Webshop landing pages and product pages

[Mat_C]

Hi,

I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products.

Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. Those archives should be the first result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. Thus, they should also provide the best user experience. The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. In a shop, your products might change, making your categories more
important to optimize. Otherwise, you’d be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.

If you sell books and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term books. You should optimize them for their specific author, title and content, and link them all to the ‘books’ category page. That way the category page can rank for ‘books’, while the product page can rank for more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.

Regards and have a nice day

[Mat_C]

Hi Roman,

Thanks for your answer. I share your point of view, but in this case I think it's a little bit different. Let me clarify it more, since my first question was too brief.

For example: if you have a webshop that specializes in machinery, you can have a category page for garden equipment which can be optimized for with this term. A subcategory could be lawn mowers, which can then be optimized too. For all the different individual lawn mowers, you can then use the specific type of lawn mower for optimizing on the product page itself.

In the case of the webshop that I am optimizing, it is different. The company sells books, e-books, software, magazines and trainings. These product types are all in the main navigation.
However, you can also use another main filter, being all of the areas of expertise. So you can choose 'Legal', 'Financial', 'Insurances' and so on. If you use this filter, you get all types of products (books, software,..) for these areas.

This gives two problems:

1. Optimizing on the main navigation pages, for example books, is difficult because I can't use keywords that are specific enough to get the right visitors to the webshop. If I would use the keyword phrases 'buy books', 'buy legal books', 'buy insurance books', then these are either too narrow or too broad.
2. Optimizing on the areas (legal, financial,...) is of course possible (for example buy financial books and financial software). There are subcategories in these areas (in the area 'Financial' for example 'VAT', 'Company taxes', 'Customs' are some of the subcategories) which I can optimize too, but still this will be too broad. The difference with the example of the lawn mowers is that every lawn mower does the same thing, cutting grass. With the products on this webshop, most of the products have very specific subjects with very specific keywords (with enough search volume) and the only possible level to optimize is the product level. For example in the area Financial > VAT there is a book about the VAT tarifs, and a book about VAT in the service sector. These two products handle about VAT, but both have specific keywords that I can optimize for.

To resume, I think I lose a lot of potential traffic if I don't optimise the product pages, since these products all have specific subjects. Changing the structure of the webshop isn't an option on the moment, and even if it would be I wouldn't go deeper then 3 levels.

I hope the question is more clear right now. Thanks for checking!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Ok I understand, so in your case, what I would do is add some custom taxonomy to reflect the structure that you want to rank for.

I mean probably you will have to build a structure based on the navigation mainly focused on the users So you just follow the traditional silo structure, but also you can build a structure based on what mentioned.

Let assume you have product category called Books so in this category, you will have all your books available, but in the other hands you probably will want to target user interested in accounting solutions, so now you can add a tag called accounting solutions.

On this accounting solution, taxonomy you can group all the products to this target niche and this can Include

• Software for Accounting
• Books for Accounting
• Guides or Training or whatever you want

The main Idea behind is both structures can work together, in fact, is very common on big e-com websites manage several taxonomies in the same space. Keep mind that my comments are based on my experience and knowledge. There are many technical aspects that you have to keep in mind much of them related to Platform that you are using.

Wordpress and Shopify don't represent a big challenge, in the other hands Magento was a complete nightmare (at least in my case)

Hope this Information will help you

[Mat_C]

Hi Roman,

Thanks for the answer. I go into this question again, since just adapting the taxonomy and possibly adding some tags doesn't resolve the problem. It improves the UX, and creating a new structure was part of the planning anyway.

I just think we will be missing out on a lot of traffic because there are a lot of high volume keywords with low difficulty that are only applicable for the product itself (and not for a category, subcategory or tag).

There will be a copywriter assigned to write descriptions for every product anyway, exactly because of the fact that these products are so specific and need more explanation. If we take the keywords for a specific product and integrate them in the product description, I think we can surely rank with these product pages.

Do I see this wrong?

Thanks!