Big Ecommerce Brands Fail at SEO Category Strategy

Keyword Overview: "Chocolate" and Its Massive Search Volume

The American chocolate market is very competitive. If we take a look inside the keyword "chocolate", we will see that an overall search volume having keyword variation with "chocolate" in it is 45 million. The most important keywords are of course "chocolate" then "Dubai chocolate bar", then "chocolate chip cookies", "Dubai chocolate" again and then we see the "Lindt chocolate" keyword followed by "dark chocolate". I was surprised to see this "dark chocolate" has a bigger search volume than "milk chocolate" because I thought milk chocolate is more popular in the US than dark chocolate, followed by "white chocolate" and there is "milk chocolate". There are few variations of this keyword, but as we have seen - the "Dubai chocolate bar" is the keyword, after of course the main keyword "chocolate", with biggest search volume.

Google Trends & Keyword Combinations: Spotting the Rise of "Dubai Chocolate"

If we take the combination of "Dubai chocolate", we are way above 225,000 search volume on a monthly basis only in the US. This trend started 6 months ago as we can see on the trend chart, and that is amazing. That is really a trend you should ride on and we expecting Hershey and Lindt to have both amazing Dubai chocolate bars, Dubai chocolate flavors and so on, and so on. So if you take take a look at Hershey's and their menu and their category structure, what we can assume is their category structure, we don't see any Dubai chocolate. Can that be real? Am I looking at the wrong website? Lindt must have the chocolate, come on. Why is there no Dubai chocolate on Lindt? In Germany, Lindt has the Dubai chocolate not only on their homepage, you get also a popup where they tell you you can buy Dubai style chocolate from Lindt, from their online store, the main header on their online store is also dedicated to Dubai chocolate.

Initial Look at Hershey's vs. Lindt

Let's see how those two online stores without Dubai chocolate are competing? So if we take a look at Google trends for the five last years, we can see that there is an battle, an SEO battle going on and that the both manufacturers are trying to get ahead of each other. And if you take that on a daily basis, that's even more amazing. So that's a worldwide overview. If we take the United States, we can see that the chart looks a little bit different. But if we take, you see it's getting closer and closer, but if we look at the past day it's very interesting to see that on a worldwide basis there are almost intercepting each other. So they're overtaking on a daily basis each other based on the demand, based on the time zone.

Brand Comparison: Analyzing Online Category Presence

So in the United States, as we could see Hershey's seems to has a big advantage that must be also mirrored in their revenue, in their organic revenue. But if we take a closer look at this, we will see it's not like we assumed. So Hershey's seems to have almost 260,000 visitors per month from Google, organic visitors. If we take a look at Lindt, we see that the number is even bigger. They're having two 340,000 visitors organically from Google, but that could be also due to the heavy brands they have, they have really strong brands and all the keywords in their most top organic keywords are all bonded to their brand, so also Lindt and Hershey's too. So it's all their brands or their sub-brands.

Traffic Analysis & Keyword Overlap Between Brands

So let's take a look deeper inside that, so if we intersect those two online stores, we see that the overlap of those two online stores is quite small. That's when we take in consideration all keywords. So it seems that they are not real competitors, but if we reduct from that, those brands, they have Hershey's and Lindt and take only search volume which is interesting for keywords which have a search volume bigger than 1,000, we see that the overlap gets bigger and that this seem to be more equal on this chart, Hershey's is way bigger than Lindt, in this chart Hershey's is getting smaller and if we in addition to that just take a look at transactional keywords, which make, which are the most important keywords from an SEO perspective, from an Ecommerce SEO perspective, beside the brand where you expect to rank for each little keyword combined with your brand, we see that the battle is really close and that the overlap is big.

Evaluating Competitive Keyword Positions

So if we take a look at the most important keywords, the keywords which have the biggest search volume, we can see that sometimes Lindt is ahead and sometimes Hershey's. So "chocolate bars" Lindt is on position number five and Hershey's only on 43, Hershey's what is going on? "Chocolate candy" position 8 for Lindt and 18 for Hershey's, okay, "milk chocolate" they're both awful because they're so big brands, a top 10 ranking should be guaranteed. Remember this keyword "milk chocolate", it's very important, we will address it later. They have both quite different approaches how they handle the milk approach and as you can see Hershey's has a small advantage, but that advantage is not big and we will see why. So "candy near me", that doesn't count, and then "candy bag", okay, bags, the Swiss didn't discover the bags right now, they don't know that the bestselling product of Hershey's is a bag of chocolate, a real, huge bag. Okay, "chocolate candy bars" there is Hershey's ahead, if we take a look at "chocolate gifts" which is also an very important keyword, you will see, is number nine. "Baking chocolate" okay, and "milk chocolates" the other variant is Lindt on position number 4. And we can go over, and over, and over.

