Using tags and taxonomies can supercharge ecommerce SEO. Properly labeling products and categorizing them allows for (1) better targeting of long-tail keywords, (2) improved internal linking to distribute PageRank, and (3) helping Google's crawlers discover content more efficiently. Key recommendations include designing three-level categorization for products and using tags to link diverse products. Automating recommendations and dynamic linking based on tags and attributes can further boost performance.

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USING TAGS AND TAXONOMIES TO
SUPERCHARGE YOUR
ECOMMERCE SEO
Colt Sliva
SEO Engineer

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Everything you need to know about me
Disney Movies Cereals Dogs Brands
States I’ve lived or
worked in
10+ years making websites and acquiring organic traffic. Currently an SEO Engineer at the iPullRank Agency. Focused on Natural Language Processing and Information Architecture.

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COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS
Overview
Taxonomy Algorithms
Grouping Products
Get Supercharged
Tools
Labeling Products

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Overview

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All Platforms Supported

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Why Ecommerce Taxonomies Matter
Ecommerce taxonomies are the starting point for how we talk, think,
name, organize, and link products together. After this webinar, you will
have a framework on how to:
• Write better titles and meta descriptions
• Target keywords from broad match to long tail
• Create better internal linking for higher internal PageRank.
• Improve time on site
• Build topical relevance
• Design better URLs
• Help Google’s crawlers find your content

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Labeling Products
How we talk about the things we sell

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Naming things is hard
Unfortunately, we need to start with a name to create a
product -- and that product needs a URL with a folder to
live in and a page title to show people what it is on
Google.
Luckily, there’s a framework for everything.

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Key Action Item
Naming a product
Design the 3 levels of categorization into long tail keywords, URL subfolder structure, and page titles.
In linguistics, there are 3 levels of categorization -
superordinate, basic, and subordinate.
This is common across languages and design
systems. To the discerning eye, placing a product into
these three levels of categories might look like a
folder structure.
/dogs/pitbulls/american-pitbull-terrier.html
Or perhaps it looks like a product title.

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Ontology is understanding the properties that make up a thing. In
this case, we’re talking about tags, facets, features, or attributes.
Defining what makes a product can also be hard.
So we turn to frameworks.
Labeling a product (AKA what makes this thing different)

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The Framework
• Classes
• Make, Model, Brand
• Attributes
• Color, Size, Fit, Material
• Relations
• Similar-to
• Functions
• Style, experience, use, audience
• Restrictions
• Negative matches
• Rules
• Sales
• Events
• Editions, Releases
The Product Labeling Framework

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In classification, there are 2 types of relationships.
1. IS-a relationship
2. HAS-a relationship
Linking products together is feature of most static product
recommendation systems.
You can think about making recommendations based on what
traits it shares. It either IS-a similar product or it HAS-a similar
attribute which a customer is interested in.
If the current product does not meet a customers needs, linking
with the right relationship can be the difference between an
abandoned cart and a sale.
Linking Products Together
Design the 3 levels of categorization into long tail keywords, URL subfolder structure, and page titles.

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Grouping Products
How we design our site taxonomy

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Categories
Think of categories as folders or parts of a URL. It
should carry a unique product and can be nested
within other folders.
You can move up and down, but not left to right.
The Framework
• Tags build a tree structure
• Use a single category if possible
• This is your canonical
• Your category is your subfolder
• This means it is your URL as well

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Tags
Tags should function more like a network
structure. You can have as many as you need,
and they link diverse products together by
related traits.
You can move in any connected direction.
The Framework
• Unsorted ( No parent or child tags)
• Many relationships possible
• Links abstract products together
• Provides paths to jump across categories
• The most underused tool in SEO

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Putting it in practice
Here’s a Nike
product listing page
with faceted
navigation applied.
Each tag is used to
dynamically build
the page.
The category is
Lifestyle / Shoes
The tags are
Gender, Price, and
Color.

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Categories & Tags
When you use both of them together, something
magical happens.

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Categories & Tags
Your site graph starts with an unorganized mess
with no clear clusters or topics for Google to pick
out.

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Categories & Tags
Your site becomes organized vertically by
category structure and horizontally by tags. The
tags act like portals to jump to different
categories.
This results in:
● Higher crawl rates
● Better product discovery
● Better internal PageRank distribution
● Longer time on site
● Higher conversion rates
● Better analytics through subfolders

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Faceted Taxonomies
This great article by Botify makes the case that faceted
navigation isn’t as great as we think it is.
Facets create multiple versions of the same URL. That means
duplicate content, diluted link equity, and wasted crawl budget
with spider traps.
That’s why we need true taxonomy pages for SEO. These are
real “Shop By” pages which are ideal for organic landing
pages.

