How to write your online shop categories and multiply your SEO traffic

Abigail Bosze

Content Writer

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Did you know that one of the best ways to gain visits to your e-commerce is by optimizing your online shop categories? Lucky for you, there are still a lot of e-commerces that don’t use these pages, or that use them incorrectly. Would you like to surpass your competitors and make the most out of the power of categories? If so, this is the article you need: we are going to teach you how to write them from scratch so you can position your web (almost) without linkbuilding or links.

What are categories and why are they important?

Categories are pages that are part of your website and that allow you to organize your content depending on different factors. For an e-commerce, the most common categories are the product, target audience, brand, and material. If your e-commerce sells mobile phone cases, the categories could be the different brands, such as “iPhone cases”, “Samsung cases”, “Sony cases”, and so on. However, if you sell accessories for all kind of devices, these categories could be related to the type of product: “Ipad covers”, “Ipad cases”, “tablet covers”, and so on. Although these categories are normally ignored in the SEO of many online shops , they provide two important advantages:

• Your positioning strategy is more complete: you can get long tails with products cards , but you can position your shop with more powerful keywords by using categories.
• You improve your website’s architecture: you help users find what they are looking for faster. And it would be even better if you added a product search engine such as Doofinder .

How to integrate categories into your website architecture

The first step is deciding which keywords you are trying to position alongside your online shop’s categories. Here we explain how to do so.

1. Keywords search

The keywords you choose should fit what users look for the most. How can you find that out? There are lots of free tools that you can use such as ÜberSuggest , LSIGraph , or Keyword Shitter . Then you have to confirm each keyword’s search volume with Keyword Planner .

2. Analyze your competitors

If you are not sure about how to organize your products logically, have a look at your competitors. By doing this you can get some ideas about how to establish the classification of your products.

3. Divide them in subcategories

A huge number of categories could result in customers getting lost in an excess of information. Add a maximum of 6 or 7 and use subcategories for what is left.

How to write your e-commerce’s categories

One of the biggest mistakes regarding e-commerce SEO is not adding content to these types of pages. The key is: The more and the better the content you add to your categories, the higher your website will be positioned in Google. Let’s polish off that keyboard!

1. Title

It always has to include the keyword that you want to position. Remember that it must have between 55 and 58 characters. If you have enough space, try to include your added value. If the keyword you want to get is “sport cameras”, your title could be: “Buying sport cameras. Unbeatable prices”.

2. Description

As we told you in this post about SEO secrets , it is very important to fill in the metadata. You have up to 150 characters to insert the keyword again and to start raising the CTR.

3. Friendly URL

Forget about using dates in your url. After the domain you just have to write the keyword: www.domainexample.com/sport-cameras

4. Titles scheme

Any text that we want to optimize for SEO purposes needs to be structured. The content scheme is very important since it helps Google understand what you are talking about. You just need to properly use the H2, H3, or H4 tags in your different sections.

5. The importance of semantics

The time when we used to repeat the same keyword over and over again is long gone. Nowadays, what really matters is to use as many synonyms as possible. If you are talking about sport cameras, try to use all kind of terms such as sport video camera, camera for sports, or action camera. It is also a good idea to use words related to the topic: lens, viewfinder, accessories, GoPro, models, prices… Google will value this word richness and will position your website higher.

6. Add photos and videos

Both users and Google are crazy about multimedia formats. Remember to use the “Alt” tag for images.

7. External linking

Your home page is the most popular one and the one that contains more external links. You should transmit all that strength and authority by linking all the categories from the home page. Don’t forget to add links to your posts too, this will also help you with positioning.

What’s stopping you from starting to optimizing your e-commerce categories?

By working on your categories you will get more traffic to your online shop. Besides, there are a lot of businesses that still don’t know about this strategy, so take advantage of it!

We recommend that you read the following article on SEO for ecommerce for more info 😉