Ranking Sub Categories on Ecommerce Site

[BeckyKey]

Hi,

I haven't tested this yet, so before I do I wanted to see if anyone had some experience with this.

I have lower level categories I want to rank for SEO for example:

Say I want to rank 'Standard Metal Lockers' - with the way our site is set up, I have to work within a classification, which isn't always easy.

So it would be categorised as follows:

Cupboards & Lockers > Lockers > Standard Lockers > Standard Metal Lockers

The URL structure would remain /standard-metal-lockers & I would link this from the 'Lockers' page.

Is this too deep in the site structure to rank? I think if it's linked properly & promoted it will be fine, but I'd like to see if anyone else has had this issue.

Becky

[TheSymmetran]

It may end up too deep to count as much as the main subpage would. But in that case, you can create CLEAN URLs for it, meaning, you can have the CMS or ecom solution render the data on maindomain.com/standard-metal-lockers instead of maindomain.com/lockers/standard-metal-lockers (I am not 100% if this is how it looks thogh btw, if it is as simple as this, it is not "TOO" deep tbh). and then you want to make sure the clean URL is marked as the primary source of data and the longer CMS based URL should have a rel canonical associated to indicate this. I would even try to de-index that original page from results entirely.

Think like amazon, the king of ecommerce: Although they have categories and sub and even sub sub categories for products, the url for end product and categories look more like these

https://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-AS5-3-5G-Thermal-Paste/dp/B0087X728K/ [notice the keywords are followed immediately after .com/, then everything else is configured], you see how there are no categories listed before that and there are internal categorization and tracking items written after the keywords. this is obviously going to be hard to impossible to achieve with standard CMS out there unless they are super SEO friendly somehow which most CMS and especially ecom CMS are not out of the box. So you may have to do some research to see if you can pull it off that way. But the earlier method I described is what I have been able to succeed with previously.

Now lets take another look at what they do:

Parent: https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Tablets/b/ref=nav_shopall_basedevices?ie=UTF8&node=13896617011&nocache=1479275082032

If you click on tablets, you get: https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=lp_13896617011_ln_2?node=1232597011&ie=UTF8&qid=1479275076 (non keyword optimized URL)

BUT IF YOU INSTEAD SEARCHED FOR AMAZON COMPUTER TABLETS, ONE OF THE TOP RESULTS IS THIS, see the difference?

sub-cat: https://www.amazon.com/**Tablets/**b?ie=UTF8&node=1232597011

these two are literally the one and same page, but I guarantee you the latter is specifically optimized and indexed for search while the former is how the CMS sees the links.