Category Advice

[crazymikesapps1]

Hello,

Our website is http://crazymikesapps.com and it is approximately 4 3/4 years old. Ths app review and app video blog started out as a hobby and  since 02/2011 it has been our full-time business.

However, we have been plagued with poor SEO decisions made in the early years as well as horrible webmaster and blog management.

We have been working very hard to correct all issues and started with a Yoast website audit 1 year ago. We implemented a site redesign and we are mostly happy with this for now.

However, we experience a 70% to 75% bounce rate daily and we have just begun using best SEO practices for blog post creation and I feel like our category taxonomy is horrible.

About 8 months ago I had 34,000 tags, which I deleted and now I believe we have around 34. I think we have gone the other way in using categories too much and we are under utilizing tags.

The problem is we have 2 different operating systems iOS and Android for App Categories that are extensive, we have added numerous sub categories per our Yoast report, but for starters we are not all about games apps and have 40 to 50 game sub categories.

My question is, looking at our Categories, would you suggest converting some into tags. Also we have a problem with iPhone Apps, iPad Apps, Android Apps, Kindle Fire Apps because we use these as tags for a filter feature for our app category pages. But, we also have Mobile Apps iPhone Apps, etc. as categories.

Any advice would be great and sorry for the bloviating.

thank you

Mike

[crazymikesapps1]

Okay, again, think with the mindset there is no stupid question when reading this next one

When you say "reviews and videos" would live in their own categories....do you mean, subordinate to apps  or, equal to apps with the name "app-reviews" "app-videos"

If you have not figured out by now, categories are really confusing to me!

thank you

Mike

[Carson-Ward]

Thanks, I appreciate that I was saying that because most of your content seems to be app reviews or articles about new apps (there's not a hard distinction in customers' minds) you could structure it like this:

Platform >> App Category 1 (E.g. Books & Reading)

Platform >> App Category 2 (E.g. Games)

Reviews and videos would simply live in their relevant categories. You'd then optimize the category (e.g. Games) to include the terms. For example, "iPhone Game Apps - Reviews, Videos, & Guides" or something. The sub-category Arcade would be optimized with the title "iPhone Arcade Games - Reviews, Videos & Guides". Again, I haven't done in-depth KWR so I might be a tad off on the titles, but this structure makes a lot more sense to me and I think it should be easier to maintain.

[crazymikesapps1]

Carson,

If you ever need an app reviewed please look me up.

But, can I get "crystal clear" on the hierarchy of just 1 platform. Your first paragraph in the last response was a bit confusing.

I want to use iPhone > Apps > (relevant app categories) subordinate to Apps

Reviews (subordinate to Apps) Videos (Subordinate to Apps) and while the keywords

iPhone/apps/reviews may not bring back a lot of searches, it is a very relevant and coveted keyword search for our industry. I have the front page as you suggest, but optimized for Awesome Apps - First then Top iPhone Apps, Top iPad Apps and Top Android Apps all achievable in terms of ranking, eventually.

And, yes I agree with you on the Top app list blog posts. We actually have a 2nd website that is going online in about a month that is an iOS and Google Play app discovery website. This is through development of iTunes and Googles API for their app stores. We will be providing daily/bi-daily pulls to provide app price drops, new apps, app updates, and apps that have gone free. Some of this functionality will be dovetailed into CrazyMikesapps to provide app lists in a much less laborious way.

again if you have it in you please respond to the iPhone platform taxonomy question if you don't mind.

and once again, thank you.

Mike

[Carson-Ward]

Where the domain is all about apps, I'm not sure you need an apps sub-category. I'd also put videos and reviews about apps in the category of app that you're reviewing. You can use a tag for video and review if you want, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

My logic here is that "iPhone reviews" doesn't have the intent of looking for apps - they're looking for reviews of the phone. "iPhone videos" is the same - mostly people looking for videos about the iPhone. As you can see by the top results, Google understands this. "iPhone app reviews" or "iPhone app videos" aren't very high-volume terms, and certainly not the type of hierarchy that users would find useful. Whether the app has a video or not is definitely secondary to me as a user - the first is the type of app. In other words, I might brows productivity apps, but probably not random video apps.

