An issue with my e-commerce site

[Guest]

Hi all. I have an e-commerce site which focuses on bathroom products. I have noticed that on many competitors product category pages that no one has any real content other than the products.

For example. I'm selling Taps. Is there a good reason not to have an FAQ on Taps and a description of the different types of Taps/material of taps (I will make sure keywords do not compete with the Taps sub-category pages)?

This is something I have noticed in a lot of large e-comm sites, and just wondered if having products (images/product names) on the page is enough to rank?

and is there a negative reason that keeps large e-comm sites away from putting a good amount of written content on category pages?

Thanks for any answers guys!

[Lori]

It depends on where you put the content. Rule number one of marketing on the Web is that people don't read. You don't want to put a lot of content on top of the products because on mobile especially it pushes the products too low. But a lot of stores put this content underneath the products because it absolutely helps your SEO

[Guest]

It depends on where you put the content. Rule number one of marketing on the Web is that people don't read. You don't want to put a lot of content on top of the products because on mobile especially it pushes the products too low. But a lot of stores put this content underneath the products because it absolutely helps your SEO

"it helps your SEO" is a misnomer. SEO is just a search engine's way of telling if a result is the best fit for the problem that the searcher is trying to solve. Period.

Search engines have all sorts of clever tricks to glean that information but in essence if a user stops searching after going to your site then you've solved his problem.

All of the other metrics like links and mentiones and speed and UX and other bullshit are just fancy ways to help the searcher solve their problems better, faster and more reliably.

[Daniel]

I never really answer anything definitively because I have to be there looking at everything in front of me. However I'll give you a general best answer and that is that you are talking about site hierarchy really.

The categories page has multiple categories right and is really just there for user experience reasons as well as for the robots. The categories page would be click depth 1, which then leads to, click depth 2 being the product than any sub product being click depth three. So if you were to optimize your categories page and it actually worked, you're having people land two clicks away from the actual Target they seek. This is why no one optimizes the categories page and instead focuses on the actual product optimizatio, which can be powerfully optimized be it it's singular topic. The idea here then is you get the person to your website then they can always go to your categories page if they want but you've landed them square on what they were looking for.

Lastly I don't think it would hurt anything it just would be a massive waste of time if anything.

I think I know what you were asking and I believe this answers the question but once again I'm not in the situation to know for sure. Tech SEO or site hierarchy is one of the more difficult things to talk about/give suggestions about without having subjective access. Especially when it's e-commerce you're talking about. Not to mention there are caveats and exceptions to every rule.

[Andy]

On Shopify it’s not super intuitive to optimize the collection pages. You can add a description but most people don’t, they just use the collection to organize their products. Before OS 2.O it was also cumbersome to add unique additional content to each collection. Also in my experience collection pages don’t rank as well as the individual products. So go ahead and optimize them with FAQ, descriptions, etc but honestly I wouldn’t focus on them too much. Better to put your time into content that will rank and generate organic traffic that way.

[Hr ~]

I add content to category pages and it helps. It's not a massive change, though. At least in my case.

What I do is add it to the top, displaying a couple of sentences and then the rest is behind a read more tag.

I'll be experimenting with 2 text fields, one before and one after the products (instead of a readmore). If someone has any thoughts on this, please do share?

[Mike]

And they are ranking probably because:

• geotagged the images.

• images are described (so no need to actually add more text on the page).

• back links in their niche/industry.

• big budget for adverts.

There's definitely no harm to having FAQs. It's a good way to ensure you have important keywords on pages/website without trying to fit them all into a couple of paragraphs.