SEO Cape Town Guide To Category Pages
In this SEO Cape Town Category Pages Guide, we will teach you how to create category pages that rank well in the results, in just 7 minutes of reading time. Your category pages need to be optimised thoughtfully to ensure you have the best chance of ranking in eCommerce verticals, as these are usually highly competitive.
Due to the sheer magnitude of products available, you need them to be crawled in the first place. Category pages are crucial for large sites’ long term SEO strategies, especially where products have a high turnover may not be stocked again. But how do we achieve ranking categories? Let’s have a look below:
What exactly is a category page?
Other than your homepage, your category pages are going to be the most important pages of your eCommerce website. A category page helps to narrow down what the user is looking for, and breaks down products into collective topics of the various parts of your website, guiding them to the correct product page or family of products for them to make a purchase. Essentially, the category page acts as a bridge between your homepage and the products that are listed on your site, in terms of their organisation and navigation.
The problem is that often the way sites set up their category pages makes sense to humans but this does not always benefit SEO. Google’s algorithm is skewed towards serving the most relevant content to a searcher. “Garden and Home” for instance may make sense to humans as a collective category but when a user searches they would be searching for one or the other, and thus google would serve one or the other, more likely. People search differently from how they communicate or speak.
SEO Cape Town: Elements Of Category Pages
User-intent Vs Neatness of Categories’ Keyword Research
Many sites prefer their category pages roughly or topically representational, rather than the longer-tail. We believe categories should be granulated into longer-tail keyword categories that match actual search phrases. In more competitive verticals, attempt longer-tail keyword phrases where you know that there is a higher propensity for a commerce transaction as category pages in eCommerce applications are about sales rather than broad topics.
If you change the title up a little, you’re giving yourself a better chance for your click-through rate (CTR). For example, instead of something boring and generic like ‘Sheets,’ try something like “Buy Sheets Online”. The latter has a strong user intent suggestion, where the former could represent a general informational search query.
Make sure that you keep your title that represents an actual search volume while not being ridiculous. Ensure it is aligned with user-intent.
Reviews And Ratings
Category pages are one of the best places to put reviews or ratings of a product. Reviews sell products, more than brands do. Encourage user reviews with your marketing automation or perhaps even offer discounts or prizes if they do.
It’s important to understand, in this SEO Cape Town Category Pages Guide, that people trust others who have bought the products far more than they will trust any description. In the eyes of the consumer, an accurate, unbiased account is more likely to come from someone in the same position as them, as opposed to the seller. Generation Z, who are upcoming customers, trust social far more than Brands.
Siloing of Categories
A content silo is a section of your website where related content is linked together. It also helps build topical relevance in terms of SEO Cape Town and Google’s natural language processing. Google is looking at how certain words become entities in terms of how they relate to other “things”, we see this with their natural language processing. You can use this to your benefit when planning your information architecture.
It is important, however, to ensure that content is relative according to Google’s knowledge graph and not just how humans see content in relation and context. Google is invested in entities and being able to connect information but sometimes the way Google sees products or topics linked may be different from how we would see topics linked. It’s all about semantics, from Google’s point of view.
The category page may be seen as the crown of the silo, a sub-website within a website where all content at sub-levels should follow Google’s view of connectedness in their knowledge graph. This is the only way to deal with many different types of products and still be seen as relevant.
Related Products
Having a section of your category page with related products aids in your siloing efforts, which helps Google see topical relevance and authority, from a semantic point fo view. The idea is to have your developer to set up the related products as semantically relevant in the related products carousel.
Include products that have competitive search volumes, and be sure to include a direct link to the product. More importantly, these may be focused products in terms of rankings. Products that are too far down the silo will tend to be a challenge to rank, in this SEO Cape Town Guide we strongly suggest linking to them in such a structure.
Ideally, you want to put something like this on every category page, so that the products have the best opportunity to rank in terms of PageRank being shared to those pages, ceterus paribus.
