Product Pages Outranking Category Pages

[ShawnHerrick]

Hi,

We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs.

We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page.

Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed.

Thanks!

[MichaelYork]

Hi Shawn,

It is most likely going to be one of two things:

1. The On-Page optimisation for the Category pages is not direct enough to rank for all product pages and therefore you would need to re-focus the on page optimization and messaging to the products you are directly aiming to rank for.
2. You have built backlinks or internal links to the product pages so they hold more authority (you can check the PR and PA/DA of your pages vs. category pages for an idea)

Possible solutions are:

1. Re-optimise the category pages to be relevant for the products you want to rank
2. Build more powerful backlinks and authority to the category pages
3. Make category pages canonical page for product pages (probably not the ideal solution but just a thought).

I guess the real question is why wouldn't you want clients seeing the exact product they are trying to search for? If they are searching XL Blue Widgets and you would prefer they go to the Widgets page, then it doesn't make too much sense?

Hope this offers some insight.

[MoosaHemani]

There was a time when I used to face this problem on regular basis as I had lots of clients all from the eCommerce sites.

This usually happens when your internal linking strategy is not satisfactory. The idea is to reconsider your internal linking strategy and fix the problems and you will see categories will started rank for their key phrases.

Hope this helps!

[ShawnHerrick]

That is a good question, but the reason is because we might have several different products in one category and we want visitors searching for a generic product type to see our entire selection of that type of product, rather than just one. For example, Widgets might be a category page with 10 different widgets on it, but Awesome XL Blue Widgets might be a specific product. If someone just searches "widgets," then we want them directed to our widgets page, whereas if someone searched for a specific product name, we'd want them going to the Awesome Company XL Blue Widgets page, or another specific product they might search for.

That is definitely helpful though, thanks!

[ShawnHerrick]

Thanks for the quick answer. That would support Michael's second point up above as well.

[MichaelYork]

No problems, happy to help out!