I'm not going to get into a full keyword audit, but just make sure the home page describes broadly what you do. "Reviews of the Best iPhone Apps and Android Apps" seems to describe your site fairly well, but I'll leave that up to you. I will say, though, that you should have a regularly updated post for top app types on the "best ___ apps" in that app type.

[crazymikesapps1]

Okay, the last question is moot when the categories are setup the way you suggested last. Here is a quick example of what I think you are suggesting: In the example below iPhone is the platform, Apps is sub category with books, games and education as sub categories of Apps, Reviews and Videos would be additional sub categories of iPhone. This makes sense from a keyword perspective for long tail keywords, iphone/apps/games, iPhone/apps/reviews or iPhone/apps/videos

Does this sound about right?

Carson, again thank you for your time and patience in conversing with me while trouble shooting my categories.

Mike

iPhone

Apps

Books

Games

Education

Reviews

Videos

[Carson-Ward]

I'm thinking that platform (+app type) is the most important hierarchy, and since platform is always a requisite it should be the primary category. For example, /android/arcade-games . This also gives you a slight advantage in ranking for category terms once you optimize the page to target "Android arcade games".

I'm not sure what you mean by the last question. In my head it's just a sub-category for app categories within the platform. You may one day also want to build out the primary category pages to feel like sub-sections of the site.

[crazymikesapps1]

Carson,

I really appreciate your time, you have no idea how frustrated I am. I am still trying to wrap my arms around for example, how will someone find iPhone games only if I incorporate platform into the structure? Currently the only way to do this is through Cat+Tag plugin filtering.

And I totally agree with you that we have bloated categories and I have already targeted around 30+ that will be converted into tags. I will probably convert the tags for iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle Fire back to categories.

As far as combining Android & Kindle Fire and iPhone and iPad, I would not do this because iPhone also includes iPod Touch and iPad is a tablet, thus giving us more keyword long tail possibilities and really the same for Android and Kindle Fire. We may work in Windows eventually, but we are 2 people and we already do so much.But, we need some SEO structuring help so we can move ahead. The problem is I started this website as a hobby and it has never been run correctly. We have 1000's of posts to fix, suffered a manual action back in 2010 and both Penguin and Panda hits due to ignorant SEO work I was subbing out.

And, funny thing is we have 2 YouTube channels with around an average of 500,000 views monthly off our 3,600+ app review videos (we put up 2 to 4 a day). But, we make squat off of YouTube. So we are working to make the website a traffic revenue model to provide for our income, instead of our current app video demo product (we make demo videos for developers.

One last question, any ideas how to implement filtering our search based on our platforms when we have 1 set of app categories for 4 platforms? I feel stupid asking this, especially since I have spent so much time trying to get our categories straightened out.

thank you very much!

Mike

[Carson-Ward]

Happy to help where I can.

From a user perspective, the most important thing is platform. People don't really care about the source of the app, and most apps are available on Amazon and Play anyway for Android. They certainly don't just care about game apps - they care about game apps they can actually use on their device. (Do think long and hard about whether to differentiate iPad/iPhone and Android/Fire or to combine them.)

A lot of people will tell you never to add one post to multiple categories for duplicate content issues, but this advice is misguided. There is no intra-site "duplicate content penalty." Further, these categories should actually be differentiated. Yoast is right that you don't want fully-duplicate categories, but I don't see these as duplicate if you optimize them properly. I alluded to this in my prior post. It's not just "Games" in both - the title include "Android Games" and "iPhone Games."

These categories aren't duplicate from a user perspective either, right? Again, you're categorizing posts to filter out content that doesn't matter to a given user.

I still believe price should not be a category. For most users it needlessly complicates the IA. Rather, post about free apps to relevant categories. At most, use a tag to tag apps that are free.

