How to optimise the categories of an online shop

Today one of Bill Gates’s most famous sayings makes more sense than ever:

“If your business is not on the Internet, your business does not exist”.

With the arrival of the Covid-19 virus, many companies have realised how important digital transformation is.

Digital marketing is a loyal ally of online businesses. Competition is fiercer every day and you need to keep improving and looking for new opportunities to stand out.

That is why in this ebook I explain how to optimise the SEO of an online shop’s categories to attract your potential customers and make Google itself “fall in love”.

SEO tips for the categories of an online shop

When you start designing the SEO strategy for an eCommerce site, optimising its categories is one of the first things to tackle.

Below I will go through, point by point, what you need to bear in mind and which SEO improvements you should implement in your eCommerce categories.

Keyword research

As you would expect, we start with one of the great pillars of SEO: keyword research.

It is the foundation of any SEO strategy because it will help us define a good site architecture and successfully optimise the content of the target pages, the meta tags, the headings, the image ALT text, the anchors and so on.

As this section is so important, I will explain step by step how to do good keyword research so that you can apply it to your business straight away.

Analysing the online business

Nobody knows your online shop like you do. It is important that you know in detail the products you offer, their features, your competitive advantage and your direct competitors, as well as your target audience.

You will also need to be very clear about which phrases or words your customers use to find your products or the needs those products meet. Likewise, which keywords best represent each category of your online shop and which keywords you would like each of them to appear for.

Competitor analysis

The next thing you need to be very clear about is who your direct, real competitors are.

A local electrical appliance shop might think its competitor is Media Markt, but that would not be realistic: even though they sell the same products and share keywords, they play in different leagues. Media Markt has far greater resources as a multinational and can, for example, develop much more advanced marketing strategies than that local shop.

Once you have identified your real competitors you will be able to analyse which keywords they are ranking for, which ones could be interesting for your business and even strengthen certain keywords they are not using yet.

User needs and search intent

Most searches stem from a need. The categories of an eCommerce site respond (or should respond) to a transactional need geared towards the search intent of doing (to do).

Users need to buy a product (they know what they want and are looking for where to buy it), so you should identify which keywords related to your category are worth targeting and have a transactional nature.

If you are not sure about the search intent of a keyword, my advice is to search for it on Google in incognito mode and analyse the SERPs. If all or most of the results lead to an online shop’s category page, or the local pack even appears (Google My Business listings), the search intent will be transactional.

There are also some words (modifiers) that will help you identify transactional search intent:

• Buy/buy online
• Offers
• Coupon
• Order
• Cheap/affordable
• Price/prices

In short, you need to take into account: the user’s search intent, what content appears in the SERPs for the keywords you use, the different devices (desktop and mobile) and what or whom you are competing against (sometimes it can be Google itself).

To make it even clearer, let’s look at an example: suppose we are optimising the coffee maker category of your eCommerce site. If you sell different types of coffee maker, each type will be a subcategory. So in “Coffee makers” we will deal with general keywords (buy coffee makers online, cheap coffee makers, coffee machine offer, coffee machine price…) without going into each type (moka pot, capsule, espresso…).

Target VS Searcher persona

When we take into account the search behaviour of our target audience, we are talking about the Searcher persona. To define it properly you should complete the following sections:

• Name
• Job title and role
• Demographic data
• Goals and challenges
• Values and fears
• Value proposition

As I mentioned earlier, you need to be very clear about what your target audience is like in order to know which keywords are best suited to your categories, so that as well as attracting organic traffic you achieve conversions.

Consider your target customer’s point of view and do not focus on your own perspective. Likewise, identify what your target audience calls what you sell in your categories.

If your ideal customer is an end consumer, they will use everyday language, whereas a professional will use more technical terms.

Taking each of the previous subsections into account, you will have gathered a set of useful keywords for the categories of your online shop.

Using a spreadsheet and an SEO tool for keyword research, you can easily classify each group of keywords, assign priorities and filter by the organic traffic volume and difficulty of each one.

These tools will also help you find related terms, synonyms, other words from the same semantic field and even entities.

Finally, it is important to assign each category a main keyword (the one with the most searches), secondary keywords, related terms and other words from the same semantic field.

Content

The content of each category must be unique and original. When writing it, watch out for spelling mistakes, and make good use of grammar, copywriting and SEO.

Include the main keyword (without overdoing it) as well as its synonyms, terms related to the topic, semantic keywords and long tails. Try to create content that is rich, natural and meaningful.

Use bold and italics to highlight keywords (not all of them), synonyms and long tails across important parts of the text.

Title and meta description

A page’s title and meta description play a very important role because they act as your website’s first “shop window” in the SERPs. They are decisive in getting the user to click.

Title

The title still matters for a website’s rankings. Although it is barely visible when browsing tabs, on the results page (SERPs) it plays an important part in encouraging the user to click.

