Category pages don’t just make it easier for people to shop on your site, but they also play a part in your on-page SEO eCommerce rankings.
Consider the following advice to improve your category page eCommerce SEO in 2021!
Why Category Pages Are Important On Ecommerce Sites
Ecommerce product category pages, also known as product listing pages, are one of the crucial assets of any eCommerce business. This is the page where you show your product and, as a result, can lead to high sales and lead conversion rates. It needs to be very strong when it comes to both UX and SEO. There are many factors at play when it comes to optimizing category pages, so you need to pay a lot of attention to it.
Talking about category page SEO – ecommerce category pages have the potential to become high authority pages. These pages fit well into a hierarchical structure of an ecommerce website due to the high amount of internal linking. When you incorporate a hierarchy, it creates additional pages on your site, along with search engine optimization opportunities. This is good for your rankings and great for helping customers find products.
But what are the best practices for optimizing your eCommerce category page so it would rank high and bring more traffic to your website?
Start with the Right Site Structure
We’ve already discussed website structure here, but an important rule of thumb to remember is to avoid having more than three levels of hierarchy on your site. The right category structure for eCommerce will ensure you benefit from better SEO and not confuse your customers.
Optimize URLs on your website
You’ll need an SEO-friendly URL for eCommerce purposes. The “slug,” which comes after the domain extension, should describe what the page represents. If you’re selling women’s hats, then a slug that reads “/womens-hats” is most appropriate. Keep your URLs clean so users can at a glance see where they are.
If some particular URLs expand to several pages, or if you use filters, you need to set up a canonical URL for your ecommerce website correctly. Let’s say you have a category page URL that looks like this “/product-category”. So, if you have paging enabled and the user decides to open the second page URL should look like “/product-category/2”. If you have other pages connected to the main one, you need to make sure that canonical URLs are set up like “/product-category” so Google understands that they are a part of a hierarchy.
Write Meta Data Using Relevant Keywords
Don’t forget meta tag optimization for eCommerce! Your meta description is what people see in the search results. Some blog platforms include an option for automatic meta description, but it can often lead to having nonsense written in one of the key SEO blocks.
When writing a meta description, try to summarize what you offer on a specific page and include the right keywords. If you have free shipping, some unique offer emphasizes this in the meta description to attract customer attention.
Make A Relevant Product List
When you’re listing the products in each category, make sure they really belong there. If you try to fool customers into seeing different products, it doesn’t just turn them off your brand, but it can harm your SEO rankings too.
Highlight Your Product with Media Content
Images and videos of the products you’re selling are a great way of helping customers envision what each product looks like and how it can help them. It’s also great for your SEO rankings – as long as they’re high-quality images!
Images also need to be optimized for size and SEO. There are a lot of image optimization websites on the internet. You also can’ just upload a file named something like “345i7u8d.jpg” – names and alt names of your images need to be connected to the overall theme of the page and include important keywords.
Add Relevant Text
On every category page, it’s important to include keywords naturally through relevant text. This can be done in the page titles, product titles, product descriptions, and more.
Improve Your UX
UX, or your user experience, is key to ensuring people return to your site. Make the purchasing process simple, and people will stick around, browse some more, and even return in the future.
UX includes a lot of different aspects: mobile-friendliness, ease of navigation, loading speeds, and many more. Google actually has metrics for these factors and calls them core web vitals. They reflect Google’s algorithm, meaning if your website is optimized well you have better chances of making it to the top of a search page! So it is important to do UX now only for users but also for SEO’s sake.
Conclusion
Category page optimization allows for an easy selling process, a fluid design that’s easy to navigate, and great products are important for attracting and keeping your customers. It’s also a key to good SEO rankings.
For more help developing a website that delivers results and ranks highly on search engines, contact our digital marketing experts today at (312) 625-0447.
