Ecommerce Traffic increase - moving from 500 to 1000 words/category

[BobGW]

Hello,

We have found traffic to increase upon adding content to category descriptions. Our category pages are stronger than our product pages.

Our main categories (the fourty that are in the navigation) have 500 words on them, carefully written helpful content.

We are trying to decide whether to increase (for these 40 categories) to 1000 words per category. Do you think this would increase traffic ? Is it a good idea?

Thanks!

[DougRoberts]

I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that Bob.

It's not just about getting more search traffic, you want more traffic that converts, achieived the goals of the site. The last thing you want to do is to add more content to these pages, and find that your conversions/sales go down.

What's the engagement like on these pages? Do people read this content? What is the exit rate and bounce rate like on these pages? Segment the different types of traffic in your analytics to see how these pages may be affecting direct/referral traffic, new vs returning visitors etc.

What is the goal/purpose of the category pages. Does adding additional content help achieve the page and site goals? If the page's function is mainly navigational, to help people find what they are looking for, then you'll need to be careful that you don't compromise that. Make sure people can still find what they need to find!

You say you've got 40 different categories to play with. I'd look to conduct some tests so that you're not guessing. You can always look at increasing the amount of content on one or two of these and see how it affects things. You might want to carry out some split testing too to see what the impact is on your conversion goals.

[DennisSeymour]

Ill just give a practical response based from my own ecom projects

Category optimisation DOES wonders for impressions and SEO. You've seen it work.

In my case, increasing the content length DID help get more impressions but not conversions (directly)

If it helps people to make choices for products, go for it. If you are just increasing the length just for the sake of SEO, that's where you will need to make a judgement call.

Consider your traffic data and conversion funnels that you have right now and make the decision based on that.

Hell, if I was asked this personally, Id just say go for it, test it and see what happens, but like Doug mentioned, it might make you lose money if you are already converting well and that's the last thing we want to happen