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Google’s Algorithms for Taxonomy
How does Google find your products

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Google’s Algorithms for Taxonomy
The benefit of creating product listing pages
informed by taxonomy is that you create a HUGE
number of long tail landing pages.
The downside is now Google has to be able to find
all these pages, navigate between them, and
classify the intent for them.

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Djikstra’s Algorithm
Can you get from any given product to another product
in a different category without using the header menu or
the footer?
If each square is a product or page, how many link hops
does it take to find another specific page or product?
Djikstra’s can be used for new page discovery and is a
popular pathfinding algorithm.

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Random Surfer Model
The random surfing model is a graph model which describes
the probability of a random user visiting a web page.
The model attempts to predict the chance that a random
internet surfer will arrive at a page by either clicking a link or
by accessing the site directly, for example by directly entering
the website's URL in the address bar.
For this reason, an assumption is made that all users surfing
the internet will eventually stop following links in favor of
switching to another site completely.
In this graphic, there is a chance that the surfer will never
reach the #3 page.

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Key Action Item
PageRank Algorithm
PageRank is calculated by seeing which pages link to
other pages. It is run repeatedly until a consensus is
reached on the value of pages.
Often the most central and important page is a
homepage. Links from the homepage carry more
weight.
Link to key products or categories from the main content area of the homepage to increase their internal PageRank.

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K-Means Clustering
Using links, you can calculate what general category a page belongs to.
Search works by throwing a dart into a category and hitting a bullseye.
Using clear internal linking for your category can place your pages inside
that bullseye.

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Key Action Item
How to beat the machine
Internal link often, and both by tags and categories. Include links from listing pages and product pages.
Here’s a few case studies on improving
internal linking. They tout the many benefits
of a better site architecture through
taxonomy.
1. Credo (Source)
a. +74% Organic Sessions
b. +41% Pages Per Session
c. +148% New Users
2. Spyfu (Source)
a. +129% Keywords Ranked
3. Ninja Outreach (Source)
a. +40% Organic Traffic

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Tools
Architecting your site taxonomy

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yEd
yEd is a graph editor which lets you
nest nodes.
You can plan tags and clusters by
linking it all together.
This is a great way to physically shift
site architecture around and get a
chance to visualize what you want to
create.

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Screaming Frog
If you’re not using the Screaming Frog visualizations, you’re missing out.

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Supercharge Your Ecommerce Experience

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Automate Product Details
Build a faceted visual with additional
product details.
Drive higher CRO and customer
confidence with clearly labeled
products.
Additionally, build structured content
on page that will be used by Google
during their crawls.

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Key Action Item
For additional SEO benefits, always recommend products in different categories but with similar tags to increase link
diversity, spread PageRank, and increase crawl efficiency.
Build a Recommendation Engine
Using tags or attributes, you can
calculate similar products surface the
highest revenue producing items to
customers.

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Build a Mega Menu
Dedicated landing pages perform better than mixed intent
pages which may cause keyword cannibalization.
Create a focused mega menu based on your new
hyper-targeted taxonomies.

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Additional Dynamic Links
Because your tags allow you to target many long tail
keywords, this opens up dynamic internal linking.
Build targeted pages and focus more PageRank of high
volume keywords. Earn more traffic by linking more often
to valuable pages automatically.
It’s PageRank sculpting like it’s 2005 with the technology
of 2021.

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Build a Quiz
Help customers find the right taxonomy for them by
matching their personalities with tags.
Direct them to parts of the site they may not have visited
and garner conversion through experiential marketing.

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Dynamically Link Products in Blog Posts
By using the same tags for your blogging CMS and your
ecommerce management system, you can join two
disparate systems together.
Often, ecommerce organizations fail to merge content
marketing with shop functionality. People can shop on
facebook, instagram, snapchat. Cross platform
ecommerce is all the rage. The least we can do is make
shopping more convenient on our content marketing
platforms.

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Back to basics
To reference where we started -- taxonomies are the start of
everything. You don’t have to be the most advanced ecommerce
organization in the world to get reap all of the benefits of keeping your
topics tidy.
• Write better titles and meta descriptions
• Target keywords from broad match to long tail
• Create better internal linking for higher internal PageRank.
• Improve time on site
• Build topical relevance
• Design better URLs
• Help Google’s crawlers find your content

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Thank You!
Twitter: @SignorColt
Email: colt@ipullrank.com
Website: https://ipullrank.com