Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be
-
My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today?
Thanks.
-
The goal should be the fewer clicks to get to the RIGHT item. (Which is subjective, for sure.) People will do more clicks to get to better data, however we shouldn't put them through any more clicks than needed - so, if you can do it in two, great, but if you need 3-4, then do 3-4.
The one thing I have noticed is that (depending on how big your site is) more clicks to get to deeper content can make it harder for search engines to get in and crawl those pages, which can reduce ranking opportunity.
-
Bob - that principal still applies and the quicker the visitor can be in front of a potential conversion/purchase - the better.
From ans SEO perspective though - do not rob yourself at creating as many as subpages of product pages as NATURALLY possible - splitting the products within niche - within niche.
Hope this helps.
P.S. - supply a Top 5-10 products which changes either monthly or quarterly with seasonal market trends with also boost conversion and overall appeal of your homepage.
your pal
Chenzo
-
All depends how you can categorize them. I have done/worked on sites that are more than 2 clicks and they do just fine with revenue.
Do the 20 categories have any parent categories you can put them into to put in the navigation? Also what about drop down navigation. This can allow them to dive deeper if they want or browse if they need to.
Can you give me some examples or a screenshot?
-
Can you search for the products on the home page?
How much filtering would it take to find the product I'm looking for?
During a presentation at Pubcon, several experts said that the 2-3 clicks or less rule isn't true, and that you can get people to click more as long as the experience was beneficial and enjoyable.
Terrible example: I took over a website that forced you to fill out a search box before you were ever able to see the inventory. To make matters worse, you actually had to fill one of the boxes before you could move ahead. It was terrible for people just trying to browse my products.
However, being able to filter my searches when clothes shopping online is a life saver. I'm a bigger guy, and don't like several colors. So, I'm able to filter by size, style, color, etc. to be able to find what I want. Each of those is a click. I'd say the same thing about computer hardware.
The only real way to tell is by testing the website. There are a few different programs out there where you can tell people the end result you want, and they have to try navigate the website. You'll get a recording of their screen, as well as them speaking about the process. These people are brutally honest, so try not to take offense ever.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?
Hi. I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume. Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK. Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours. I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants". Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson19922 -
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
How many Anchor text i can make on One page.
I would like to have clear answer in numbers i.e. 1, 2, 3, or 4 etc. of how many Anchor text i can make on One page.????
On-Page Optimization | | 1akal0 -
Are there any SEO benefits changing the default home page filename (index.htm) to a keyword rich filename
II'm a newbie. I have a website using the default home page filename: index.htm. I have total control over the web server. I was wondering whether I can get any SEO improvements for my main keyword if I change the default filename with a filename that contains the main keyword, like our-main-product.htm (doing the 301 redirect and changing the server search order, of course)?
On-Page Optimization | | Grafimart0 -
WordPress and category/subcategory landing pages
Hey, Here's my situation. I'm building a WordPress blog for product reviews of a certain niche. Current category setup is 4 main categories with 4-8 subcategories each. Each subcategory has a unique description that will help it become a landing page for certain keywords, after which it lists the posts from that subcategory. The posts will always be assigned to a sub-category, never to a main category. My issue is what to do with the main categories. They're fairly general so they're not really targeting any keywords, and don't have any unique descriptions attached to them. I was thinking of choosing between three options on designing the main category pages: List the subcategories + normal posts loop that bring the latest posts from the subcategories (may create a lot of duplicate content since the subcategory pages are also listing their posts) List only the subcategories (+ maybe just the latest post from each subcategory) Don't link the main categories at all, instead only use them to create dropdowns for the subcategories So, what would you choose, and why?
On-Page Optimization | | mihaiaperghis0 -
Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site. The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with? In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type? Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
On-Page Optimization | | KMack2