When optimizing a WooCommerce website with the excellent YOAST SEO plugin for WordPress, I noticed that building “templates” for titles and meta descriptions is not that easy. Mostly when you want to input the product category and the product title.
To optimize WooCommerce products, you can go to WordPress dashboard and click on SEO, Titles & Metas, Post Types, Products. You will see this screen:
The main problem is that if you try to add the following tag in the Title or Meta Description boxes: %%category%% – that won’t show as the product category.
Of course, that is a tag you want to use at it contains the keywords to rank your product and likely match the URL as well. After a bit of research, here is the solution:
%%ct_product_cat%%
It’s as simple as that: use %%ct_product_cat%% and the WooCommerce category (or categories separated by comma) will show. In case of multiple categories, I recommend to enter such tag at the end of the Meta Description sentence, so that it is still readable in English or the language you use.