Our Digital Marketing team got an interesting enquiry from an eCommerce store. Please find the question and our response
Question:
So, as of now, there is no provision to click through Categories and view products. Example:
Category → Sub Category → Products: This is NOT implemented.
The only way to view products is to do a search.
Some articles in the internet seems to suggest that ability to go to products page without doing a search, and just
by clicking on category links (browse) is critical for SEO.
Can you share your thoughts on what impact will be there on SEO when browse is not implemented?
Response:
If the site is not having the categories and sub categories, it’s definitely a disadvantage because when users type
for a particular product the chances of coming up in search engines will be high only if a have a separate page for
each product with proper categorization.
Supposing we have an E-commerce site:
http://www.example.com & let’s consider the site sells consumer electronics.
So a full fledged site will have
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/cameras
http://www.example.com/cameras/canon
http://www.example.com/cameras/canon/cybershot (product-name). Here based on the categories we can optimize
the pages with appropriate categories.
Now lets consider our site:
We ASSUME that the site has product pages but doesn’t have easy navigation and categorization.
So currently our URLS are like http://www.oursite.com/cybershot (product-name) (After the search is done and the
product is clicked, we assume a product page will open like this)
We can still optimize the page because its a separate page.
But the real problem will occur if we the URL’s are going to changes after phase II is complete. After we optimize
and promote the page of the URL structure is going to change then the rankings will drop and we may have to do
proper re-direction and promote the new page (categorized like example.com).
