Exactly the same as any other website - speed, quality, original content, optimised meta data, backlinks ...

As for using SEOF with ACF - https://blog.room34.com/archives/6285/using-the-seo-framework-with-advanced-custom-fields/

first, it's good that you're using wp_title() and meta descriptions. but, you should make sure each page has a unique title and meta description. this helps search engines understand what each page is about. also, try using a lightweight plugin like 'rank math' or 'yoast seo'. they help with on-page seo without being too heavy. make sure your permalinks are seo-friendly too. go to settings > permalinks and choose 'post name'. this makes your urls cleaner and easier for search engines to read.

second, since you're using acf fields, you might need to customize how your seo plugin reads content. some plugins let you add custom fields to their analysis. check the plugin settings or documentation for this. also, make sure your xml sitemap is updated and submitted to google search console. this helps with indexing. try to improve page speed too. use tools like gtmetrix or google's page speed insights to find issues.

if you continue to face indexing issues, i use solutions like tagparrot, seocopilot, and indexed pro to speed up the indexing. seocopilot has been helpful for me. it offers tools to analyze and improve seo performance. it's not too expensive and gives good insights. try these if you're still having trouble getting pages indexed.

Website performance is a pivotal factor in delivering a seamless online experience. Swift page loading is achieved through tactics such as image compression, browser caching, and leveraging content delivery networks, ensuring users can access content quickly and efficiently. Additionally, prioritizing mobile responsiveness is crucial in today's diverse device landscape, promoting a positive user experience across various platforms and positively influencing search engine rankings.
Proactive measures are essential for sustained performance. Regular monitoring, website performance testing, and ongoing maintenance activities, such as optimizing database queries and ensuring robust security measures, contribute to a consistently high-performing website. In essence, a well-optimized website not only meets user expectations but also aligns with search engine algorithms, fostering improved visibility and overall success in the digital landscape.

We've been using Minty - it embeds product displays using structured data

The best SEO optimization process for a WordPress website includes keyword research, optimizing meta tags, using an SEO-friendly theme, improving site speed, and building quality backlinks. Regular content updates and mobile responsiveness also help. For more insights, check TopCSSGallery’s blog: WordPress SEO Optimization Tips.

SEO is not something that can easily be brute forced. It normally takes time to be seen and ranked within the noise of the internet. Without seeing your site, it sounds like you're mostly on the right track.

Technical:

• If you submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools it should pretty well cover your sites needs to help be crawled.
• Meta tags, Alt tags, and descriptions should be filled out to describe the content of a page, images, etc.
• Here's a couple page speed tools if you want to see page suggestions. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
  https://gtmetrix.com/
• Build backlinks with other local businesses, directories, information centers etc.

Marketing:

• Social Media traffic helps. Facebook and Instagram cannot be ignored and fortunately they built cross posting functions for those platforms. Twitter & Pinterest might also fit well with your site.
• Newspaper, Magazine and Radio advertisements if you are interested in local business with obvious referrals to your website for more info & products you offer.

Hard to say without an actual URL to look at.

But here it goes.

• are your meta descriptions optimized?
• is your site fast and free of errors that piss off search engines (CLS etc)?
• are your images sized properly and tagged with alt tags?
• is your site theme free of bloat?

Have you setup google analytics, tag manager, search console?

You can use a program like hotjar to get a heat map to show where users are clicking and hovering.

You can use a program like google optimize to test different versions of your pages to see what works and what doesn’t.

There are tons of options available to get the data needed to make informed changes to help drive more traffic.

Focus on using local keywords like “Alabama souvenirs” in your content and optimize your Google My Business profile to boost local search visibility,
improve site speed and mobile usability with plugins, and use schema markup for local business info,
hiring a trusted local SEO agency can help but keep monitoring results with tools like Google Search Console to adjust your strategy.

Other people have touched on SEO optimization, but it honestly sounds like you need more marketing for the site.

Where are existing customers finding your site? (there are keyword search tools that you can use on competitors sites to see what they are doing as well)

What social media groups are you engaging with potential customers on to drive traffic to your site?

Are you competitors running paid ad campaigns?

Have you asked existing customers how they search for finding the products that you sell?

Answering these questions would be a start. Also look at the marketing and startup subreddits.

