An effective growth hack for search engine optimization (SEO) of a business to business (B2B) news section, a SaaS blog or e-commerce product overview page is using the ‘Category page hack’. This hack will increase your ranking position in Google Search, Bing and other search engines. But it also works great for improving your Google Ads quality score if you use this page in Google Ad campaigns. And it will probably increase your conversion rate too.
Many B2B websites use WordPress or have custom built websites and feature a news section or blog, the same for SaaS. E-commerce websites may use WordPress with Woocommerce or Magento and feature product overview pages. The categorisation of news or blog articles, or the product overview pages of a category of products is an opportunity for SEO. In principle the pages are full of duplicate content, have little unique content and very little value, therefore these pages do not rank high.
But with a small hack, these pages can become highly relevant and valuable landing pages. They will rank higher in organic search, are great for paid ads and often convert better.
Is coding required?
This hack works for any website, though it may take some coding. For custom built websites, it will take a bit more effort and customising.
If you are using WordPress, check if your theme supports adding a category description. If it doesn’t, you need to create a child theme and make a few small changes to the code.
If you are using Magento, in some cases you need to do some coding. And in any case, you have to consider the design of your product category page to carefully fit in the additional content.
How to implement?
When you can add a description to your category page, write an introduction of at least 300 words. Use pictures and rich media to make this page as valuable as possible.
This makes the page very valuable for search engines.
This transforms the page from a summary of duplicate content to a page of unique content.
It provides more information on the category and links to all related articles or products. This makes the page very valuable for search engines.
Chances are that this page will rank higher for a specific keyword than any other type of page. Make sure you leverage this powerful hack and make this one of the best pages you have to offer.
Follow the usual checklist for optimizing a page for search engines. Choose your keywords with care and make sure it fits into your website’s hierarchy.
Don’t forget to add high-quality content and pictures. Include meta tags and build internal links from other category pages and the homepage.
To take full advantage of this hack split your categories into subcategories. Create subcategories based on your keyword research for long tail keywords.
Example
For example, your fashion e-commerce website sells dresses. You might split dresses into categories for short dresses and long dresses.
But also consider categories based on occasion like prom dresses, homecoming dresses, etcetera.
Long tail keywords include searches like cheap prom dresses and sexy prom dresses. These add up to other 200K searches, so it might be worth the effort to create separate subcategory pages for these.
Note that the keyword sexy prom dresses have little competition and bids very low compared to overcrowded categories like dresses and prom dresses. This is a great opportunity for your Google Ads campaign!
Concluding
A category-based landing page will prove to be of great value. It will become easier to beat the competition with a high ranking page that is very relevant to the performed search query.
Want to know more? Have look at our services page for International SEO.