How important is it to rank for a product category?
-
We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts".
My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"?
Other factors:
- In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it.
- We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.
-
I think Robert covers it pretty well. I would just add that it will probably be easier for you to rank for the long tail terms like "frosted jelly donut" as well if you're already ranking for "donut" if you've developed a logical hierarchy in your site architecture. When ranking for donuts, creating your sub categories or internal pages linked from your page that's ranking will pass along more authority to those pages targeting long tail terms.
That said I agree with Robert's assessment that assigning your time half and half is a good strategy if you have the resources to do so without becoming stretched too thin.
-
If you have the capability, definitely go for it.
Since Google is looking more and more at semantic rankings for relevant keywords, "powdered donuts" or "decadent delicious donuts" will naturally follow if you are producing content that ranks for "donuts", especially if you make special reference to these specialty keywords.
The competitor that is ranking for all of these keywords is likely doing so because they have produced content and generated links to an architecturally-fitted site for your industry. If you can replicate and improve on that process, you will out-compete them.
In terms of strategy, you probably want to assign 50% of your monthly workload to "donuts" and another 50% to long tail keywords relevant to "donuts". This way, you can make quick gains on long tail keywords which are easy to rank for, and longer-term gains on your major industry keyword over several months. This strategy helps you double-down on long tail keywords while also building up relevancy and authority for your major keyword.
Looking forward to seeing what other folks have to say on this.
Cheers,
Rob
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
-
Product pages and rank brain
Hello, On product pages does the content matter or does the presentation and answering the user intent matter more ? I know for informational query content definitely matters but with rank brain, I am thinking that for pages where your present product content doesn't matter as much ? Am I right ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
How does this company rank this page?
If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/ This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL. Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold. http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages! Any insight into this would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Awesome Ecommerce category pages
Hi! We are in the process of overhauling our websites, and I am hoping that some of you can post URLs for websites that are ranking well and using lots of creative content to help rank their ecommerce category pages. You can post your own, or others that you admire.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Brand queries as a ranking signal?
Hi folks, I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this. I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this? Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this... I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this. Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would? Best wishes, Amelia PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Local ranking (keyword) strategies
Hello SEOmozers, I've been working on improving all components of my SEO skills for the past 6 months. I have definitely had some great victories and some gray defeats. My newest challenge is local ranking for a home improvement company. My target is to rank them locally with Google within the top 7 results. I have managed to do so, but only for one keyword "windows and doors CITY". My campaign, in terms of anchor text has a wide variety of long and shortail keywords, I have not concentrated on the above keyword. My question is, how do I go about to rank this website in the local results for all other keywords "windows CITY", "window replacement CITY", etc... What I don't understand is how Google picks up which keywords to rank the website locally for, and which ones to ignore. Any information will be well received. Cheers, Nikster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thenikster0