Category Trees

WHAT SHOULD INFORM YOUR STRUCTURE

The layers of your category tree should consider both the understanding of the customer on your site but also the understanding of search engines to crawl your site and index those PLPs to help users discover your site and create pathways for traffic to flow through. As such, there are multiple perspectives that should be addressed when defining each category as well as the structure in which they are nested under one another:

1. Customer perspective

   • Categories should be intuitive and reflect how customers think about your products

   • Naming conventions should be local to the market where possible.
     For instance, a category might be named Sweaters in the USA but Jumpers in the UK

2. SEO perspective

   • Categories should align with top search keywords to maximise discoverability both externally as an entry path to your site as well as internal search tools

   • The structure (level 1, level 2, level 3…) should be optimised to crawls and indexes of your site for search engines

3. Business perspective

   • Categories should align with your product offering and be scalable as your business evolves

   • The structure should ensure a minimum number of products in a category so that you are not becoming overly granular
     For instance, as your offer evolves you may add or remove categories if they are no longer something you sell

   • Automating category creation as well as assignment of products into categories wherever possibly will reduce manual workload in your teams

OPTIMISING FOR NAVIGATION

In the build of your product catalogue, products get assigned to these categories and subsequently build out the PLPs of your site. What this means is that your category tree is how users navigate and discover your products, so it’s imperative that you are making it as easy and intuitive for users to drill up and down within their browse journey.

AUDITING YOUR TREE

As your product offer evolves but also as search engines and customer behaviour and trends change, your tree will need to adapt. It’s important to review your tree annually to make any improvements, bearing in mind category tree changes can have a significant implication on search indexes and rankings for your site so should be handled carefully with a clear process to protect your search value.

There are some indicators that your category tree may need revision, but please bear in mind that this requires a fair bit of assumption from a customer and the best feedback loop for tree structures are from more qualitative user surveys as well as site crawls.

• High drop-off from your PLPs after a user drills down into a lower category could suggest that naming is unclear or categories are overly broad and don’t align to customer expectations

• Low internal search success could indicate missed opportunities for categories based on user demand, which could temporarily be solved through synonyms and redirects, but also poor keyword matching from your catalogue

By understanding and optimising your category tree, you create a foundation that supports both user navigation and traffic growth, setting the stage for success across the rest of your site.