Advanced SEO Category Restructuring (part 2)

Introduction to Advanced SEO Category Restructuring

In the last SEOLAXY School lesson we covered the basics of category restructuring. In the first SEOLAXY Academy lesson we'll cover the more advanced approach of category restructuring. Let's go.

Common Mistakes in Category Structuring

Before we start we need to address an important issue here - the following topics are most often forgotten or done wrong, listen carefully and do it in the way presented.

Understanding Facets vs. Subcategories

Number one: facets are not subcategories. Facets are another fancy word for filters as we know, and we often find in online stores that facets are subcategories - an example, black t-shirts. So black t-shirts are very popular, they're selling a lot and if you have an online store which sells fashion and fashion wear, you might have the category Black t-shirts and that's wrong. Why? Because black is an attribute, so that means either colors, sizes or any other kinds of describing the products.

Why Attributes Should Not Be Categories

So, what we need to do with facets which are subcategories? We need to make them again facets, so we remove the subcategory Black t-shirts, in the category T-shirts we add the facet "Color" and the attributes black, white, red, and so on, and those facets need to be crawlable and indexable, meaning they should be visible for Google. Most often we find the facets are not either crawlable or indexable.

How to Properly Use Faceted Navigation

To check it out you need to make sure that the links towards the facets are crawlable for Google meaning they are inside an HTML element and not an form element or a JavaScript element. Once we land on the new URL for the facets, let's say we click on black and now we have black t-shirts, we need to change the title tag of that URL, we need to change the H1 of that URL and also the URL. So, if we are in the category let's say root Fashion and then T-shirts, now we have the facet. We have covered that in the School lessons about URL structures for online stores, so you should know that after that a slash should follow with an f slash black. So that would be the best way to go, and that URL needs to be put on index, follow. That is very important, that that URL is indexable and that the links on that are followable. The paging of those sites is no index, no follow. We can discuss it for if you want stronger products or categories to change that, but that's the standard approach I'm now describing. After we have moved the subcategory into facet, made it crawlable, made it indexable and the facet value is appearing in H1 and the title tag, so meaning the title tag is black t-shirts, the H1 is black t-shirts, we now need to redirect the old subcategory to the facet. We shouldn't forget that. There is a reason behind it why someone put that facet or that facet value as a subcategory - because it's popular, it's selling good, and so on. You might find it also in the menu. There is nothing wrong with that, you can leave it, just change the URL to the category facet URL. And what you need to do is assure that the most popular facets which generate a lot of revenue and a lot of organic visits should be placed in the facet sitemap on top. Don't arrange your facet sitemap A to Z, or the newest to the latest, you should put the most popular facets on top because sometimes you don't have enough link juice and crawler budget that Google crawls all these. Always put the most popular facet URLs on top of your facet sitemap.

Category Merging and Consolidation Strategies

The second one we already mentioned but we didn't go very deep, we just explained that an online store should have maximum 4 levels of categories, not a fifth category, and the reason behind that was link juice. And it shouldn't be the case that level 5 or 4 categories are appearing in the menu. Often a good idea is not even to list the level 3 categories. If you have an smaller online store you should list level 2 and maybe level 3 categories. If you have a bigger online store, you should list in the menu level 2 and level 3 categories, but leave the level 4 categories out of it, or if there are some exceptions you can put them in there. So as you already saw, beside having the exception to having a popular level 4 category maybe there is also a popular facet category URL. To understand it very easy it is important to see it with your own eyes, rherefore I have prepared something very interesting. So this is your homepage, it has some link juice in it, and let's say you have only two level 1 categories, only two. Now what happens is that all the link juice from the homepage, if you wouldn't have any other links but let's just say, assume we have only two links to the level 1 categories, that link juice would split, I would try to split it evenly because Google will split it evenly. So let's see if something is left in this, this is all main juice to the level 1 category. You see the level 1 category is very strong, it has a lot of link juice. If you have more level 1 categories, it would be less link juice left inside it. So that's it, that's our level 1 categories. We have only two of them. Okay, now we assume we have four level 2 categories for this level 1 category. So I will put that aside, link juice is gone for that category and we have new four level 2 categories. And the link juice will be distributed evenly to those four, so they get also a lot of link juice, you will see why this is a lot, and if I spill something uh I will clean it up later, but you see the distribution of link juice gets a little bit hard, so I need to redistribute so it's even distributed. So from each glass I will put a little bit in this glass and so on. So, let's say I will take the glass with the most link juice, imagine they have all evenly distributed link juice. So it seems that this glass has the most link juice, I will put those aside. That's our level 2 category which has got that kind of link juice.

