eCommerce Site Taxonomy: Your Ticket to a High SEO Reach

Creating an easy-to-navigate, efficient website structure–or taxonomy–is part of providing a seamless user experience for ecommerce sites. Ensuring site taxonomy meets users' needs and industry standards leads to high search engine optimization (SEO) reach and more eyes landing on your page.

This guide focuses on ecommerce site taxonomy best practices to secure a higher ranking in search results. These practices include:

• Perform relevant keyword research.
• Design a simple site structure.
• Include the audience in your design.
• Leave room for growth.
• Ensure consistency on all pages.

If this list seems daunting, partner with an ecommerce SEO agency to improve site visibility and grow your business. We have lots to cover, so let's go!

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Perform Relevant Keyword Research

The most critical part of SEO is keyword research. With thorough research, businesses can understand what their audience is looking for. Match keyword research with topic research to find out the audience's interests. This information can help organize a website's taxonomy into relevant and helpful categories.

Nowadays, search engines can often understand what users search for even when they do not use specific keywords. For example, Google can tell that someone is looking for wedding dresses when searching for topics such as “latest wedding dress styles.”

This means that businesses do not need to repeatedly use their keywords in their content to rank in search engine results. Follow these website optimization strategies using relevant keywords and topics.

• Find out where the business ranks in various relevant searches. Use Google Search Console, a free tool that can help determine the current rank as well as the rank of competitors.
• Consider the search intent of customers to avoid ranking for the wrong keywords. Search intent can be informational, commercial, transactional, or navigational, and each of these intents is a different journey.
• Determine target keywords using Google tools such as People Also Ask (PAA), Autocomplete, and related searches.
• Check competitors’ ecommerce keywords to get ideas on keyword use. Look at both where they rank highly and may have invested a lot of resources and what gaps they may not have covered. 

Design a Simple Site Structure

A simple site structure has many benefits. Users can easily access the site's content and find what they need. Search engines can crawl a site with ease, which helps improve indexing and ranking. Even a website with hundreds of topics, if organized simply, provides clear and easy access for both users and search engines. 

Here are some best practices for creating a simple site taxonomy to achieve the benefits of SEO:

• Design a site taxonomy for people, not for search engines. Although search engine bots must crawl efficiently, do not overlook a user-centered design to increase conversions.
• Add a reasonable number of links. Internal links show the relevance of different pages, but the page should only have three to five links for every 1000 words.
• Improve the heading hierarchy to create a logical sequence. Organize content using heading elements such as H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.
• Keep site navigation simple and intuitive. Try to keep user clicks to a minimum to find what they need. 
• Include breadcrumbs to improve navigation. Users can easily navigate forward to subcategories or back to higher-level categories just by using breadcrumbs.
• Add schema markup or structured data. This helps search engines understand and index site content.

Include the Audience in the Design

Find out how the audience looks for information to design an audience-centered site structure. For example, if site traffic mainly comes from people using their mobile devices, the site structure must work with various devices. A responsive site structure is excellent for mobile and desktop users, as the site appearance changes accordingly.

It starts with a thorough understanding of the audience. Here are techniques to create an audience-centered site structure:

• Make the website accessible. Add alt text to images, use larger font sizes, add keyboard navigation and descriptive URLs, and make videos or multimedia accessible.
• Speak to the audience with typography. Choose fonts wisely by considering the site theme, audience preferences, and other factors. Remember that most people “read” pages left to right when placing information. 
• Add engaging images and helpful guides such as infographics, graphs, and tables.
• Research how customers navigate different categories and pages. Look at their pain points and any difficulty accessing and navigating the website. Adjust site structure accordingly.
• Test different aspects of the website's structure and design. Use A/B testing to check which site design, content, structure, and navigation work best for the target audience.

Leave Room for Growth

Eventually, websites need updating; content requires improvement as the business grows. This is why a good site taxonomy should leave room for growth. Marketers can also add new content, which likely moves or changes categories around to ensure topics are interrelated.

Create a scalable website structure using these effective strategies:

• Perform research on new topics, trends, and relevant content.
• Create new pages for new products and add significant internal links.
• Develop new landing pages for offers, considering consistency in content, page design, and contact information.
• Review site structure. Look for duplicate pages, dead links, 404 pages, and outdated pages and deal with these accordingly.
• Create a database for all site pages to quickly and efficiently improve site structure for new pages or categories.

Ensure Consistency on All Pages

A consistent site structure means various pages have the same organized design. For example, an online grocery website has several primary product categories: food pantry, meat, poultry and seafood, bakery and breakfast, beverages, health and beauty, etc. All of these categories should look roughly the same and be navigable in the same ways as the others. 

If one of the primary categories has a link to a relevant promo page, this should also be part of the other categories. Consistency spells professionalism and authority, and businesses can increase sales and revenue with ecommerce SEO. Experts create a consistent website by following these best practices:

• Ensure the navigation system for the website is in the same place on every page. The navigation should have the same format.
• Consider consistent fonts, colors, headings, and paragraph spacing on all pages.
• Include consistent website elements for every page. These include chat options, calculators, product filters, promo offers, etc.
• Add access to company information on every page. Examples include links to the company’s About page, profile page, contact information, and frequently asked questions.

Summing Up

Ecommerce businesses can make the most of their online ranking with a well-designed, professional site structure. Customers can easily access the products they need, while search engines can index pages more efficiently. And high search rankings ensure better visibility, site traffic, and revenue.

Learn how site taxonomy affects the success of your marketing efforts. Partner with an expert ecommerce SEO agency today. Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP).