Keyword Cannabalisation & Ecommerce

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I have an Ecommerce site, with a lot of similar products - for example leather office chairs - 80 products all very similar..

We worked to optimise product pages for longer tail phrases such as black executive leather office chair, but we now have different product pages trying to rank for these longer tail phrases as well.

Now I'm trying to decide whether to focus on some priority product pages - adding lots of useful content/videos etc to try & boost the ones we want to rank for the long tail.

OR whether to focus on the category page, and getting this to rank for all keyword variations...

I'm a it stuck - any advice is welcome!

[Andrew-SEO]

I would do a bit of everything. Make your product pages as comprehensive and media rich as possible. Include subsections with relevant key terms.

Make your category pages comprehensive and make sure they reference and describe what the category is about. Including sub heading and relevant information.

Do good internal linking to products and link away to relevant blog articles about new developments in that type of product range.

After that just let Google do what it does. Your time would be better spend moving on to the next category than to micro-refine what is probably already a good job.

Sorry if this isn't the best answer - that's just my opinion.

Good Luck!

[Everett]

Hello Becky,

Rest assured that your problem has been encountered by many other eCommerce merchants, some with much larger versions of this problem. Imagine a hardware store trying to figure out how to canonicalize a few hundred thousand nuts, bolts and screws.

Most of the time, the best thing to do is make it a product variant that you can select from the page. However, if there are a handful of variants that have significantly more search volume than the others, you may want to spin those off onto their own pages. So the best answer I can give is: It depends.

If you only have 80 of them, that's not at such a scale that you couldn't write unique content for all of them. But chances are you don't need 80 unique product detail pages for the same chair.

Does this help? I'm happy to provide more input if you share further details about the search-share and sales-share of each variant.