SEO Impact of Poor Category Structure

Now we have subcategories of the level 2 category called sub-subcategories and those are level 3 categories. Let's say we have five of them. So we have only five level 3 categories and now let's distribute that link juice. So as you see, it will not be enough even for those three, four, five level 3 categories so I need to redistribute them and we have not come to the level 4 categories yet. Those are level 3 categories. So it seems that they have a little bit of link juice, the glass gets smaller but it's often not enough even for the level 3 categories. And now imagine we have this glass with the level 3 category and now need to redistribute this little bit of link juice to level 4 categories. And if we have like four, or five, or even just two level 4 categories, this is just enough link juice to survive and it will be even less because level 4 categories shouldn't usually be linked in the menu. So this is even an overperception of how much link juice your level 3 categories will get, and level 4 categories will get a third or half or a fourth depending on how many you have here. And now imagine that little link juice again divided into level 5 categories. There is nothing left to redistribute. So having level 5 categories is the wrong approach. If you have it, you need to restructure it in such case that you have only level 4 categories. If you can achieve that you don't even have level 4 categories, that's great. That's almost always achievable for small online stores. I made a mess here, but who cares let's go on. The next mistake often is made if you do your keyword research for the category, you only look at the search volume partially. Let's say we have a category of PC keyboards. If we do keyword research in our most beloved SEO tool Semrush we see that "PC keyboard" has a bigger search volume than "PC keyboards", and we would like to put the keyword with the bigger search volume inside the name of our categories. That's the wrong way to do it and there is no need to do it. So we always put the plural of the keyword inside the category description, so it's always PC keyboards, it is refrigerators, it is basketball shoes, it's always in the plural. So remember we put it all in plural. Now we have the problem with synonyms, and the solution is the same. Let's say you have sofas and couches. Often they are the same thing. And sofas have a higher search volume than couches, so what you take for online store - you take sofas. And now you think you have lost couches, no, that's not true, because the reason why we should use plural and why we should use the synonym with the bigger search volume is that Google is not so stupid and they know that those are synonyms, and that if you try to catch plural you always have singular. So if you take sofas instead of couches, you'll cover couches, sofas, couch and sofa, but your category name is just sofas and you don't need to think over and over and play with singular and plural, and synonyms, or write a synonym in the parentheses, or create a duplicate category with the synonym and so on. Just use the more popular keyword in plural and you are safe.

Technical Implementation and Best Practices

There are just two ways that Google can recognize if a subcategory is nested under a certain category. If you put your subcategory beneath your category in the menu, that doesn't mean anything to Google, it's just a link like another link. So if you have a nested URL, that's the way that Google can discover that one category or one subcategory is nested under another category. But what if you do not have nested URLs, which is often a good idea and you only have category URLs, or category URLs with IDs which is fine, we already covered that in the SEOLAXY School lesson about URL structures, how can Google now know which category a subcategory belongs to? There is only one way and those are breadcrumbs. You need to use breadcrumbs inside your categories and subcategories, and they need to be set so that a rich snippet is behind it. So use the Schema.org breadcrumb snippet inside those categories or Google will not know what your structure is. So you can do all the work, forget breadcrumbs, if you don't have nested URLs and Google will not know what your structure is, meaning they are having trouble determining your entity, cluster, niche or subniche and that's a big problem. So just a small thing like the breadcrumbs, sometimes useful for the users, but very useful for Google to determine which subcategory belongs to a category. Do it and please never forget it. And if you have done that, the next thing is important. We already mentioned it you shouldn't have category clones or duplicate categories, and if you have clones that's a bad idea. You should have only once a subcategory nested under a category, and so that Google can determine which is the main category. If you use that subcategory in another category which is not your main category, you will link it to the main category. You will not make a duplicate of that subcategory or a clone with the same products. Please know that it's very important to clean up that mess and have Google understand which is your main category for a certain subcategory if you use it in more places. And you should always use the one like we explained already which is after the Google structure meant to be, so don't do it with your gut feeling or due to the response of your client, do it just like it's written in the Google Shopping categorization.

Handling Seasonal and Temporary Categories

Now we address a second thing we already mentioned, but it's very important - those are seasonal categories. So those are categories which have in a certain period of the year a lot of products in it, and after the season is finished that category almost vanished. So sometimes there are few products left and sometime the category is completely clean, there is nothing in it so what should we do with seasonal categories and sometimes those seasonal categories make a lot of revenue and a lot of profit, so we need to take care about them. Those seasonal categories and the URL of the seasonal category should always be the same. So if you have let's say swimming pools, you should leave the category and when the season comes it will work. What you should do after the season is just remove it from your structure, remove it from your link juice and it's just not appearing anywhere. It's not appearing in the menu and only during the seasonal time it can appear in the menu, but because we are lazy and it's hard to manage and often make some IT troubles, we should not place seasonal categories in the menu. How can Google then give enough link juice so we rank again during the season? If you are not ready to place it in the menu and that would be wrong, you will now see why, we have another way to do it. Every online store should have a prefooter which, on the homepage of course, which redistributes the link juice after we have finished the link juice distribution process at all. So after we have finished it, we can push certain URLs through the prefooter. We have a footer and we have a prefooter full of links, sometimes four columns with 5 up to 10 links for each column. So we can name it like bestsellers or bestselling categories and so on. We can mix their product URLs, category URLs, facet category URLs, and so on and so on, and even our blog articles if it's needed. The prefooter is like a mechanism, you can redistribute link juice like you want. If the summer is approaching, let's say it's April, the 1st of April, instead of laughing your ass off on the 1st of April, you should activate the swimming pool category inside your prefooter. But it's not the season, why should I activate it right now? Because you removed all the link juice after the season, now you need to put it two or three months, even earlier into the prefooter and in the menu if possible, so that you get enough link juice for that category. So seasonal categories create a lot of trouble, but sometimes they also create a lot of revenue so it's worth it. The least you can do is put the seasonal URL category inside the prefooter two-three months before the season starts because you want to get your rankings before the season starts and have it during the season, and not try to rank during the season so you will miss out a lot of organic traffic, revenue and profit.

