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Step 2: Develop an SEO eCommerce Site Architecture and Keyword Mapping

You would be surprised how many website owners would just give you a blank stare if you asked them about how their site architecture was set up. Many eCommerce sites were set up before SEO became an established Internet marketing discipline. The site architecture of these websites typically reflects that of pre-existing catalogs, or even how a warehouse filled with products might have been organized before the advent of the Internet.

Perhaps the most important concept in eCommerce SEO is that keyword search volume can be used to determine the proper organization of an eCommerce site. This is accomplished by using pages higher in the site to rank for broader terms, and then mapping less frequently searched terms to pages deeper in the site. For our tire example, here is how site architecture might be transformed based on this:

Poor Site Architecture Based on Historical Catalogs:

An optimized eCommerce site has the home page optimized for the overall type of products that the site sells such as “tires”. Below the home page should be the most frequently searched categories of tires such as “snow tires”, “all weather tires”, “off road tires”, etc. The next level down should be subcategories of tires. These subcategories may be brands like Michelin, Goodyear, Yokohama, etc. or sizes like R70-16. The names and levels of the categories and sub categories should correspond to the search volume of the keywords that each page is trying to rank for.

Good Site Architecture:

Keyword Mapping

This set-up is relatively simple if you have a fairly small website, but some eCommerce websites have more than a thousand different pages of content and that's where keyword mapping comes in. This is a long and arduous process that is crucial to your on-site SEO. You have to assign keywords to different pages so that your site as a whole covers the keywords that you need.

For each keyword that gets searched, the search engine’s goal is to serve up the most relevant content possible to give the searcher what they are looking for. By focusing each page in your site 100% around a single keyword that you are trying to rank for, you maximize the chances of ranking for that word. Try to rank for too many keywords with a single page and you will end up not ranking for any of them.