Hi Nigel,
Firstly, thank you very much for taking the time to provide such a detailed response. I’m really keen to take on board your feedback and learn and apply this to my store.
Ranking for Categories/Subcategories
Ranking for ‘Woodsculp’ would be the ideal scenario but there is a lot of competition. The searches for all the subcategories mentioned (e.g. Woodsculp Elephants, Woodsculp Safari, Woodsculp Summer 2022) are strong.
On the subject of ranking categories, if for example ‘Woodsculp elephant’ was a ranking search, would it matter if I called the subcategory ‘Woodsculp elephants’? I did notice during keyword research that the singular and plural can have different ranks.
Products Under Main Category
With regards to listing every model on the Woodsculp category page, in the past I would normally not display every product at this level as there could be hundreds of them. Instead I would normally display the subcategories (Woodsculp Dogs, Woodsculp Elephants) in a grid format to allow customers to navigate to the relevant subcategories (and products) more easily (like the pyramid way of site structure?). I know you mentioned having the sidebar to be able to navigate to the subcategories.
Is displaying all products under the main category (in this case Woodsculp) standard e-commerce practice and the best way of displaying products for users and for SEO?
- Product URL structure
In the past I would have structured my product URLs to include the subcategory. For example:
allthingsnature. com/woodsculp/dogs/ws012-woodsculp-scottie-dog
Would it be better to structure as:
allthingsnature. com/product/ws012-woodsculp-scottie-dog (wordpress allows either /product/ or /shop/ for the product permalinks).
- SEO Title
I noticed that you added in the ‘Wooden Sculptures’ part in the SEO title, will adding extra words like this hurt ranking for ‘Woodsculp’ in any way?
- Products in Multiple Categories
You mentioned earlier in your post that I could create a ‘Safari’ subcategory but you are saying that you would not put products in multiple brand categories?
So if I had a product ‘Woodsculp Scottie Dog’, I would be best off only placing it under one subcategory (presumably the one which ranks the highest) such as ‘Woodsculp Dogs’ as opposed to placing it under two, maximum three (Woodsculp Dogs, Woodsculp Pets etc.).
This seems a shame as I would certainly like users to be able to find that product if I was fortunate enough for them land on those category pages (Woodsculp Dogs, Woodsculp Pets) from a search engine result.
I’m confused by your last bit: ‘I would however have no problem having them in another type of category, say 'Wooden Animals’. Is that not exactly the same as having a category like ‘Woodsculp Dogs’? The only difference being that I’ve put the brand name in there as that phrase was a ranking keyword?
- No Index Pages
Thanks for the suggestion of a non indexing sale page.