Internal Linking for Optimized Category Pages

So we mentioned many things we need to do - we can merge categories, we can delete categories, we can delete facet category URLs, we can move products, we can do a lot of things, and one thing we should never forget is to create redirects for it. If something is disappearing as it has been known, it should have an redirect to the thing where it is gone. If we delete something, we always redirect to the parent category and so on. So if you delete a product which was important, had link juice, you'll redirect the product URL to the category belonged to. If you delete a subcategory, we will redirect that subcategory old URL to the parent category. And if we don't know where to redirect it, then we should redirect it to the homepage. But there is no scenario where we should forget the redirect, except one and that's if that URL, category or product URL, it doesn't matter, does not have any external or any internal link juice. So there is nothing to redistribute. So if we do the next point I mentioned, we can uh diminish that requirement to only one thing - if an URL does not have external link juice, meaning backlinks, we don't have to redirect it. We can put it on 404 or 410 status. 404 is temporary not available and 410 is forever gone. Meaning if you delete a subcategory and maybe it will come back later, you can put a 404 on it. If you decide that this subcategory, category or product, or whatever will never again exist, you put a 410 on it. So the next point is also very, very important for the complete restructuring process - if you delete something, you have three issues. You have Google, Google should know where to find the deleted or merged URL so we redirect it, also users are bookmarking certain stuff, so with the redirection they will again come to the right point, but what we often forget is internal links. So we took care about Google itself, the Google bot, we took care about users and their bookmarks and their requirements, and in any way they have saved that URL, it could be put on social media and somewhere else where you are not able to find it or remove it, or do something with it, we have taken care about that. But we have forgotten the internal links. So we need to check with some crawler software like Screaming Frog or for bigger websites JetOctopus, we need to check if anywhere else an internal link to the deleted or moved URL is present because we don't want them to show internal links to redirected URLs, and especially if we decide to put a 404 or 410 status to it, we don't want to lose link juice and have internal links showing towards that URL. So take care, that's the last step of cleaning up after restructuring. Please, don't forget restructuring takes weeks, sometimes months, it is a big cleanup process afterwards to do it. Plan it carefully, try to plan it only once and not to do it every year or every second year, try to plan ahead, talk with your client about his future plans to add or remove things, and create a new structure which can last a long time because cleaning up afterwards is a big process.

Final Tips and Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Be very careful with those things, this is among the top three mistakes Ecommerce SEO Specialists and Consultants do after doing mistakes with redesign and URL restructuring. So be careful, this is almost the most important thing which can go wrong if you take over an online store, is a necessity to do it and people forget to do it and when they are doing it, they're not planning it carefully, they're doing it as a side job and that is not the way to go. It is so important, there is so much potential organic growth that this deserves to be planned and also implemented very well with your help. And if you do it right, you will create what - an great hockey stick SEO effect and this is nice to see and it brings a lot of revenue and happiness to your client.

Conclusion and Next Steps

And now let's take the quiz. Question number one: how should a furniture online store name its category if the search volume for for "sofa" is 135,000, for "sofas" 40,000, for "couch" 368,000 and "couches" 135,000? A) Sofa, B) Couch, C) Sofas and Couches, D) Couches. The right answer is Couches. Question number two: what should a furniture online store do if category "coffee tables" has subcategories like "white coffee tables", "gray coffee tables", and "black coffee tables"? A) Leave it as it is, B) Remove them and redirect them to the category, C) Convert subcategories into facets and create redirects, D) Add also the subcategory "anthracit coffee tables". The right answer is C, convert subcategories into facets and create redirects. Question number three: how does the Googlebot know which subcategory belongs to a certain category? A) Through the menu, B) Just by crawling the online store, C) through the sitemap, and D) Through breadcrumb snippets. Right answer is D, through breadcrumb snippets. Congratulations if you had everything right, maybe it's time to consider joining SEOLAXY as many other Ecommerce SEO Specialists and consultants. If you had only one wrong answer, watch the next episode. If you had two wrong answers, you should watch the episode 12 of the SEOLAXY School. If you got all three answers wrong, please rewatch this lesson. See you next time.