But what should the title tag be like?

• It should be unique for each page, descriptive, concise and appealing.
• It should be no more than 55 characters long. Google actually measures titles in pixels, so it should not exceed 570 px.
• It should include the main keyword as far to the left as possible. It is also worth adding one or two secondary words, as long as you do not exceed the recommended length.
• If your brand or domain is very well known, you can include it at the end of the title.

Meta description

The meta description does not directly affect the page’s relevance, but it is important for presenting the value proposition and attracting as many clicks as possible (higher CTR).

Features of a good meta description:

• It should be unique to each page, original and appealing.
• It should include a specific value proposition, your differentiating advantage (24-hour delivery, free delivery, offers…) and relevant information.
• It should be between 120 and 140 characters long. As with the title, Google measures the meta description in pixels, so it should take up roughly 430-920 px on desktop and 350-700 px on mobile.
• Include keywords or synonyms, because even though the meta description does not affect rankings, they may match users’ searches.

In this post you can read in more depth how to write a good meta description.

Hn headings or heading tags

Headings are used to structure the semantic content of a page and to highlight the most important concepts in each part of the content. Up to six levels of hierarchy can be used (from <h1> to <h6>).

It is important to include the headings in order, progressively (first the H1, then the H2, H3…). For example, you should not include an H3 before the H2.

It is recommended to use only one H1 per page, which will mark the main heading (not to be confused with the title).

Finally, remember to include the main keyword in the H1 as far to the left as possible and to add secondary keywords and related terms in the following sections.

A quick and easy way to analyse a page’s headings is to use the Chrome extension SEO META in 1 CLICK (previous screenshot) or Web Developer.

Internal linking

One of the most important aspects of improving the SEO of your online shop’s categories is internal linking. It is essential to optimise it properly so that Google understands your site architecture and which URLs are the most important.

Below I explain some good practices you need to bear in mind in your interlinking strategy:

• Crawl your website with Screaming Frog or SafeCont and extract the URLs with the most authority or Page Rank, not counting external links. Also look at the depth level of each one.
• Try to reduce the depth levels and pass strength to the categories that matter most to you.
• Add links in your category texts to related categories and vary the anchor texts using related terms, synonyms and so on. You can review your website’s anchor text profile to look for room for improvement.
• Remember to work on both vertical and horizontal linking.

URL syntax

When creating categories or subcategories, it is essential to pay attention to URL syntax. Note down these recommendations for creating a good friendly URL:

• Try to keep URLs as short as possible and do not repeat keywords in subcategories.

https://www.ejemplo.com/

https://www.ejemplo.com/mujer/

https://www.ejemplo.com/mujer/faldas/

https://www.ejemplo.com/mujer/faldas/largas/

• Avoid spaces (separate words with hyphens), dates, special characters, symbols, capital letters, accented words and stop words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions…).
• Make sure it is easy to understand and do not forget to use SSL.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs help build upward internal linking and reduce the bounce rate, as well as improving usability, because users always know which subcategory they are in and can easily go back.

It is advisable to use short, descriptive names and include words related to each page’s main keyword. Finally, do not forget to apply the structured data markup BreadcrumList so that they appear in the SERPs as a rich result (sometimes they do not appear, as it is Google that decides whether to show them).

Image optimisation

A website’s images are essential for conveying trust and improving usability, and ultimately they help users get to know the product better.

From an SEO point of view, bear these tips in mind:

• Use original and relevant images whenever possible.
• Add an ALT attribute that is descriptive and includes keywords. Do not add alternative text to images you use as layout elements.
• The file name should be short; use hyphens to separate words and avoid stop words and special characters.
• Upload the image at the exact size you want to display it, avoid very heavy files and choose the right format for each one (JPEG, PNG, GIF…).

Google offers various SEO guides and documentation setting out its recommended practices in different areas. Here you can learn more about image optimisation.

Linkbuilding

A little help always comes in handy, which is why it is worth designing a linkbuilding strategy for your categories.

That said, I always recommend that before doing any linkbuilding you have solid SEO On Page foundations in your categories and no major technical errors.

Analyse your backlink profile, anchor texts, referring domains, dofollow and nofollow percentage, URLs with the most inbound links… to choose the category to boost. Choose a trustworthy platform to buy links such as LEOlytics, Prensarank or Unancor.

Make sure the website where the purchased link will go is in the same language as your site; that it produces quality content; that it is related to your topic; look at its organic traffic trend, whether it may have suffered a penalty, and its domain authority… You should also avoid websites that only publish paid content.

Conclusion

After this short guide you are sure to have a clearer idea of how to optimise the SEO of your online shop’s categories. There are more aspects to consider, but I assure you that if you build an SEO strategy around the most important sections explained in this post, your categories will improve considerably.

If you have any questions or need help with the SEO of your Ecommerce categories, leave me a comment 🙂

I want to access the full marketing guide

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