Transactional Keywords: Impact on Conversions & Rankings

Let's take a look where Lindt is good and where Hershey's is behind. So that's all, "candy bar", "dark chocolate bar" again, interesting keyword, "bulk chocolate" there is Hershey's, okay, "dark chocolate bars", "chocolate bars", "chocolate gift", "chocolate gift box", "chocolate candy", "hazelnut chocolate" and so on. If we take, and "caramel chocolate", that was also there, "caramel chocolate", okay. Let's take a look where Hershey's is in the front of Lindt. It's "candy sale", "giant chocolate bar", so everything which is giant Hershey's is ahead, "york candy", "bulk chocolate", "box of candy", so all those bulk products, "big bags of candy", "candy bag", "chocolate bag", "large bags of candy", it's really interesting, "hazelnut candy" and "zero sugar candy". Okay I would expect from a Swiss company that they take more care about zero sugar products than the Americans, but we see it's not like that at least in Google. Okay that's a nice overview. We can also, we will take a look how bad others are doing it at the end, but now let's take a look at the category strategies.

Optimizing Your Category Strategy

So we see here a few top level 1 categories, we assume so, Gifts, inside those Gifts we have Corporate Gifts and Occasions. I address only those very important ones. Okay, so let's take a look at the occasions. We will open it up and we see that they have just the seven chocolates listed in the occasions subcategory and you can choose the occasion, yes there is a lot to choose among the occasions. There is not a lot of going on on Hershey's when we talk about gifts and events where you need a special gift. You will see Lindt has a quite different approach in that area. Now let's take a look at the Chocolate category, so we have the Chocolate category and inside it Chocolate bars, Candy bars and so on. So we are interested in chocolate mainly today, so we want to see because "chocolate" has a heavy search volume and "candy" also but we compare the chocolate niche so going into the Chocolate subcategory to see it. So we now discover a little bit of the category structure of Hershey's, Chocolate & Candy, then you choose Chocolate and Chocolate Bars. There is the first mistake - they should divide at least Chocolate from Candy and not to again have Chocolate, why? The link juice towards this is being separated, that's one beginner mistake they made and they should for sure separate it. They have only 36 chocolate bars, okay, and we can list them and that's it. We are now just taking care about the category structure, maybe I will do special video roasting the Hershey's online store with all the mistakes. So where can I choose which type of chocolate I want? There is nothing in the menu, so there is nothing in the category structure I can see, there are no subcategories I can choose from, there are no pictures of subcategories, but there is a Chocolate Type facet or filter, oh my God. So they created a single filter for every combination instead of having dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, strawberry chocolate, salted chocolate, caramel chocolate, almond chocolate, nut chocolate, peanut chocolate, and so on, and then you can combine all the possibilities like milk caramel chocolate, milk hazelnut chocolate, and all the things here listed, or almond dark chocolate, cherry dark chocolate, and so on. But at least they've done something right and that is that they placed attributes of milk, dark and so on into the filter so everything describing a product should be in the facet. So dark, milk, salted and so on, white chocolate is missing, I don't know why they don't have white chocolate listed, but it doesn't matter. They've done something wrong and something right. So they should have at least subcategories like Almond Chocolate, Cherry Chocolate, Mint Chocolate, Caramel Chocolate, Hazelnut Chocolate, Nut Chocolate, Peanut Chocolate, or list them as a type in the facets. Both are okay. Listing dark, and milk, and white chocolate as subcategories would be the wrong approach, but you can do it. Also in this kind of situation you can do it, but still the right thing would be to have the categories based on taste and then to choose dark, white, and salted, and milk chocolate in the sidebar, in the filter menu. That's it. And they have also a few snacks and their brands. I'm amazed that KitKat is a brand of Hershey's. I didn't know that before I did this, and it's very. very interesting. My most favorite player, basketball player ever - Shaquille O'Neil has a partnership with Hershey's, have an a Shaq-A-Licious chocolate bar or Shaq-A-Licious gummy bears, I don't know, gummies, those are gummies, so you can chew on them for a long time because Shaq is a big guy. So Hershey's, Reese's, KitKat, Golden Almond, Twizzlers, Jolly Ranches, Rolo is also theirs, York, One, Ice Breakers and so on. Interesting that they have so many sub-brands but that is normal or very frequent for chocolate manufacturers.

