When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
-
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?
-
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,
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
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
-
How should I setup schema.org for ecommerce site?
I understand how to do products, what I am more curious about is the organization schema. Is it worth it to set it up as an ecommerce business? I would have to set it up on the About Us page for the site, does it matter to Google that it is not located on the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Ipad Sales & Traffic Improvement for my Ecommerce site
Do you guys know any tool or software which provides follow things for my ecommerce site? Real Time/ next day data for ipad traffic Real Time/ next day data for ipad urls visited Read time/ next day data for ipad Page rendering load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad network load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad dom processing time for the all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad request queuing load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad web application load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad total load time for each url Real Time/ Next day data for ipad timestamp i.e Time of each url being accessed by the visitor Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor city Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor country code Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor duration on that page Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent name foreg chrome, IE, safari, firefox etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent OS foreg. ipad only Real time/ next day data for ipad user agent version foreg. ipad 8.0, ipad 6.0, ipad air, ipad ratina, ipad mini etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url session trace in water fall like backend time, dom processing, page load, waiting on ajax, interactions of visitors etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url with total request for each page. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with javascript error on the page and javascript url plus stake track of that error. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with ajax error on the page and ajax url plus stake track of the error Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each and every url where each and every request time taken in waterfall layout. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors funnel visiualization tracking Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors transcations tracking. Please note that all above data also require day wise, country wise, previous days and month, model wise sorting, pagination feature, etc. waiting for your reply Regards, Mit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mit0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Any Suggestions For My Site?
I've recently started a website that is based on movie posters. The site has fundamentally been built for users and not SEO but I'm wondering if anyone can see any problems or just general advice that may help with our SEO efforts? The "content" on the website are the movie posters. I know Google likes text content, but I don't see what else we could add that wouldn't be purely for SEO. My site is: http://www.bit.ly/ZSPbTA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whispertera0 -
Depth of Links on Ecommerce Site
Hi, In my sitemap, I have the preferred entrance pages and URL's of categories and subcategories. But I would like to know more about how Googlebot and other spiders see a site - e.g. - what is classed as a deep link? I am using Screaming Frog SEO spider, and it has a metric called level on it - and this represents how deep or how many clicks away this content is.. but I don't know if that is how Googlebot would see it - From what Screaming Frog SEO spider software says, each move horizontally across from Navigation is another level which visually doesnt make sense to me? Also, in my sitemap, I list the URL's of all the products, there are no levels within the sitemap. Should I be concerned about this? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Site Wide Link Situation
Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RezStream80 -
Internal linking between categories
Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ? If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example ) Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0