Start with an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast, use clean URLs, compress images, and speed up your site with caching. Also, focus on creating helpful, keyword-targeted content consistently.

1. Install Yoast or Rankmath to let you do some basic fundamental stuff like metadata and sitemaps.. you said you added GSC and Site Kit. great first step too. GSC will speed up indexation, collect key organic data, and help troubleshoot high level tech issues. Site kit will set up GA4. both important to have. but their benefits stop there.. id strongly suggest investing in ahrefs, semrush, or moz. not cheap at all, but even for a beginner, they will pay off tenfold if you're serious about SEO. also remember - every tool listed here is just that - a tool. not a single tool will deliver results unless utilized effectively.
2. do extensive keyword research and structure your site in accordance with this to match intent, without overlapping intents. 1 keyword cluster per page. keep the urls and their hierarchy clean. i.e. xyzmovers dot com / chicago / cross country - just a random example but think from a hierarchical standpoint. broader, more competitive keywords higher up, long-tail less competitive further down.... interlink between all of them. dont leave any pages orphaned.
3. once url framework is built, read up on basics on onpage seo. really, the only specific thing to do is put your primary target keyword in the title / once in the body copy, and naturally sprinkle in synonyms / intent-matched variants .... dont use keyword density checkers or overthink it. that stuff doesnt matter. most important thing - match intent. someone searches "moving companies chicago" , thats service intent. they want to hire a good mover, so show them that. who you are, what you do there, and why they should hire you. also, since this specific example is local intent, prove to both google and users that youre in chicago (gbp integration, local portfolio entries, etc)... not bogus filler content like "what is moving" , "chicago statistics" etc... just the keyword once or twice, and write good stuff. dont overlook ux either. specifically mobile. best way to assess ux - just pretend youre the user. do you see what you want to see? is it easy to do what you want to do? .... onpage is as simple as that.
4. now that your main pages - service "money" pages, about page, contact, etc... then start blogging and link building. blogs should be topically relevant and interlink to your money pages. links should typically go to the blogs and look as "natural as possible" and be "at least somewhat decent" .. biggest thing i look for with "somewhat decent" is 1. topical relevance - rankings / traffic iny our niche (not "feet pics" or "proxy sites") and 2. their inbound to outbound link ratio (avoiding massive link farms) ... links are so incredibly important and so freaking hard to get. even the "just somewhat decent ones".... so id passively pursue links through networking, but wouldnt invest too much time into it starting out. 99.9999% of the links you see / advice you hear from solicitors is absolute junk. avoid it like the plague. any link "from a list" or sold as "xx per month" will provide precisely 0.00 value. the only ones that will help are real(ish) links from real(ish) sites.
5. rinse and repeat. keep an eye on competitors. keep an eye on how google is reacting to reverse engineer and react. keep researching keywords for new long tail money page and blog opportunities. keep reading up educational pieces from the big dogs like ahrefs hubspot semrush etc. (nathon gotch is my favorite) .. just search stuff like "seo ranking factors" . "link building strategies" etc. a/b test. assess whats working / not working and refine your practice. some of the stuff that may work for others may not work for you and vice-versa so a lot can be learned through first-hand application. just remember SEO is slow moving so some of the specific work you do may not pay off til months, even years after you do them.

In conclusion: to do good SEO, understand your keywords, write your content to give the users what they want to see on a page level, build topically relevant good blogs / links, and interlink.

That's "how to do SEO" as concisely as i can put it. the principles actually arent complicated at all despite what the Gurus, Agencies, and pretty much everyone else want you to think. Google wants to give the user what they want, and they're really good at doing it. so give the user what they want, and make it easy for google to understand that youre giving them what they want.

great that you're on wordpress. pretty much the standard... +wordpress +set up on GSC / sitemap, reaching out to ask the questions... you're on the right track - Just keep reading/learning, applying, analyzing, and refining and it will all pay off!

**final edit - this is a bit of a brain dump and could be worded better. hope it doesnt overwhelm u. i promise if you read and digest it, it will be time well spent. its literally everything ive learned from 10 years of experience (well, just about everything ive learned)..

It’s a start. Search Console usually takes a couple of weeks, but just make sure you turn off the “Discourage Search Engines from Indexing” option on WordPress.

