The Importance of Optimizing E-commerce Category Pages for SEO
Category pages are perhaps some of the most critical elements of any e-commerce website. According to recent research unveiled at SMX West 2020, these pages have the potential of ranking and driving more organic search traffic, unlike product detail pages. That’s perhaps why you need to make sure that you optimize your category pages properly. Whether you choose to add some top-quality copy or any feature that’ll boost engagement, optimized category pages can generate more organic traffic, sales, and revenue.
If you are still on the fence about optimizing your category pages, I will explain everything you need to know about their optimization in this guide. Let me begin by looking at the importance of optimizing eCommerce category pages for SEO.
Importance of Ecommerce Category Pages
Category Pages Can Help You Achieve Higher Rankings
One reason why e-commerce category pages are so crucial is rankings. Because other bigger e-commerce websites offer the same products just like smaller sites, the latter group is often unable to rank high for individual product pages. However, an e-commerce category page makes it possible to gain a top place in the SERPS. This is because optimizing them targets keywords that consumers search for. Although they have the least content, a well-optimized category page can effectively communicate its relevance to Google, thus lure more consumers.
Category Pages Can Potentially Become High Authority Pages
Ideally, an eCommerce website should have a hierarchical structure with no more than three levels. That is a home page, category page, and product details page. After the homepage, category pages are arguably the most important pages of any eCommerce site. For that reason, they are likely to rank high because of their higher location in the hierarchy.
Nonetheless, it’s not easy to take advantage of category pages and see real gains in terms of rankings and traffic. It would help if you committed a lot of SEO work to optimize them. Failure to do so will generate the opposite effect and even affect your overall domain authority negatively.
If you’re not sure how to optimize your category pages, I’ll show you how in five easy steps.
Optimizing Category Pages
- Optimize Your Category Titles
Much like the title tag, category titles form an essential part of your SEO. They give Google and other search engines a strong signal about your page and its content.
When optimizing category titles, you must identify the keywords that consumers use in their search queries. In addition, you need to write your titles, starting with keywords followed by the name of your brand. On top of that, include specific characteristics of your product in the category title. Doing this will help you craft highly optimized titles.
- Optimize Your Meta Descriptions
Although a meta description does not have a direct impact on on-page SEO, what you write in this field is often shown in the search results. That means a well-optimized meta description can help you get a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) once you manage to get first page rankings. Therefore, make sure you provide unique quality content in the description for all your category pages. More importantly, ensure that you summarize your product’s characteristics and offers like free shipping or free returns in the descriptions. That way, your snippet will make sense and even lure potential consumers into clicking it.
- Make Use of Navigation
While the primary function of navigation and filters is to help shoppers find what they want, they help in content optimization. They also help in the authority and indexation of every category page, which is vital in Google algorithms. Therefore, try to add some relevant keywords in the navigation and filters to promote natural search.
- Link Building
Including links to other related products is another great way to reinforce your keyword theme. A good rule of thumb is to link contextually relevant products.
Remember, using unclear language in the anchor text can cost you a rare opportunity to boost the relevance of your pages. For that reason, avoid using words like “More Information” or “Click Here” as link texts. Typically, they have little or no meaning to search engines and should be avoided.
- Optimize Your Category URLs
Optimizing the category URLs is another important SEO practice. The best way to do this is to make sure that your category URL describes precisely what your page is all about with no unnecessary information or additional characters.
Also, try to keep short, clean, and precise such that consumers can tell what you’re offering by just looking at the category URL. If, for instance, you have a category for ladies’ handbags, your URL should be as simple as https://example.com/ladies-handbags
Parting Shot
In conclusion, category page optimization is one of the important areas that you need to prioritize. It will help boost your organic search rankings as well as traffic and revenue.
