When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?

[the-gate-films]

We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have.

Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products.

My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?

[the-gate-films]

All the categories are based on what my customers search for in my nav or based on what discovery related keywords they search for.

My worry is that this is endless, as there are literally thousands of categories that I could be creating.

If you have 5 or more products that are relevant to a keyword, should you not create a category for your customers to find, rather than just a product page, (offering your customers more options)?

Thanks,

[Everett]

As MrLeeB said, users may not be able to find what they're looking for and there would likely be some unnecessary wasting of "crawl budget", which could have an negative impact on indexation and rankings.

As Mike R. said, it would probably be terrible for the user-experience, and thus rankings and conversion rates, if you had too many categories.

For many years eCommerce businesses have built out category pages based on internal-searches performed by visitors, as well as the keywords they used to find the site on search engines. When used sparingly, this strategy can help inform the category structure of the site while offering a landing page for high-value keywords.

It can help copywriters understand which pain points and questions are trying to be solved, thus which should be called-out as benefits of the products within the category. It can even inform which products you source or develop to sell.

When abused, like when software, website code or database logic automates the process of creating these pages, the results can be devastating to the business.

After a few months of long-tail growth, the site may experience a major ranking loss across the entire domain for all but clearly branded and hyper-long-tail searches. If you are in the game of burn-n-churn, it might work for you provided you pay for some seed-traffic to build out the keyword lists.

...just in case you were thinking down that path.

[MikeRoberts]

Are the categories helpful for the customer? On one hand you don't want to lump too many things into one category when they can be broken out into more granular categories that better serve visitors. On the other hand, it won't help you or your customers if you get too granular and break everything out into categories based on the mot insignificant details.

While keyword cannibalization is a concern, serving your visitors/customers what they want and how they prefer to see it will likely improve metrics more on your site than concerning yourself with a nebulous concept like "how many categories is too many." If you have 200 different categories but they are well targeted and you want to add another (or ten more) that are also equally well targeted, then why wouldn't you do it?

[MrLeeB]

Hey Steven,

Good question! I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this too.

When it comes to categories, I think as long as there's no keyword cannibalisation taking place and users can still easily find what they're looking for within 1 or 2 clicks from the homepage, there's not too much of an issue with creating them. But it could affect how many of your product pages get indexed, as crawlers might use their resource indexing your categories instead. That might not be the case or 100% correct, but it's something to bear in mind.

As long as your categories are logical, make sense to the end user and don't overlap with other categories much, you should be fine.