, or common GTIN fields from other plugins.
- Brand: WooCommerce Brands, a popular brand plugin, or a Brand attribute.
Catalog reports
| Section | Lists |
|---|---|
| Thin Product Descriptions | Descriptions shorter than the free plugin's product description minimum (150 words). |
| No Short Description | What shoppers and snippets see first is empty. |
| Duplicate Product Content | Products with the same short description, or almost the same description. |
| Missing Identifiers | No SKU and no GTIN/EAN/UPC/ISBN. |
| Missing Brand | No brand found. |
| Fewer Than Two Images | More images help shoppers and image search. |
| No Price | Products that can't appear with an offer. |
| Variation Problems | Variations without a price or SKU, with "Any…" attributes, or repeating another variation. |
| Category Coverage | Categories with one product, 3+ products but an introduction under 50 words, or no SEO title or description. |
| Ecommerce Clusters | Categories with 3+ products: their average SEO score and how many products no content links to. |
| Product Link Opportunities | Posts and pages that mention one of your 20 best-selling products by name without linking to it. |
Each list shows 20 products. Download issues as CSV ("Catalog issues") from Reports.
Extra product checks in the SEO box
| Check | Good when |
|---|---|
| Product Identifiers | A GTIN, EAN, UPC or ISBN is set (a SKU alone is a warning). |
| Brand | A brand is assigned. |
| Product Images | 2 or more images. |
| Price | Simple and external products have a price (a problem otherwise). |
| Variations | All variations have a price and distinct attributes. |
| Product Structured Data | The Product schema has an image, price, currency and availability. |
| Category Size | On product categories: warns when a category holds a single product. |
Store Indexing Rules
Turn on Store Indexing Rules (WooCommerce) under Pro Features (off by default), then set them on Crawl & Indexing → Store Indexing. They set the default robots tag; a product's or term's own robots setting always wins.
Only for products that won't come back. Products that return to stock are indexed again automatically. Also left out of the sitemap.
Products whose catalog visibility is "Hidden" are still reachable by address; keep them out of search results and the sitemap.
Also removes product tags from the sitemap.
Archives of attributes with "Enable archives" turned on, such as color or size pages.
Filtered and sorted shop URLs are already noindexed by the free plugin.
Product placeholders
With Advanced Title & Meta Templates on, product templates can use:
| Placeholder | Outputs |
|---|---|
{price} | The current price, e.g. $19.99 (for variable products, normally the lowest) |
{sku} | The SKU |
{brand} | The brand |
{stock} | In stock, On backorder or Out of stock |
{product_category} | The first product category (not "Uncategorized") |
{attr_color} | An attribute's values, e.g. "Red, Blue". Use the attribute slug without pa_; letters and underscores only. |
{title} by {brand} – {price} {sep} {site}