How to Optimise Category Pages for E-commerce SEO

Specific product pages can rank well, but category pages tend to rank for high volume terms. Optimising your category pages can:

• Generate traffic
• Boost brand visibility
• Improve user experience with seamless navigation
• Improve site structure and search engine crawlability with internal links

Best Practices to Optimise your Category Pages for E-Commerce SEO

There are some SEO best practices you should follow when it comes to optimising your category pages for your e-commerce site. These steps include:

Keyword Research

Every successful SEO campaign starts with keyword research to understand customers search intent and aid in the structuring of your category pages. Keyword research helps identify user intent, competitor gaps, and product attributes. Target long-tail keywords to match user intent for low volume searches with high conversions.

Organise Your Categories

It's important that you organise your categories logically, creating a hierarchy to improve user experience. You can do this by using content hubs to build your store site structure. This involves grouping related products under broad categories, helping search engines understand the structure, while helping potential customers find what they are looking for. 

High Quality and Valuable Content

A successful category page isn't simply a load of products, it should provide the user with valuable, offering high quality content that guides your buyer through their purchasing journey. Ensure each category page has:

• Brief overview highlighting key benefits and features
• FAQ to address common questions
• Customer reviews to build trust and credibility

Improve Navigation

Your store navigation should be seamless and intuitive, helping visitors find what they are looking for quickly. Some things you can do to improve navigation includes:

• Add breadcrumbs to help visitors understand their location in your store
• Navigation menus enable visitors to find relevant categories and products
• Category recommendations help keep user engaged, encouraging exploration
• Internal links provide visitors with further suggestions and articles that may benefit them

User-Experience Practices

Search engines today pay attention to user experience when ranking websites, including e-commerce stores. User experience (UX) ensures visitors can navigate your site with ease, find what they are looking for, and make purchases without frustration. 

• Use a simple design with minimal distractions
• Have a consistent layout
• Provide visitors with options to filter and sort products based on preference 

Accessibility

Accessibility is essential to user experience. It ensures your site is accessible for all users, including those with hearing difficulties, limited mobility, and poor vision or blindness. 

• Alt text for images helps visually impaired users understand the context of your images
• Readability – use contrasting colours with legible fonts to improve readability
• Ensure your elements can be navigated using a keyboard

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is essential to your category page, improving relevance and visibility, while boosting usability. On-page optimisation should include:

• Title tags using targeted keywords – no more than sixty characters, designed to capture attention
• H1 tags – communicate the main topic for search engines and users
• Meta Descriptions – these influence click through rates. It's a summary of the page that should be no more than one hundred and sixty characters
• URL – ensure your URL is clean, readable, descriptive, and keyword rich to help users and search engines understand the content of the page
• Schema Markup – structure your data to appear in rich snippets in search results pages

Conclusion

Optimising your category pages for your e-commerce store is a strategic process that involves technical optimisation and content creation, along with strategic planning. Follow the recommended steps above or get a customised SEO strategy for your e-commerce store by contacting Genie Crawl now.