How to add SEO-friendly content areas to WooCommerce category pages

Summary:
To enhance SEO performance for a WooCommerce site, Freshy implemented a custom content box under product listings on category pages. This allows content teams to easily add optimized text, links, and images—an essential feature for ecommerce category SEO.

Issue background

Many WooCommerce category pages are product-focused by default, displaying only product grids without supporting text. While this clean look may be appealing, it creates challenges for SEO. Search engines rely on crawlable content to understand page context and relevance.

A client’s SEO team recognized this and requested a way to display unique written content on each category page to improve indexing and keyword targeting. Initially, they asked if Yoast SEO could help, but that plugin was already installed and doesn’t handle front-end content placement for categories.

Diagnosis

We confirmed:

• Yoast SEO was already active, but not capable of outputting content visibly on category archive pages.
• There was no WYSIWYG field or content area for category descriptions beyond the basic WordPress description field, which appeared above products and wasn’t ideal for layout or SEO.
• The client needed a flexible, easy-to-manage content area that appears below the product grid for better keyword optimization.

Resolution steps

1. Created a custom ACF field
   Using Advanced Custom Fields PRO, we added a WYSIWYG editor field to product categories. This field:
   • Appears in the WordPress dashboard for each category.
   • Accepts rich content including text, images, links, and headings.
2. Built a custom shortcode
   A shortcode was written and added to the theme’s functions.php file to render the new content area directly below the product listings on category archive templates.
3. Tested on a new sample category
   A test category was created and populated with sample content to confirm display, formatting, and behavior.
4. Handled template quirks
   During testing, we discovered a pagination issue in the template. This was flagged for potential follow-up but did not block deployment of the content box feature.

Final outcome

Each WooCommerce product category now has an SEO-optimized content area at the bottom of the page. This allows content teams to:

• Insert keyword-rich text to boost rankings.
• Add relevant internal links.
• Display images or other HTML-enhanced content.

This setup improves crawlability and enhances content strategy without disrupting the visual flow of the product grid.

Want to boost SEO on your ecommerce site? Contact Freshy — we build custom WordPress and WooCommerce solutions that drive traffic and conversions.