A very interesting study saw the light of day at the just-concluded SMX West conference in San Jose. Jill Kocher of Jumpfly gave a presentation on Scalable Ecommerce SEO for Category Pages, the conclusions of which for many marketers may be surprising.
If you run an e-commerce business, or handle e-commerce as an SEO specialist, you may be wondering what to optimize first: product pages or category pages. You don’t have to wonder any longer, because the study proved that category pages rank better and have much more potential.
The study covered 30+ of the largest e-commercials in the US and 25 billion keywords. In the vast majority of cases, the category pages had:
- more keywords (on average by 19%)
- generated more traffic (by 413% on average)
- had a greater potential for growth (by 32% on average)
The only industry where product pages are doing better is electronics. This is probably due to more specific, technical inquiries.
The dominance of category pages over product pages is even more devastating in the D2C (Direct to Consumer) sector, where the number of keywords for categories is on average as much as 356% greater than keywords for products.
Many important conclusions can be drawn from the study, but the most important one is obvious: good site architecture is still an invaluable asset in SEO. When creating or optimizing e-commerce, the long time spent planning the category structure will not be time wasted.