Key Takeaways

Now let's take a look at Lindt. Lindt has an Chocolate level 1 category, so they divided candy and chocolates, so they don't have candy so it's easier for them, but at least they have chocolates. We can also click on the chocolates and come into the first level category. So you can here choose the type of chocolate - milk, dark, white, hazelnuts, oat milk and so on. So something I already said should be done, they have done it. Great. You can choose between the brands, the sub-brands of them, also interesting, the chocolate format - you can choose if you need a box, a thin, balls, tablets, bars and so on, and you can choose the flavor, also interesting. Now it's getting complicated because they have a lot of going on here that needs to be compared to the ones here because I see some double things, like hazelnut is also here and I think I have seen hazelnut here, yes. So do I get the same filter or facet URL if I click on this, I get flavors, some carry URL parameters and hazelnut, or not parameters, those are ASCII codes. Okay, and get hazelnut, if I remove hazelnut and take the type of chocolates, do I get the same as here? So the website is also not the fastest I have ever seen and you see, we have here eight hazelnut, we get the same products, 16 products, so it's okay to have both those facet values and two different, but that's their approach you think. The next one you can see, is they have listed here Shop by Flavor, and you can also open it up on this side. So the milk chocolate, so if I open milk chocolate here, I will get what URL - type of chocolate blah blah blah equals milk, great, if I use the sidebar menu, the sidebar filters, the sidebar facets. But if I open now milk chocolate, I get a subcategory. So they are having cannibalization issues. So they have both indexed, as we see here indexed and follow, there is no canonical tag here, then we can take a look at the parameter which I have already chosen but it's now activated, not activated, who knows, in this shop everything is happening. So we need to reload that URL because it seems to be JavaScript, it's index follow and it is canonicalized to the shop, to the level 1 category which is wrong. It should be can canonicalized to the subcategory if they really wanted to. So they have chosen another approach - they are putting the facets just for the sake for the user, using some JavaScript I will not get into, it it's about the category strategy and they've used it as subcategories. They're using attributes as subcategories. That's the wrong approach, but using caramel nuts and fruit and pralines, that seems to be okay. But a few things are missing in the menu and that's okay, but I cannot choose the chocolate type here, I should see here some thumbnails where I can choose at least the flavor first and then maybe if I want the milk, dark or white chocolate. So that's their approach, they kind of mixed it and now you can see that Google can get confused here. There are few ways to get to the same thing which should I index, why is that canonicalized to the level one category and so on, and and here are some brands listed, Shop by Brand, only three brands although they have a lot of more brands. Very, very interesting.

