Where to Put Content For Product Pages - How To Structure Website?
-
Currently we have 300+ products. We do not have a CMS or Ecommerce site at the time being for certain reasons. Currently our site is set up with content on almost every single page. The main catagory page, explains everything on the main page, then our products page has a lot of text too. But right now, it seems as if our main pages are only ranking.
In the near future I will be using a cms and purchasing a template. I noticed most Ecommerce style websites have just the product with the name and price, then when they click on the product it brings you to that page with a brief product description and some photos.
My question is, does each page need content? Or can just the product page itself have content?
For example, say we have a link to SHOES. Then the shoes page displays dress, casual and athletic. Then the athletic page brings you to a page with, running, tennis, cross training shoes, and so forth. Is it best to write content on this main catagory page? If so, how much?
Or should we focus on putting content on the actual page of the individual product? Along with pictures and specifications?
I know Content is Key and we are doing pretty well at that, however, I am starting to wondering if we have to much content or too similar content.
What is the best structure to try and recieve GREAT organic rankings?
-
I am very much a novice and have had some success with cms systems. I have found they offer a variety of options and are very intuitive. Some even talk about trade offs regarding different styles and formatting issues. There are a lot of great cms platforms out there for you to use, I am sure you will find one which will work great for you. Dave
-
Cody, it was my understanding it does not matter how many directories deep a page is located, but instead how well it is linked to.
Using your first example (example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html), if that page was linked to from the home page, it can perform very well on SERP. It would beat the second example if that was not linked to from the home page.
If a user actually had to click through all those links, then yes it would be inconvenient for the user and be buried content which would not be crawled as often.
-
You are right about the ecommerce layouts... typically product organization is by category then you can click in deeper for the product detail. Categories are commonly nested as well... like your Shoes category branching to dress, casual, and athletic.
Most decent ecommerce platforms will allow a full description on the product detail page and a short description for display on the category page. Furthermore, category pages themselves will often have a description/content field of some sort. Obviously, you want to avoid duplicate content issues, but you can use the combination of the category descriptions and product short descriptions on your list pages for ranking on the category. Then, you can use your product pages to rank as well. Again, you can keep the content different between the short and long product descriptions.
I've seen sites handle the category pages without much content; however I don't think you can go wrong with the additionally ranked pages if you set them up correctly.
Also, check to see if you can get an ecommerce template that supports related products - this will help with your internal linking. You can also check out up-sell/cross-sell areas of the product page as well.
Do you have a link we could check out for content suggestions? That may give a better idea of why the product pages aren't ranking well for you.
John
-
Good decision on the CMS. You'll love it. Be sure to use it to give your product pages relevant URLs, Titles, and other good on-page SEO attributes. This will very much increase their likelihood of getting picked up. Also, if it has canonicalization features built in, these are often good for e-commerce sites. You'll have a lot of dynamically generated duplicate content across categories.
My advice to you would be to build your site to give your user's the best possible experience first, then worry about search engine rankings second.
Think to yourself - "If I were a user on this site, would additional content on what this page is about be helpful on this page?" If Yes, go ahead and do it. If No, you might want to leave it out.
If it were me, I don't know how much useful content you can put on a category page alone. It might even be distracting. At this point your goal is to get your users to clickthrough to the next step in the buying process. This usually doesn't mean reading something. It usually means clicking a picture or link, right? I might just leave that one alone, but that's totally your call. It depends on the situation.
Keep in mind that the further down in your hierarchy you put your product pages the lesser their importance is in the eyes of Google.
For example, if I have a tennis racket I am selling, the second of the examples below is going to appear more important, because it is closer to my root domain. The flatter you can make your site architecture while still providing a good user experience, the better results you are likely to see in the search engines.
example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html
vs.
example.com/tennis/tennisracket.html
Hope this helps get your wheels turning.
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
-
For an e-commerce product category page that has several funnels to specific products, for SEO purposes does it matter whether the category page's overview content is above or below those funnels?
We manage an e-commerce site. On a category page, there are several funnels to specific products. We moved the category overview content below those funnels to make it easier for users to quickly get to products. Seems more user friendly to me, but could that move of the main content to the lower part of the page be a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | PKI_Niles0 -
Ecommerce- Keyword use in Product links on Category page
I'm wondering how Keyword use in Product links on Category pages can affect a pages rank? I have 1 site where this seems to be an issue but not on all categories. For this site, a site: keyword search ranks the category page as no.1 in the SERPS but a non-site: search shows 1 of the many products within the category as the highest ranking page (currently 20 in google) on this site. This product is probably the least likely to generate a conversion due to it's cost so this is less than ideal. The plural search of the keyword shows the category page and it ranks higher than the keyword itself (currently 9 in google) Category name and URL = keyword. The category is paginated with 12 products per page. Product URL and anchor text is brand-model-type (where type = keyword) I'd like to keep the product URLs and anchors as they are if I can as they are well searched terms themselves but I want to optimize a category page to rank for the keyword itself. Have any of you overcome a similar issue? Would adding more text to the category page dilute the issue?
On-Page Optimization | | MarcOZ0 -
Duplicate Page Titles? I thought this was good structure....
I have several warnings for duplicate page title.... I thought that I had good structure, but I guess I am doing something wrong. On my website (http://www.farnorthkennel.com), I am getting duplicate page errors for pages like this: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/hazel
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska
and
http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/emerald I thought that this sort of structure was a good idea since the end page is different. Should each page be set up right after the original domain name? I'm new at this....0 -
Can rel="canonical" refer to another website page?
I want to republish the post from another website with their permission and want to abide by Google guidelines. Google guidelines is clear when you are using the same content at different parts of the same site however not when using it on another site in a legitimate way. Is there some way to use rel="canonical" refer to another website page of you are reproducing the content from same page?
On-Page Optimization | | h1seo0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Jquery in top of page vs text on bottom page
Is it the best way to use jquery sliders on the top of your page to still get all your text above the fold and score in search engines? for example: http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... is much better to score high ranks in search engines than http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-conte... ?? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | HMK-NL0 -
How to SEO a website that is being help back by duplicate content?
We have over 20 websites that sell property. Each website is targeted to a different country. People advertise to sell their property. The websites are not getting to page 1 for the terms we want probably because of duplication issues. If we compare one website with another country website on www.duplicatecontent.net we find it is nearly 70% between one and the other. So we trying to understand why this is. If someone wanted to sell a property in Spain we would create an advert for them but rather than putting this on the back-end of the Spain website it goes on a separate website that does on all countries. We have tried to put nofollow tags so that the country specific website gets acknowledgement of being the original website but the rankings for key-terms will not rise and the duplication % remains nearly 70%. Can anyone suggest the best way forward?
On-Page Optimization | | Feily0 -
What is the best practice for optimizing international websites? We operate a .co.uk and .com and obviously content is similar.
We have two (and soon to be more) international websites, all in English. The sites in question are WebHostingBuzz.com and WebHostingBuzz.co.uk. Obviously content is similar as we're providing a similar service but from different locations and different prices. What is best practice here? Should we completely re-write the .co.uk content (this is the newer site) so it isn't penalized for scraping? Any hints/tips would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | mdrussell0