From the course: SEO: Ecommerce Strategies

Ecommerce silo structure

From the course: SEO: Ecommerce Strategies

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Ecommerce silo structure

- [Instructor] When it comes to search engine optimization for your eCommerce website, the way you structure your site has huge implications on how well you are likely to rank in the major search engines. So it cannot be ignored. You want to make sure that you put some thought into how you structure the different pages on your eCommerce website. It's likely that as an eCommerce website owner, you will need a range of different pages, including your homepage, your product pages, your checkout pages, and your category pages. And again, you want to put thought into how you implement these pages strategically on your eCommerce website. If you are implementing a content marketing strategy, which I highly recommend that you do if you're trying to rank in search, then it's likely that you are blogging as part of your content strategy resulting in you producing new web pages on a consistent basis. So this is going to increase the size of your website. So the more pages you have, the bigger website you have. Having a big website has its advantages in search engines. So technically, major search engines do not rank entire websites. They actually rank individual web pages. So this means that the more web pages you have, the more opportunities that you actually have to rank in search for a unique keyword. And this is one of the reasons why blogging is so powerful because you can actually target new keywords and start ranking for multiple different keywords in the major search engines. However, you do want to make sure that these articles are actually of high quality. And also you want to make sure that the blog content that you do produce is actually categorized well on your eCommerce website. But the big question remains, why is eCommerce website structure so important to you as a eCommerce website owner? Well, first and foremost, it's great for users. So if you have a great structure it's going to be easy for users to actually access the content that they want to find on your website. It's also great for search rankings. So one of the big indicators to search engines that your website is of high quality is user experience. So if your pages are easy to find and your users are having a great experience on your site, then this is going to send signals to the major search engines that your site deserves to be ranked. Also search engine bots can access and find the content on your website easily. If the search engine bots are having a hard time finding certain pages on your website, then this can actually impact how well your website, in general, ranks and how well individual pages rank as well. I want to give you an example of how you might want to structure your eCommerce website to help improve such visibility. This is an example of what is known as a silo structure. You might want to implement this for your eCommerce website. This will also be available as a template and a handout for this course. As you can see, I have a homepage. I also have my shoe store page. I have my about page and I also have my blog page. So underneath my shoe store, I have a sub menu of men's shoes and also women's shoes. Underneath that I have a sub category again, which has, for example, in my men's shoe section, men's work shoes, men's sports shoes, and men's fashionable shoes. If I was to update this website today with a new product that fit in with the men's sports shoes, then I want to make sure I put that in the right category. This makes it easy for users to access the content and find the products that they're looking for easily on my website and it also makes it easier for search engines to identify what content goes where on my site and what they need to index where in their search engines. I have a similar thing happening with my blog. In my blog categories I have men's fashion as well as women's fashion. This works the same way and has the same benefits to my online store. You want to make sure that you start your eCommerce business as you means to continue. It can become really difficult to try and fix bad website structure after you've had multiple pages already on your site. If you already do have a site though, that has multiple pages and it's not structured well, you want to make sure that you spend the time to go back over your website and improve your website structure adding pages to menus and sub menus where necessary, and this could dramatically improve where you're currently ranking in the search engines for certain web pages.

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