Mediaboss Marketing

If you need water and decide that drilling a hole in Hoover Dam is a good idea, youll be rewarded with a thin stream that lasts for a long time. But if you want a lot of water, why would you stop with just one hole?

I use this analogy whenever I speak to e-commerce firms about getting traffic through SEO. If you arent ranking on Google for allyour profitable keywords, youre going to be stuck with a trickle of traffic that represents just a fraction of your full potential.

Wouldnt it be nice if you could direct some of that unrealized traffic back to your website? Today, Imgoing to talk about one way to help do that: by building out alogical and intuitive site architecture.

The few e-commerce companies that are highly successful invest time and expertise into planning their website structure correctly from the beginning.By laying the foundation for your information architecture on the firm ground of expert analysis based on your historic sales, revenue and conversion data, youll ensure that your SEO automatically grows stronger over time and remains immune to tectonic shifts from any future algorithm updates.

The most profitable e-commerce web shops dont have sites that mirror their marketing brochures or organizational structures. Online, customers dont care about that.

They want answers and they want them fast!

So a company selling bed sheets and curtains might have their site structured like this:

Within this structure, there can be sub-divisions for specific types:

Someone looking for a curtain can be quickly directed to the best location, where theyll find relevant information about curtains such as fabric, colors, designs, brands, sizes and more which they can search or filter according to their requirements.

With customization of templates, enough information and content can be included in these category pages to make them complete destinations rather than just product dumps that display a long list of items with descriptions.

This kind of website structure is intuitive to users, helps deliver a delightful customer experience, and also has several natural SEO advantages:

Its important for e-commerce web shops to have information architectures that scale as you grow bigger.

If your site only shows up for the black, 64GB iPhone model, customers who are searching for a white, 32GB version wont come to you. If a buyer searches for LED TVs, and your site ranks only for LCD TVs, youll lose sales.

Hoping that Google will figure out that you also sell these other things wont work. Your information architecture must be designed to make that crystal-clear. And each category and sub-category should expand and develop as you add new products to it.

How you name these categories also matters, especially when labels you assign in your database are automatically pulled into your URL structure. Ive detailed technical solutions to help with this in my previouspiece on e-commerce SEO best practices.

What you can do to help develop an ideal information architecture on your e-commerce website will depend upon your role in the organization.

Collaborate with an SEO consultant for the above. He or she will draw up lists of search terms based on keyword analysis and help you draft unique descriptive text for products listed on the e-commerce store. This will boost your search rankings and attract more traffic.

As you can see, theres a role for everyone in implementing an optimized information architecture. With proper planning, a strong site architecture can ensure high search engine ranking for profitable keywords that can be sustained over the long term and it caneven keep on growing stronger automatically as your site develops and expands.

It all begins with laying the right foundation, and this requires close cooperation between all the teams involved, under the guidance of an SEO consultant who is experienced in e-commerce SEO. Only this will help fix profit leaks that can funnel extra dollars into your coffers year after year.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Is your information architecture costing your e-commerce web shop millions in lost sales? - Search Engine Land