When putting together your site structure, you must take into consideration your needs and the needs of your users as well.
Before getting into SEO, I think it’s important to understand what are the category pages and their purpose? Category pages are the place where you get your information about a certain product. People can find the right category and look at the products and details beneath it. The main purpose is to provide a better user experience that encourages people to find products quickly. Having an organized category page will positively influence your online shop, due to the fact that browsing your page has been so easy to navigate.
Building an e-commerce website with diverse category pages can be tough, especially if you are new to this. When putting together your site structure, you must take into consideration your needs and the needs of your users as well. You should consider improving your site structure for SEO, since having a neat page and using the right SEO tools, can generate a lot of organic traffic to your shop. Below are some suggestions how to improve your site category structure for SEO.
Before you create a single category page, I recommend you reflect beforehand and analyze the user flow of your website. Categories and subcategories are used to classify products to make it easier for customers to sort through your goods. The main categories are usually broad, which shield a wide variety of subcategories within them. A good number of online shopper’s research before purchasing, it’s not unusual for them to use a broad search term on Google when starting their shopping. You can take advantage of this situation and add the targeted keyword to your product, thus using the tools of SEO to generate organic traffic. Subcategories contain more specific product details. Nevertheless, your intent shouldn’t be to create too many subcategories — instead, concentrate on developing a category structure that makes the website easy to use. Another thing to consider is using product filters to narrow down results further by price range, color, size, brand, etc. Nowadays, e-commerce shops have product categories and filters, specifically to allocate desired products faster. The main purpose to integrate both filters and subcategories is for customers to find products that meet their requirements fast. For instance, if a customer wants to buy a smart TV, a 75 inch 4K Ultra HD, between 1000 to 2000 euros, they should be able to do so in just a few simple steps, if the page is user-friendly optimized.
SEO is important but beware to not over-optimize, since google penalizes anything that is copied, not authentic. When building a website, you should consider what a search engine wants, but remember to prioritize what a human visitor wants first.
One of the common mistakes out there is when a website has too many subcategories or blog posts that are very similar. Google highly suggests to minimize similar content, and most importantly it will confuse your website user’s which will exit your page quickly.
Here are more recommendations to optimize your category pages: • Enrich your website with content to your category pages by adding images, videos and internal links to other relevant pages. • Publish unique content, images and videos, this way google will recognize it as authentic and rank you higher. • Build internal links from relevant blog posts to your category pages. • Revise your category pages once per year, so if needed you can add fresh product-related content, images and videos. If you are trying to implement these tips on your website for a better conversion rate and category structure, don’t forget to check all your results. Google Analytics is a suitable tool to gather all kinds of information on your site, from new users entering your page to time spent on-page. Furthermore, this way you can check what should be avoided, and also in which area you mastered your page content to keep up the good work. If you want to know more about e-commerce development platforms or apps, read our blog posts for Shopify and Shopware. Our dedicated outsourcing team can be your collaborator in ecommerce.
