Author: Naomi Francis-Parker
Product categorization is fundamental for any eCommerce website. However, once these categories are set, I find that most brands rarely think about them again or, rarer yet, regularly review them to make sure they’re still aligned with their customers’ needs.
In a competitive, ever-evolving digital landscape, shoppers are constantly finding new ways to describe and search for the things they want, so it’s crucial to ensure your online store’s product categories resonate with searchers and add value to your SEO.
In this guide, I'll show you why embracing a customer-centric approach to product categorization is essential for delivering a better user experience and how this can lead to improved visibility and increased revenue, whilst gaining an edge over your competitors.
Table of contents:
Before you get started: ‘Traditional’ product categorization
This guide will mainly focus on faceted navigation because I believe it’s an undervalued and underused tool—especially in technical SEO, as I’ll discuss in the next section.
For context, product categorization for most eCommerce sites typically looks like this:
Parent categories: These usually make up the site’s main navigation and are broad product listing pages (PLPs) that contain all products in one category (e.g., sofas).
Subcategories: These are more refined PLPs that contain products grouped by a common feature (e.g., corner sofas).
Faceted navigation: This is used within a PLP to help customers further filter their results to find the exact products they’re looking for.
The technical side of faceted navigation
When it comes to faceted navigation and filtering, there are some strict technical recommendations that most SEOs adhere to avoid over-indexing, cannibalization, and duplication—all issues that can seriously impact your online store’s performance. The strictest of these recommendations is to noindex all filtered categories so that the only pages that search engines crawl are your main product categories.
While it is incredibly important for brands to noindex product variations (e.g., color and size) to avoid the issues mentioned above, I believe this has also caused most eCommerce brands to ignore their faceted navigation altogether, resulting in a ‘set and forget’ mindset that hampers innovation and exploration into new product categories that may be more aligned with your customers’ needs.
The consumer online shopping experience is becoming increasingly personalized, making it easier for customers to find what they want almost immediately, but also causing them to be less patient with sites that aren’t as facilitating with their user experience. Customizing your product categories to align with your audience’s needs—and the language they use to search for those needs—is an effective tactic to personalize your online store and appeal to any number of potential customers.
Customers are looking for personalization, convenience, and they want to find products while putting in the least amount of work possible.
The problem with the ‘traditional’ way SEOs categorize products is that it requires customers to do a lot of work by manually filtering a page before they even see a list of products that matches their needs.
Customer-first product categorization 101
Customer-first product categorization simply means aligning your product categories with what your customers are actually looking for. This is where your faceted navigation goes from being a simple filtering system to a data tool that can provide insight into your customers’ needs.
Faceted navigation provides a great user experience because it allows customers to filter PLPs so that they’re left with a list of products that exactly match their search parameters. The concept is simple, highly effective, and is the closest you can get to personalization for new or logged-out users. The problem, however, is that it still requires work from the user.
Customer-centric categorization takes the personalized approach of the faceted navigation one step further by removing this additional work and allowing the user to land on the page they want directly from the SERP. You can achieve this by creating PLPs that are more tailored and aligned with the products your potential customers are looking for.
The running industry is generally good at this. For example, if you search [trail running shoes] on Google, most of the pages that rank are specific to trail running shoes (rather than just running shoes), which would require the user to perform more filtering once they’ve clicked on the page.
Every time a user filters results on a PLP or searches for something using internal site search, it indicates that the product isn’t as easy to find as they would like. The beauty of a customer-centric approach is that these products are usually frequently searched for and therefore have the potential to drive a lot of traffic and revenue for your online store.
The advantages of customer-first product categorization
A customer-first approach makes sense when you consider that 15% of Google searches are unique; this is equal to around 1.275 billion unique queries every single day. That’s 1.275 billion potential new ways to search for (or describe) something that already exists. Couple that with the trend towards more personalization (mentioned above), and it’s easy to see how your parent categories (or even subcategories) are potentially no longer the most relevant pages for your customers.