Links To Products
Some category pages will have a whole list of individual products, and others won’t. At the end of the day, you want your site architecture to be as shallow as possible. Larger eCommerce sites find this to be a constant battle as this begins to affect their crawl-budget if not set up correctly.
Say your category only has only 30 products overall, it’s going to be worth listing them individually so that your customers can scroll through. However, if you have significantly more than this and you are looking at thousands, then it isn’t going to make sense to list everything and expect your users to spend time scrolling and invariably the users will experience search fatigue and bounce off the site.
Category Descriptions
You should not leave these out as they are important for Google to know what the page is about and the user-experience of the online shoppers. The idea is match the user intent of the user. Long swaths of text in an article format, where the user has used an overtly commercial user-intent search query may not be appropriate. At the same time, there should be enough content to understand what the category is about.
Also remember, a double -line description for each product quickly begins to add up in terms of total page copy when many products are featured. Thus. the category description is also made up of the description of the products displayed themselves.
SEO Cape Town Guide: How To Choose The Categories
Your Current Ranking
You should already be keeping an eye on your website ranking as a whole, and now you can use whatever tool you’ve been using to do some further research into this. Try to find out more information specifically relating to your category pages.
One of the things you need to know is whether or not your category pages are being outranked by one of your competitor’s subcategory pages for certain keywords. If this is the case, they have likely done more research into what is working with their customers, and you need to get a better picture of keywords before you can proceed.
Another thing that you want to know is if your page is ranking for any unintentional keywords. So, if one of your current pages for something like women’s jumpers is ranking for another word, this could be an opportunity for you. Look into the search volume and number of clicks this keyword phrase is getting before you make a final decision
What Are Your Competitors Doing?
If you haven’t already, then it’s a good idea to look at your competitors’ pages and see how they have structured their category pages. It is likely that they have already picked up on some opportunities that you haven’t noticed yet, so by doing this you will find more ideas that you can then use for your own page.
To do this, you should first look manually at the competitor pages. Use the navigation tools, they are likely located at the top of the site. This will give you a good idea of the keywords they are using as well as the structure of their site.
After you’ve done your manual investigation, use some of the tools available to you such as SEMrush and Ahrefs to go through the site. There are also other tools available that will help you to get information about category URLs, tags, internal links and other on-page elements. You will also be able to find the most important keywords as they will be stored and help you navigate new opportunities for your site.
Potential Problems To Avoid With SEO Cape Town Category Pages
Information Architecture:
Google will also treat category page differently, depending on how you set it up from a technical SEO perspective. Sub-category pages are often too low down the information architecture to allow for PageRank or authority to be shared to those pages and thus they don’t rank.
Internal Linking Equity
Internal links are just as important as backlinks. These are the links that you have on your website to point to other relevant pages. Link equity means the way that a link passes authority from one page on your site to another. When you create new category pages, the internal linking equity for your site changes.
If you’re not careful, you could end up wasting it on the wrong pages, as the link equity you see now will be redistributed across your site. As such, you need to consider how the internal liking equity is going to be impacted before you create any new category pages. You should focus on creating more internal links for the important pages on your website, potentially using navigation tabs to help you do this.
SEO Cape Town Guide: Keyword Cannibalisation
Have you ever heard of keyword cannibalisation before? To put it simply, it means that you have multiple pages on your site that are all targeted towards the same keyword. Now, the problem with this is that they are going to end up competing for this specific word with unintentional pages cannibalising the pages you had in mind.
As such, instead of competing with other pages that have been set up by competitors, you end up competing with yourself. As a result of this, you’re going to end up with a lower click-through rate than you should have.
To avoid doing this, any keywords should only be targeted within one page. If you do find that you have competing pages, join them together so that all the information is on one page. Or, if this isn’t something that you think you can do, find a new keyword to target for a specific category page.
SEO Cape Town Guide Conclusion
Hopefully, you have found this SEO Cape Town Category Pages Guide helpful, and have a better understanding of how you can create an excellent category page, that ranks well. Information architecture and granulation of categories are key.