Expanding & Refining Your Category Approach

But what they have done better than Hershey's is the following, and that is Gifts. So chocolate is often both as a gift. If you want to buy a gift for a birthday, you buy a chocolate, if you want to say somebody thank you, you buy a chocolate, if you go to a wedding, maybe you will buy some premium chocolate, if a new baby comes to this world, maybe that is also being a nice present, to bring some chocolate and some business gift, and so on. So they have many occasions here and then they have holidays - Easter gifts, Valentine's Day, very popular, so the keyword Valentine's Day gift, Easter gift, Wedding gift, New baby gift, Business gift, Birthday gift and so on are very popular keywords with a high search volume. Also Gift for him, Gifts for her, Gifts for couples, for friends, for teachers and so on. You can do that research on your own, I will not open it up. So this is a very important part of an online store which sells chocolate to have all those pages. So what are they - are they categories, are they subcategories, what are they? Lindt gifting, so they have created a new category which is Gifts, Chocolate gifts, interesting keyword, maybe it has some search volume. Let's check it out, I didn't look it up beforehand. Interesting, 5,400 is a nice search volume for such an page, but it is more important to have other pages. So let's see, we have homepage, Gifting again, the breadcrumb is helping us and Google, as you already learned in the SEOLAXY lessons, to find what categorization is behind it. So it's Gifting, Wedding gifts, okay so those are all subcategories which is done in the right way. And they have enough products, no matter what you open, what can't be said for here Hershey's. So if we open now Corporate gifts, they have only five results. What we know is that you have lower chances to rank higher in Google if you have less than six products, it should be at least 12 to have a bigger chance. So Lindt did this part right. So they addressed the gifts in the right way, they made a big mess and confusion with their filters and the subcategories with milk, dark and white chocolate, they quite done it right with the flavors, but if we take look at Hershey's they have done it wrong almost in any way except that they have the chocolate type done wrong, and now we can take a look also at the chocolate type. So we want milk chocolate, we click on milk, you only see one product. Hmm, that can't be true, Hershey's has more than one milk chocolate product. Let's click on this milk chocolate with all caps, we get another product. Hmm, now let's take a look at the third option we have here - milk chocolate with, oh that's the right one. We have eight results. So if they clean up this mess in the sidebar with the confusing attributes for filters, they have done this right. But now let's take a look. What's the H1 of this one? You see it's search. I will record an video roasting Hershey's and showing everything they've done wrong because this is amazingly gone wrong. It's impressive that both of those online stores have such results as we have seen here, because their tactics are not perfect and they are just different, and we can see that here. It is really, really amazing what tools like Semrush let you discover. You can have an assumption, then you need to dig deeper but it helps you to see. So they have, those are the shared keywords, you can find out what are the unique keywords for each site. which are the missing keywords and so on, and filter it. Use those Semrush filters by filtering out brand keywords, because you see the difference when I entered here just to exclude the keywords containing the brands Hershey and Lindt. The keyword overlap was only 200 keywords. And we were talking about 1,500 keywords. If we include the brands, the amount of keywords is huge so what's the overlap? The overlap are the transactional keywords. All the other parts are brand keywords.

Final Takeaways

So if Hershey's, if Lindt didn't had such a strong brand they would be peep in Google. You see, their SEO strategies went really, really wrong and they have a lot of potential because those are very, very strong domains. Let's see, authority score 52, authority score 54, they have 3,900 referring domains. Okay, that's the shop domain in case of Hershey's, we need to look at the root domain and the root domain has 22,000 different domains linking to them and in Lindt it's only six. What should happen with this online store? That's the Lindt USA version. The lindt.com version or German version will have more, but we're talking about the US market so Lind is at least four times behind, should be four times behind Hershey's in Google. But what we see is just they're competing for a small amount of keywords which are 1,500 keywords and those are divided into that. Hershey's got flavor things right, the attributes thing quite right and Lindt has the gift section well and their attributes are categories, and helping them out but still it doesn't make it better. So you can place in the menu white chocolate and it can stay a filter and do it in the right way. And the usability of those online stores is exactly as their SEO. It's not thought through. They didn't think a lot about it - they just made a mess, putting everything and trying to make it better with this tactics. They need to restructure this and to do it. Just for for an example what should they do, they should put put milk chocolate as an attribute and then because this subcategory has a lot of link juice and maybe some incoming backlinks, this URL should be then, should have a 301 redirect to the facet value. So it should be then redirected into this one and they need, before they do this, they need to fix those white spaces and problems with their URL. So here should be "chocolate" or, why "shop chocolate", you don't need "shop" here. So the URL should be chocolate, type of chocolate, that's okay, equals white. And you can link that from the menu and it would be better and put the flavors like caramel, they can stay as a subcategory, but then we need to make a way from the level 1 category into it by putting some thumbnails, for letting the user choose it. So that's the way, that's why restructuring is important and also you can see that big online stores make those mistakes. At the end we can say that both need a lot of improvement, that Lindt has a little bit better strategy but because of so many backlinks behind Hershey's, Hershey's is in front. If they would have an equal amount of backlinks that would be an easy battle for Lindt. So what need they to do from the category strategy point? They need to restructure, both of them, and then Lindt needs more backlinks, and of course both of them should put Dubai chocolate on their online stores because they're missing out a lot. Maybe they're having manufacturing problems, they don't have enough chocolate to sell in the US, maybe the FDA didn't approve Dubai chocolate from those two brands, who knows, everything is possible, but that's the way to go. If you want to avoid to make the same mistakes Hershey and Lindt did, you can get our Ecommerce SEO checklist on seolaxy.com/checklist and you can also sign to our newsletter to get amazing Ecommerce SEO tips and important news due to algorithm changes inside Google, so you stay informed and can do better Ecommerce SEO. See you next time. Bye!