Proven Ways To Improve Ecommerce Category Pages For SEO

E-commerce categories can be a tough nut to crack in terms of how well they perform with search engine optimization (SEO). E-commerce category pages serve an important purpose in SEO: drawing potential customers to your company's products. They are crucial for driving conversions, and successful category pages should be a core component of every e-commerce site's marketing strategy. E-commerce sites need category pages that do more than simple list products in descending order. In fact, what makes a phenomenal e-commerce category page may surprise you.

Why are Ecommerce Category Pages Important?

Ecommerce category pages are a great way to direct the buying habits of shoppers who have already established themselves as customers of your brand or store. They're like landing pages, but they're even more specific, since they focus on a very limited set of products. Shoppers have come to expect these pages from brands and online stores, and they're often higher in Google search results than the homepage because of their specificity.

The Two Types of Category Pages

Category listing pages (CLP)

Category listing pages (CLP) are the gateway to your e-commerce website. Each product category, or a list of categories, is usually logically linked to a CLP to allow users to browse your products by category. This approach is used by many online retailers: Amazon, eBay and Walmart are some of the most popular examples of this practice.

In most cases, CLPs contain only a small amount of content in comparison with other pages on an e-commerce website and are rarely considered to be in line with best practices for SEO. However, with the advent of smartphones and tablets, more and more users are starting their product search directly from the CLP page instead of visiting a category landing page first.

Product listing pages (PLP)

Product listing pages (PLP) have a significant impact on the success of e-commerce websites for many reasons. They are the first impression of your brand for consumers, and can heavily influence purchase decisions. According to a study by Baymard Institute, 74% of consumers find product images helpful in making purchase decisions. The same study found that 88% of consumers use online search to find products and companies. With these statistics in mind, PLPs are important to both consumers and search engines.

Understanding the difference between CLPs and PLPs

The difference between these two types of category pages is simple: A CLP is designed to get a sale, while a PLP is designed to help the category page rank in search engines.

The main difference between CLPs and PLPs is their use of internal links. A CLP includes plenty of links that point to the product detail pages of other products within the same category. This helps visitors find what they want on the site, which leads them to buy more products. On the other hand, PLPs contain very few internal links—only one or two links to other products detail pages. Instead, PLPs have many links out to relevant websites and other content that will help the category page rank in search engines.

The Best Ways to Optimize E-commerce Category Pages for Search Engines

Optimize navigation for search engines

By optimizing category pages, retailers can improve the experience for their users and search engines, as well as improve their ranking in the SERP. Category pages tend to be very similar to one another, which means they're easy to optimize by using common strategies. For instance, all of your categories should have a unique title tag, an image and a description.

Include targeted keywords in page titles

A title tag is one of the first things people see when visiting a website, and it's one of the most important elements when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). It's important to include targeted keywords that correspond with what people are searching for, including your brand name and other words that describe the product. Include relevant keywords on other parts of the page.

Although the title tag is one of the most important SEO elements, you should also include keywords on other parts of your page as well. The meta description should be included on your page and should contain keywords, as well as a call-to-action. Other places you could include valuable keywords are in your URL and image file names. Include website navigation. People who visit category pages often want to be able to quickly find products that match their search terms, whether it's by price or color or style or size.

Provide a specific product description

By including a specific product description, shoppers are given an idea of what they're buying and can be persuaded to buy it (this is good for the company's search rankings). It also gives search engines a description of the item that they can use when ranking the site's pages. In addition, by using product descriptions to attract users to your site's category pages, you're making it more likely that they'll click through and look at other products on your site, which will increase your pageviews.

E-commerce categories can include photos of products, but this is only effective if a shopper clicks through to the individual product page and sees more detail about the item being sold. This will help solidify in their minds what it is that they are buying.

Use H1 and H2 tag properly

You may think the title of your category page is the most important part when it comes to SEO and ranking well in search engines like Google. While having a great title is essential, having a properly written H1 and H2 tag can be just as important. The H1 tag (e.g., In-Store Pickup) is what search engines will use to list your website on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) when someone searches for your product category. It's incredibly important that the title of your H1 tag matches the keyword you want to rank for.

The H2 tag (e.g., Pickup Location Details) is what people see when they're on your category page, but they're also very important because they help people find what they're looking for on your website. The keyword in your H2 tag should match a keyword in the content of that page, or at least be a related term. If you're writing good content with keywords and linking to other pages on your site within that content, you'll be able to rank for multiple keywords in no time!

Optimize metadata

Metadata is the content about your content—meta tags, descriptions, titles, and more. While your content may be the most important aspect of SEO, metadata can play a huge role in how people find you online and whether they decide to stay on your site.

When working on e-commerce category pages, look to optimize the metadata associated with each category. This will ensure that your site's content is well-displayed in search engines. While there are many factors that determine whether a site is optimized for search engines, it's important to note that oftentimes the search engine bots get their first clues about what they're looking at from the metadata on the page itself.

Integrate breadcrumb navigation

The breadcrumb navigation is a very common pattern in online stores. It allows the users to have a clear understanding of where they are and how they arrived at the current page in the site. It can be easily used to show the user that they are on a category page, even if it doesn't have any content.

We can use breadcrumb navigation in our category pages to improve SEO rankings. Google does not like duplicate content, so adding breadcrumbs for each category and subcategory helps reduce duplicate content issues; especially on sites with thousands of categories.

Nix Non-Unique Page Elements

Non-unique page elements are ones that appear on every page in a category, like the name of the category itself and the name of the brand. Because they're not unique to each page, they don't add value to the content of any one page—and they take up valuable space where you could be telling a more compelling story instead.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when optimizing product pages for SEO is that not every page should look the same. This is an easy trap to fall into, especially if you're building your site on a CMS platform. While you may have the option to create a "template" or a "theme," you want to avoid doing so unless absolutely necessary. Instead, build each page individually and let it look like what it is: an individual product page with its own unique elements.

The most obvious advantage here is to be found in search engine optimization. It's important to remember that Google doesn't just look at your content; it also looks at your site structure and how that matches up with user intent. The best way to make sure your e-commerce category pages are going to be clicked is to ensure they contain all the right page elements (and no unnecessary ones).

Unpaginated Category Pages

For some categories, the pagination at the bottom of the page can offer valuable information to your customers: there's no better example than an e-commerce site that uses a different product image for each page of a category. However, if you're using one product image per category page and you're not paginating, you might as well remove those useless numbers from your category pages. They aren't providing any value to your visitors or improving your SEO efforts.

Internally link categories

Internally linking categories will help people find the category they are looking for. This is important because SEO considers category pages to be a landing page, which means that the page and its links will be rated based on how well they help users get to the site's main content pages and the top-level navigation.

Internal linking is a great way to show search engines that your site is truly about a particular topic. If you have an e-commerce site, you could have product pages for each of your items, and category pages listing all of the products you sell in that category. You should then link between these pages. When you are linking from a category page to a product page, it should be with the actual name of the product (the actual product name, not just a model number).

Conclusion

By making a couple of simple SEO tweaks to your category pages, you can make your products more visible to search engines and consumers. Keep these quick tips in mind when optimizing your e-commerce category pages, and watch your rankings grow as well as your sales!