By embracing a customer-centric approach to your product categorization and faceted navigation, you can:
Increase visibility through long-tail keywords
Leverage internal data for a competitive advantage
Act on emerging trends
Increase visibility through long-tail keywords
By their nature, long-tail keywords are more descriptive and more specific than head terms. In the past, long-tail keywords were typically understood to reflect informational intent and were therefore better suited for blog content. However, there are many instances where users are searching long-tail keywords with commercial intent (i.e., when the product is more complicated or technical) and this is where the real opportunity lies.
For example, a searcher might be looking to buy a green velvet two-seater sofa. In this instance, they could search using several different keywords:
[Green sofa]
[Green velvet sofa]
[Green 2 seater sofa]
[Green velvet 2 seater sofa]
These keywords have thousands of monthly searches each, even [green velvet 2 seater sofa] (which is very long-tail/descriptive) has 110 searches per month. But, most companies focus on the broadest terms and pass on the work of filtering for specifics to their customers. This is evident when you look at the search results for this keyword.
By creating categories that focus on longer-tail keywords with high commercial intent, you can gain more visibility and outrank competitors whose pages aren’t as relevant or optimized for these niche product searches.
Leverage internal data for a competitive edge
It may not surprise you to know that very few companies reported learning from site search data and using it in other areas of their business. That means that a huge proportion of businesses have informative internal data that they’re not even looking at—these businesses are likely to include your competitors.
Businesses that rely on third-party data for user behavior insights tend to overlook the value of internal data. While it is worthwhile to use third-party tools to understand industry trends and keep an eye on competitors, internal data provides an even greater competitive edge because it’s the data that no one else has access to and it’s specific to your audience.
Customer-first product categorization makes the most of this concept by combining your internal data with keyword data to provide insight into what your customers (and potential customers) are actually searching for. It can also help you understand whether a behavior is specific to your business or a part of a wider industry trend yet to be capitalized on.
By looking more deeply at user behavior, you can begin to understand whether or not your existing categories are still aligned with your customers’ needs, or whether the landscape has changed and your categories need a refresh to ensure continued visibility and relevance.
Act on emerging trends
In certain industries, like fashion, the ability to anticipate and react to emerging trends is critical for success. This is where a mix of internal data and external search data can make a big impact.
Most brands have a good sense of which of their products perform the best during certain times of the year, and there can often be short-term trends that are sprinkled throughout that time. By analyzing your internal data and coupling that with search data, from tools like Google Trends, you can spot new, popular search terms and react more strategically.
ASOS is a great example of this. The online clothing retailer frequently updates its navigation by incorporating internal search data and industry trends to build new trending categories that capture a specific audience.
This is a relatively easy way to show you’re in tune with your customers and can provide them with what they want (without them having to work for it), which is more likely to result in more returning customers and higher revenue.
Customer-first categorization: How to get started
Before we get into the ‘how,’ understand that the easiest way to start analyzing your internal data is to get good tracking in place so you can see how your customers are using your faceted navigation and which facets they are most interested in. There are plenty of paid tools you can use to set up tracking for events like this, such as Tealium. I prefer to use Google Tag Manager because it’s free and it’s relatively easy to set up events, especially if you’re already using Google Analytics to track and monitor your website. Once you have tracking in place, it’s much easier to gain insights going forward and will make ongoing category maintenance and review easier as well.
If you don’t already have tracking in place, then you can still start working towards customer-centric product categorization by using keyword data coupled with the expertise you have within the business to understand your customer’s needs. Speak to your sales teams, your customer service teams, and, if you have physical stores, speak to the sales assistants and managers. These are the people that interact with your customers the most and they will have a deep understanding that you don’t always get behind the scenes.
01. Choose a category
While it’s tempting to refresh all of your categories at once, it’s much more efficient to choose one and focus on optimizing that before moving onto the next. This way, you can see what works and what needs improvement and apply those learnings to the next category.
I recommend choosing a category that has an extensive product list and a faceted navigation that gets a lot of use. Try to pick a category that you know customers like to get specific with, as this gives you plenty of options to explore.
02. Find the demand
This is where your internal teams (or tracking if you have it) come into play. Look at the data and speak to your teams to understand which features your customers are most interested in or filter for the most. For example, if you’re a sofa company, you might find out that, after size, color is the most important product attribute that customers look for and so you might want to start there.
