Make the shopping experience better for users. Take a cue from brick-and-mortars with these ecommerce organization and merchandising tips.
Imagine walking into a grocery store, list in hand, and all of the store’s products were randomly strewn on tables displayed throughout.
Odds are good that you would U-turn and make the drive to a store where things were better organized. You wouldn’t want to spend the rest of your life sorting through all the products to find the things on your list.
The same is true for your ecommerce website. Organization is critical for a good user experience and good SEO.
Also, imagine having “toilet paper” on your list, but the signs on the various rows say no such thing.
And according to this imaginary grocery store, “toilet paper” is called “tissue for your bottom.”
Does anyone have “tissue for your bottom” on your list?
No. We simply call it “toilet paper.”
Ecommerce mirrors in-store browsing and buying
From studying traffic patterns, grocery stores learned long ago that aligning “like” products makes the shopping experience easier.
As we all know, everyone seems to be there for milk so stores keep them in the back. (“Let’s make sure that folks have to walk past all the other items before getting to the milk!”)
What you call “Products” and where you have them on your ecommerce site (i.e., information architecture and taxonomy) matter quite a bit in SEO.
This hypothetical grocery store is akin to the ecommerce website with “Shop” in the navigation.
Once you’ve clicked through, you get a list of every product available on the website.
Things need to be organized (categorized). And again, the categories need to make sense.
For many years, my agency handled SEO for a leading HVAC manufacturer.
Back in 2005, when we first engaged, they called their air conditioners “cooling products.” Unsurprisingly, they did not rank in Google for “air conditioners.”
User experience needs to consider the customer journey
It’s often been said that SEO and UX are linked, and it’s never been truer than when we think about how you organize an ecommerce website.
That one product you have may have several categories that fit within. Easy enough – make sure that the product is associated with those other categories.
Just like you might find the hot sauce in the Mexican aisle, you’ll also find that there’s a display near the chips.
Make it good for the user, and you’re most likely also making it good for Google and the searcher.
So, where do you start?
The following tips for organizing your ecommerce site and promoting your products will help you get more traffic and sales.
1. Build a solid site taxonomy
Start by creating your main categories. If you’re unsure where to start, learn from your competitors.
Verify that they are successful in their SEO efforts through a Semrush audit and see the breadth and value of their organic keyword presence.
Your main navigation should present your main categories. A great example of solid architecture is Wayfair:
You can see here that although Wayfair offers products across a wide spectrum, they have intuitively broken these out into what they consider to be their main categories.
And, if you were to click into any one of these, you would then see their sub-categories: