How should I deal with this page?

[ATP]

Hey Mozzers,

I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example.

I have the current structure

Parent Category - Shoes

Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc

Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses

There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this.

The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell.

My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it.

I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better.

The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword.

The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites.

There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem?

With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by

1. Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories
2. Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems.

However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress.

I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice.

As always thanks for any input.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks for the great reply!  I think your assessment is correct!

[ATP]

Hey guys thanks for your replies.

@Dmitri

I wouldn''t say im missing the bigger SEO picture. I'm just having to deal with the current situation in an orderly manner. When I took over the website, the previous SEO's were tracking hundreds of pointless keywords (just because they ranked for them, but we all know a keyword with 0 searches a month is hardly a model to build a business on), all categories and sub categories had no content except products. There were no canonical urls, poor navigation under optimised images etc.

My tasks thus far has been to sort a website out containing hundreds of pointless thin content pages establish new relevant categories and basically start over. But I have to do all this within the a 5 year old template with no real capital to spend. (Welcome to my hell lol)

My first job was to make the site UX & UI more friendly an I implemented drop down nav menu's, categories than make sense from SERPs and a user point of view. I removed colums to widen pages and made products and content easier to view. Cleared out 5 URLS displaying exact copies of our website. Then writing content for all the sub category pages and actually doing the basic technical SEO stuff on them all. I have now started on the products but obviously there are hundreds to work through. As such social media, backlinking, article writing has taken a back seat.

Because of this my keyword aims havn't been to rank top 10, even top 20 in some cases, but to establish a page for each keyword we would want to target, optimised it and get it achieving some form of ranking even if its 20-50th and sort out organised spreadsheets to begin tracking changes and rankings. Once I have managed to optimise the whole site, and remove the last of the very poor content. I will move onto supporting articles and back links and beginning driving ranks up.

In regards to merging the article page - i agree. the traffic isn't helping me, hence the suggestion to remove the page, but the content is good, relevant and unique, so my logic was that removing the page, accepting the loss of traffic but using what has proven exceptional content on the page would remove a competing url, remove pointless traffic targeted at similar keywords, and give a content boost to the main page giving it more chance of ranking for keywords that will convert.

@CleverPHD

The sub-categories are carefully chosen and we have made every effort to write good unique content for them all. I do think you make a good point however on products being in multiple sub-categories could cause low quality issue and maybe we should look to remove some that are showing the least promise to boost those with the most. But as we have been able to rank all these pages as high as 12th without any real back-linking or supporting articles I dont feel this is causing too many issues and can only get stronger when we have the time for backlinking. They are not loosing ranks and are remaining stable.

It is only this 1 parent category that wont rank, even badly as we appreciate its a highly competitive keyword, it shares no common products, has unique content.

You suggestions are exactly how we came up with many of our categories. But I agree that we do need more hubpages targeting wider terms to redirect to our products, at this time whilst im still working through thousands of products its not possible time wise.

I think what you gentlemen have highlighted is that I am probably focusing on obtaining some form of ranking to early, I should continue my effort across the whole site and improve it as a whole b and organising it into a manageable state before worrying about obtaining mediocre rankings that will come naturally when ive completed the mountain of work ahead of me.

[CleverPhD]

Short version answer:

I like your option #2 and think you are on the right track there.

Long version:

It sounds like you have a lot of category and subcategory pages that are of low quality due to the type of traffic and/or due to the amount of content that is on a given page.   Additionally, if you have product information on these pages and a product could fit into several sub categories, you have a lot of duplicate information on these pages, which adds to the low quality of content issue.  This also increases the number of pages Google has to crawl on your site at any one time and so Google is spending all this extra time crawling pages on your site that do not matter, vs the pages that do.

The pages probably ranked for a bit, but then did not do as well as when Google finally sorted it all out, as Google saw a lot of low quality pages and/or redundant information.

While you do need to sometimes have a lot of URLs in the ecommerce setup to allow users to sort results and find the products they need, you do not (and should not) have to expose all of those URLs to Google and/or try to rank them.

You need to start back at the basics.  Who is your customer and what are they searching for and what keywords are most likely searched to find the products they are looking for.

Do any of your customers care about "soft shoes"?  If they are old, this may be really important, but if they are young it may be that they are looking for "fashionable shoes".

You have to find a way to simplify the content on your site around those ideas.   I would think about writing hub section on "fashionable shoes" "cool shoes" "latest shoes" - something that talks about the latest trends (and oh by the way here is a shoe you sell that goes along with that trend), have a section on that page were you link to your most fashionable shoes (the best sellers) then allow the user to click in and browse more within your catalog.  With your "fashionable shoe" page you have something you can share on FB, that people may want to comment on, and link to, plus that page starts your product listing for that type of shoe and leads them into your full shoe catalog.

In your shoe catalog, I would make sure that you have one main section "shoes for sale" or something else - the main entry into your store/catalog.  Have a paginated way for Google to crawl all of your shoes, but it cannot hit any of your filters to change up any of the urls.  Google can now find all your products, read all the original descriptions and reviews of each product but it will not get lost when a person wants to resort by price or by size or by style etc.

Make sure all of your topic pages and all the paginated pages (but none of the sorting option pages) are in your sitemap as well.

There are variations on the theme I describe above, but if you want to stand out, you have to organize around your user personas and the words they are looking for and the words that bring in buyers.  Don't worry about losing traffic that does not convert, it does not pay the bills.

Good luck!

[DmitriiK]

Hello, my friend.

It seems that you're forgetting that SEO is much much much bigger than number of keyword repetitions, connections and relations between two of those pages.

Do you have good UX and UI? How about good backlink profile? What about unique and awesome content on category/subcategory/product pages? Are you overstuffing/understuffing pages? What about brand awareness? If you're talking about shoes, are you targeting local market? if not, can you compete brand-wise with large corporations like Nike etc?

You're saying that you get 60% of all traffic to the article page, but traffic is mostly irrelevant. So, I don't see how it would help sales if you merge that article with shoe page - if you gonna get traffic to it, it's still gonna be sales irrelevant.

All online store websites, especially built on CMS are always about great content! Add an awesome sauce of backlinks and you get your exposure, rankings and so on.

Hope this helps.