Create a list of the top three to five product attributes and prioritize them based on what you feel is most important to the business, and then do some keyword research to find out which of these attributes get the most searches.
Once you’ve done this, you should have a list of potential subcategories to create that you’re confident align with your customers’ needs and will likely have the biggest impact on revenue.
For instance, if we continue with the sofa example above, we would likely find that the top three attributes that customers are most interested in are:
01. Color:
[Green sofa] — 9,900 searches per month
[Grey sofa] — 9,900 searches per month
[Cream sofa] — 8,100 searches per month
02. Material:
[Leather sofa] — 22,200 searches per month
[Fabric sofa] — 3,600 searches per month
[Velvet sofa] — 6,600 searches per month
03. Type:
Corner sofa] — 110,000 searches per month
Two seat sofa] — 2,600 searches per month
Sofa bed] — 22,000 searches per month
Each of these has significant search volume and reflects exactly what customers are looking for. Now, with the keyword data to back them up, you can start to plan your new, customer-centric categories.
03. Plan your new categories
Before we continue, a word of warning: You must consider the current structure of your site before you make any changes. Part of your planning needs to include how these new pages will fit into the current structure of the site and how customers will arrive at these new pages from elsewhere on the site. If you overlook this, you risk messing up your site structure—and for this approach to work well, you must have a robust site structure and a clear user journey.
Once that’s all done, you can start planning the categories that you want to create. This is where you will need to not only work on the PLPs themselves, but also the supporting content that goes with it. Nothing in SEO works as well in a silo, so make sure you’re considering the other key areas of your site so that your new pages go live in the best possible shape to help your rankings.
I find that the blog is typically a good place to start because building a content strategy that supports your new categories can help you identify additional customer considerations to address. It can even help you discover complementary products that you may want to include on the PLP to drive your average order value. All of this can help when it comes to building your PLPs and it will make elements like internal linking and FAQs easier. This is why I would advise against building the PLP first because you will likely overlook the key elements mentioned above, which can leave you feeling as though the page is never ready.
04. Publish your new customer-centric product categories
Once you’re happy with the strategy and have created the new pages, the only thing left to do is publish your new categories and start monitoring your visibility. If you thoroughly researched and executed well, then you should start to see your visibility improve and you can start to take notes for the next category!
Remember to account for facets in your user journey
While new categories are relatively simple to implement, there are important technical aspects to consider, including:
The user journey and site structure (as mentioned before)
The role your faceted navigation will play once your new subcategories are in place
Be mindful that users can arrive on your pages in many different ways, and your website’s functionality and structure need to cater to that.
Using the sofa example from before, consider this scenario: You have identified a need for new subcategories that combine sofa color and type, and have created a new ‘green corner sofas’ page as part of this strategy.
A user searches for [corner sofas] and lands on your ‘corner sofas’ page and then decides they want a green corner sofa, so they filter for the color green using the faceted navigation.
What is the next step in their user journey? This is important as it will shape how you plan the technical side of your categories. You have a couple of options:
When the user selects ‘green’ from the faceted navigation, they are taken to the new ‘green corner sofas’ category page.
When the user selects ‘green,’ the products are filtered on the existing PLP and the user remains on the same page.
The right choice is entirely dependent on the capabilities of your platform, so I’d recommend speaking to a developer to find out what’s possible. No matter which option you choose, you must ensure that the facets adhere to best practice and aren’t indexable, otherwise you’ll end up with a ton of randomly indexed, cannibalized pages.
Improve SEO and increase revenue with customer-centric product categories
By now, it should be no surprise that the more tailored your website is to your audience’s needs and vernacular, the more likely it is that they will buy from you. Not only that, but (as evident from the green sofas example above) there are thousands of people searching for these more specific products and attributes that many brands are simply overlooking.
A customer-centric approach is about focusing on your customers’ wants and tapping into their mindset when they’re shopping online. Thousands of people want what you’re selling, but if you’re not making it easy for them to find it, then you’re leaving money on the table.
