Do product sub-categories compete with top level categories for rankings?

[Jason-Reid]

Hi All,

This question is for an eccomerce site with a very large sku count (over 3million individual sku's). As the person responsible for SEO on the site, I am often playing catchup to some of our web merchandisers. My question is this: Will creating sub-catagories that have a page title and H1 tag that include the top level category name plus a refinement be competing with each other and the top level category for rankings?

The products that I am specifically talking about are Funko Pops! (some of you might collect them). There are different sub-sets of Funko Pops such as Funko Pop!: Rocks, Funko Pop!: Movies, Funko Pop! Television ect. Im worried that if I create many pages with these titles/h1 tags that they will end up competing for the query "funko pops"... something I worked hard to rank above Amazon for.  Any thoughts would be appreciated!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Jason,

Don't tear apart your subcategories into subdomains. It is much likely to perform poorly and cannibalize your search terms.

I'm working in XXXL e-commerce where there are over 30 subdomains for each country. We found that this configuration isn't good enough to compete with other big players, on google search.
So, we've run some test and found that moving from subdomain to subfolder into a bigger subdomain pays in traffic.

That said, I'd focus more on checking what your main competitors are doing. There might be a lot of opportunities optimizing what content you are offering users.
A tip, check how their and you are rendering for mobile views. There might be a low hanging fruit over there. Unless you are already doing that

Hope that helps.
Best luck.
GR