One of the most important tasks when creating an online store is setting up the right categories for your business model. In this post we’ll explain how to do it and show you some essential tools to make the job easier.
A website should organize its categories in a way that makes navigation easy for users and achieves the best indexing by search engines, always with the right focus on the products we offer. To do this, we need to pay close attention to users’ wants, needs and search habits.
We need to ask ourselves: what search terms would a user looking to buy our products use? We recommend avoiding industry jargon, since it’s known by professionals, not by users. But also: what search terms are my online competitors using? If your competitors have been selling online for a while, they’ve most likely already found the best keywords, so don’t overthink it: look at what they’ve done and draw your own conclusions. Let’s start with a couple of Google tools that will be very useful. The first is the Keyword Planner, to find the terms users type when searching for your products. If you’ve never used it, you can see what it is and how it works in this Google tutorial. You also have Google Trends, which shows search trends over a given period in a chart that lets you compare different terms. This way you’ll know when during the year your products are most in demand and can use that data to run targeted campaigns throughout the year.
Once we’ve found the search terms that matter most, we need to set up a hierarchy:
How do you organize keywords into a category hierarchy?
The best way to explain is with a practical example. Let’s say we want to open an online costume store. After using the Keyword Planner, we get the following statistics, showing the keyword we’ll use for each category and its average monthly searches:
| cheap costumes | 18100 |
| Halloween costumes | 18100 |
| carnival costumes | 8100 |
| costumes online | 6600 |
| costume store | 3600 |
| kids’ costumes | 2400 |
| baby costumes | 2400 |
| funny costumes | 2400 |
| animal costumes | 1900 |
| pirate costumes | 1300 |
| superhero costumes | 1000 |
| movie costumes | 1000 |
| buy costumes online | 720 |
| women’s costumes | 720 |
| Christmas costumes | 590 |
| hippie costumes | 590 |
| witch costumes | 480 |
| Disney costumes | 320 |
| horror costumes | 320 |
| girls’ costumes | 260 |
| boys’ costumes | 110 |
| men’s costumes | 110 |
| Three Wise Men costumes | 90 |
| viking costumes | 50 |
Now let’s look at where to place these keywords: which will be categories, which subcategories, and which we’ll use as homepage keywords or for targeted campaigns. This list shows the chosen keywords and their average monthly searches. An important one is “cheap costumes”, with an average of 18,100 searches. Where do we put it? There are two options: use it for the homepage if we really are an online costume store with very competitive prices, or create a dedicated category for these costumes, either because they’re from past seasons or surplus stock we want to clear.
Next in importance are “Halloween costumes” and “carnival costumes”. If we enter them into Google Trends, the tool mentioned above, we’ll see, as the image shows, that they’re seasonal. These are keywords to push at certain times of year, so we’ll use them for dedicated categories and optimize their SEO at least three months before the sales period reflected in the chart’s yearly search peaks (October for “Halloween costumes” and February for “carnival costumes”):
Following the order of the list, we have “costumes online” and “costume store”. These should be used on the homepage, since it’s our website’s front page and both fit there as terms that reflect the online store’s overall focus.
Next are “kids’ costumes” and “baby costumes”, perfect for two categories focused on each.
The next five, “funny costumes”, “animal costumes”, “pirate costumes”, “superhero costumes” and “movie costumes”, should be subcategories of the categories we set as main ones.
Clearly, “women’s costumes” will be a main category containing all the costume subcategories for women.
“Christmas costumes” works the same way as “carnival costumes”. We can keep a category all year round and put more work into it ahead of the December sales period to get the most out of it.
The next ones, “hippie costumes”, “witch costumes”, “Disney costumes” and “horror costumes”, will be included by gender within the main categories, since these are aimed at women, men, girls, boys and babies.
Next we have “girls’ costumes”, “boys’ costumes” and “men’s costumes”, which will be main categories holding the relevant costumes in subcategories organized by theme.
The remaining ones, “Three Wise Men costumes” and “viking costumes”, would be subcategories. The first goes under the main category “Christmas costumes”, and the second under the relevant gender categories; that is, we have viking costumes for men and boys but not for women and girls, so they’ll be included in the “men’s costumes” and “women’s costumes” categories.
If you know your business model and work on your keywords, you’ll know how to categorize your online store
In short: following this example, we’ll have main categories —women’s costumes, men’s costumes, kids’ costumes, boys’ costumes, girls’ costumes, baby costumes, Halloween costumes, carnival costumes and Christmas costumes— with the remaining keywords from the list as subcategories, always as consistently as possible to make navigation easy and to build categories and subcategories around keywords with meaningful search volume. This way, SEO can be worked using the same words in content, titles, meta tags, URLs, headings, etc., creating the kind of consistency Google loves.
