eCommerce URLs & SEO Question

First of all, thank you all for reading. I've been a long time lurker and have just very recently signed-up. This forum and all of you changed my life deeply around 3 years ago when I started making money with Affiliate Marketing and for that I am grateful (and I promise I'll work on a long, juicy guide soon as the ones here were what got me started and motivated).

Now, onto the question. I've decided to expand from AM, as putting all your eggs in one basket is dangerous, and as such I've started working on eCommerce dropshipping with woocommerce.

Although everything is fairly simple - from design to the content and silo structure - I have one doubt I just can't seem to clear even after thoroughly searching around here and on the web. It's all about how to correctly set up the URLs/permalinks in order to target my keywords.

Let's say my niche is bar soap and that my domain is "barsoapboss.com". I've done the appropriate research and found some big keys I want to target like "buy bar soap", "best bar soap" and "cheap bar soap" (each with their own smaller variations like best red bar soap or cheap large bar soap) for example. Should I go for them in the store's pages themselves (category, sub-category with products) or make the store URL generic and attack them on separate blog posts instead?

Let's take a look at an example below:

Option 1
barsoapboss.com/best-bar-soap/red/johnson-21

In this case, /best-bar-soap/ is the category page, /red/ is the sub-category and the finally the product ID comes last. This allows me to target my keywords on the store pages but it makes it hard for me to provide long, SEO-focused content on the pages. (a category page can only have a bit of text on top and then some other on the bottom and it's not as SEO-friendly as a regular clean article page/blog post).

or like this:

Option 2
barsoapboss.com/bar-soap/red/johnson-21

In this case, I make the URL more broad with /bar-soap/ (doesn't contain my desired keyword) but it looks better. To compensate for the lack of KW, I'd then complement the store with a /blog/ section where I would directly target the keywords - "best bar soap", "cheap bar soap", etc... - in a regular article and then link to the products in the shop section.
+
barsoapboss.com/blog/best-bar-soap
barsoapboss.com/blog/cheap-bar-soap
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There are most likely other options that I don't know about and if you do, please don't hesitate to share them. This has been a roadblock for me as I don't want to move on before making sure everything's perfectly setup.

To all of you who have been in the same position and have successful eCommerce stores, what do you recommend? Any other tips or options?

Thank you all in advance for your availability and be sure to ask if you need anything!

In Option 1, you're stacking one category under another category and it is a no no and makes it look like a site with thin content(for the category pages).
In Option 2, the chances of ranking your shop section is thin and it's possible for some of the traffic that landed on blog page to bounce back if they're looking to actually buy the product.

I'd go with something like

barsoapboss.com/best-bar-soap/red-johnson-21
barsoapboss.com/best-bar-soap/white-jack-21
barsoapboss.com/cheap-bar-soap/blue-jimmy-21
barsoapboss.com/cheap-bar-soap/purple-joanne-21

From what ‘ve learned from minds way bigger than me is to not overoptimise the url.

I.e.

barsoapboss.com/best-soap
barsoapboss.com/cheap-soap

Probably you could also drop the “-soap” part, as this is already mentioned in the domain name.

Let’s wait and see what others suggest.

SpoonFeeder said:

In Option 1, you're stacking one category under another category and it is a no no and makes it look like a site with thin content(for the category pages).
In Option 2, the chances of ranking your shop section is thin and it's possible for some of the traffic that landed on blog page to bounce back if they're looking to actually buy the product.

I'd go with something like

barsoapboss.com/best-bar-soap/red-johnson-21
barsoapboss.com/best-bar-soap/white-jack-21
barsoapboss.com/cheap-bar-soap/blue-jimmy-21
barsoapboss.com/cheap-bar-soap/purple-joanne-21

Click to expand...

I see what you mean with the categories, thanks for the reply! So with the strategy you mentioned, I'd optimize the category pages as best as I could to rank right? As in small text section on top (H1 and small paragraph), products section like a regular store (the usual mosaic), and then more text on bottom (to make the category page have more content and higher chances of ranking, kind of like a mix of category page + blog post).

This is what I thought about doing initially but I was afraid that the category pages wouldn't rank due to their natural "shop" format, while blog posts can be 100% dedicated to SEO from top to bottom. I was also wary that if I put too much text on the category pages, it would drive down CTR but maybe it's the best compromise out of all options.

Again, thanks for the information SpoonFeeder, I appreciate it.

Hello friend, I am in the same situation and am very very interested in the same knowledge. Created account to give a bump and help in any way I can. I think option 1 is better for weak keywords and 2 is better for hard but thats just me and my limited experience.

Jadriano said:

Hello friend, I am in the same situation and am very very interested in the same knowledge. Created account to give a bump and help in any way I can. I think option 1 is better for weak keywords and 2 is better for hard but thats just me and my limited experience.

Click to expand...

Hey Jadriano, thank you for the interest and trying to help out, I appreciate it! Let's hope a few experts on this topic jump in and share a few words of wisdom.

Last bump, any help would be highly appreciated. Even if no concrete solutions are found, I'll update this thread or make a new one down the line detailing the results of my experiments to ensure that people with the same question get some guidance in the future.

jamesandersonicb said:

1. Optimize Your Meta Titles, Descriptions, and H1's. Most e-commerce sites use a templated approach to their meta tags, which usually follow a pattern like this
2. Optimize Your URLs
3. Write Unique Product & Category Descriptions
4. Add Schema Markup

Click to expand...

Hey James, great bullet points - they're all absolutely essential steps. When it comes to #2 though, what's your opinion on the best way to "optimize" them? Do you use any of the strategies mentioned in my first post or do you have other ways to do it?

Thanks for your input.