Backlinking is key to building up authority to your site and improving your SEO.

Heya! You're just the target audience I wrote my 385 page pagespeed guide for! Hope this helps!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ncQcxnD-CxDk4h01QYyrlOh1lEYDS-DV/

This covers the entire optimization process from top to bottom with thorough explanations of all concepts and:

Included is a breakdown on how to analyze and interpret Speed Test reports to identify optimization opportunities.

There's an extensive amount of optimization information and resources for server stack configuration for NGINX, Apache, OpenLiteSpeed, Varnish, Object Caching, PHP, HAProxy, MySQL, SSL, Gzip/Brotli, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, Security considerations effects on performance and Linux optimizations. There are also a bunch of resources on database optimization.

Wordpress specific optimizations: It has sections on how to optimize common features including Ads, Forms, Woocommerce, Analytics, Google Maps, Custom Fields, Galleries, Video Players, Sliders, Filters, SEO plugins, Anti-Spam, Cookie Notices, Backup plugins; in addition to one size fits all optimizations(Images, Videos, CDN, SSL, CSS, JS, Resource Hints, Fonts, Caching etc), and tons and tons more.

I made sure that this is the most thorough resource you'll find anywhere!

You're on the right track with optimization. For theme suggestion, you can go with Neve or SeedProd for the ecommerce store. Both comes with tons of templates for online stores and easily integrates with WooCommerce.

Try Astra for a eCommerce store, it is also working great with Elementor

For WordPress optimization, I recommend checking out video guides on platforms like YouTube. You can find detailed tutorials covering image optimization, server settings, caching, and CDN integration. As for themes, I’d suggest checking out GeneratePress for lightweight and fast options.

Agreed, these all work fine for the frontend. I’m currently working on a Wordpress site that has a postmeta that is around 18 million rows and a total database site of around 8 gigabytes. The backend is so slow that it isn’t really usable anymore.

thanks, i am not sure if cloudflare actually helps, i will include cdn in the list.

I disagree with #3. It's the quality of the code of the plugins, not the quantity of the plugins.

This should only really be done with above the fold elements...to a reasonable extent.

This will actually slow shit down. You want css to be cached rather than be read every page load. The only possible justification for inline css is if it is dynamic or the final decisions on layout aspects have not been reached.

1. Install Rank Math on your WordPress website!

2. Follow the 20 tips in this article to optimize your website for search engines!

3. Watch your website traffic and rankings skyrocket!

4. Boost your website's organic search traffic for free!

5. Get ahead of your competitors with these 20 SEO tips!

In /r/WordPress, we do not allow list posts, or links to them. Read the rules before posting.

Welcome to WordPress, this is extremely basic, unfortunately those that rank will never ever ever give you the secret sauce. Also SEO plugins are kind of important, but I have worked with several websites who rank on the first page of Google without doing a single key world research or long tails or anything SEO related. They did not even use H tags. With that said if you answer a pain point and answer it well where nobody else knows about it, people will flock and others will copy.

This was super helpful, thanks!

I love this topic. Close to my heart at the moment.

What you need are backlinks that use the anchor text of the keywords you want your category pages to rank for, to point to the category pages of your WooCommerce store.

This is challanging in WooCommerce, but possible.

You can either do it yourself, which is the route Website Squadron has taken by joining a skool community called WP Odyssey, or, you can hire a freelancer to do it.

If you are in the United States, there are agencies like Primary Position that can help you achieve this. In London I think the best SEO company is First Place SEO.

When you say "optimize the category pages" do you mean cause them to rank higher?

What have you done to increase authority?

The things you have done are content-related. Content has no affect on authority.

There are 4 things you need to rank.

1. no penalties

2. content (doesn't have to be good or useful, just has to exist)

3. relevancy

4. authority

There is a very good chance you already have 1-3 covered.

What you (and most people) are missing is authority.

TL;DR: You’re on the right track with keywords in category descriptions and meta tags. To boost WooCommerce category SEO more, add unique, helpful content on each category page (like guides or top product picks), optimize images with alt text, use clean URLs, and improve page speed (WP Rocket helps if you're on WordPress). Also, internal linking to related categories/products and schema markup can provide a nice SEO BOOST. Take a look at POP - page optimizer pro for good on-page tweaks.