I'm sorry if this seems to conflict with prior advice, but I feel fairly confident with technical, structural, and IA issues - particularly when they touch on UX. Yoast is competent so maybe it's a matter of context and communication. I suspect we'd agree on most of this, even if we expressed it differently.

Ultimately I would still recommend consolidating categories, removing a bunch of them (really, do people look for "Labor Day Apps? :), and breaking it out by platform. It makes more sense for users and for search engines.

[crazymikesapps1]

Carson,

Thank you for the deep answers back to my question. I am still confused with categorization, but think we are getting closer to the correct taxonomy. We revamped them a few weeks back, getting rid of overlap and we know we have more of this to do. Specifically converting some categories into tags.

My question is, we had Yoast do a website audit a year ago and they encouraged us to simplify by app-type, platform, price, category, etc. The confusion on our side comes with the fact that we have 4 different platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire. We had separate app categories for each, but the site was packed with duplicate categories.

I am struggling with overlap now as far as device. For example we have iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle Fire Tags and we tag all apps as 1 of those for every review. We do this so we can use a Cat+Tag search feature to create searches by device and category. But, we have as you pointed out iTunes iPhone, iTunes iPad, Google Play, Amazon app stores, which are the same as the tags. We could not figure out how to setup the categories to have the correct filtered results for say: iPhone, Games, that are free.

I appreciate you taking time to dig into our mess and would love any follow up advice you could provide.

thank you again.

Mike

[Carson-Ward]

Here's my consideration on whether to create a category or not. The answer to all would ideally be "yes."

1. Would a post/page (either one-time or regularly updated) be insufficient to talk about this topic?
2. Does the term receive significant search volume?
3. Can I cover the topic well enough and regularly enough to satisfy users and search engines?
4. Does this category have value to a user? Would a user think, "I want to see all the posts about ___"
5. Does the category avoid heavy overlap with another category?

This mostly apply to tags as well, but I tend to use tags to talk about themes (e.g. an ongoing story in the news), brands, etc.

Alright, so those are the abstract rules as far as I can think about them. Let's look at some examples.

• iTunes iPhone apps: Seems like a good one. You can't cover it in a post, there's plenty of search volume around iPhone apps, there's plenty to talk about, users would want to see only iPhone apps. I do think, though, that you have a ton of overlap. There's a category for "iPhone app reviews" and another for the type of app it is.
• Divorce apps: Kill it. Of the 3 posts in there, only 1 appears even somewhat relevant. Search volume is negligible, and you're not really helping anyone who navigates here.
• Cartoon Network: Should probably be a tag, but only if a user would find it useful.
• Paid: Not sure that people are itching to find paid apps - and they're likely to find the Play/iTunes store anyway. Actually more people look for "best paid apps" than for "paid apps,"  This is one that should be covered by a post rather than a category.
• Top rate: this one's tricky because it's tempting to think there's plenty of people searching for "best apps" and "top apps." Here's what I'd do instead: kill the category; post a monthly list of the best apps overall, and update it. Then get more specific: the "10 best tower defense games for android" and such. I'd kill it because every single post in the category would overlap.

I also noticed that your categories are not optimized. The "free" category, for example, is simply titled "Free." You'd want something more like, "Free Apps for iPhones and Android Phones." (just an example) There are a number of plugins (including one by Yoast) that allow you to set custom category title tags, which I'd highly recommend.

I can't go through each of these for a Q&A, but my structure would look a bit like this:

• Device

• App type (includes reviews, news, commentary, etc.)

• News

• Industry news (because all new apps go under app type)

• Device news

When you're deciding on whether a type of app deserves its own category it's hard to know whether a user would find it useful, and you can make the argument for really obscure things that 1/1000 people would actually click on. Instead, start with search volume, and aim for simplicity over comprehensiveness.

If you do change category hierarchy, make sure to find category pages where you're receiving search volume. It's not likely, but you don't want to be moving any structure around if it's working well for you.

You're asking a big question, so I apologize for the long answer. Hopefully this gets you started. Let me know if you have a few specific questions