How to rank an EMD for Ecommerce website ?

Hello everyone,

I almost have an EMD ( mykeyword.com ) for the keyword that I want to rank for. It is clearly my main keyword that I want to focus and have about 100k monthly researches.

All other keyword are long tails variations of my main keyword (ex : white keyword, keyword for man,...) but the volume of all these keywords are quite lower (~ 5k researches/months).

So because I have an EMD, 99% chance that Google will rank my homepage for my main keyword (and not my category page).

So should I only optimise my Homepage for the main keyword (and optimize long tails keyword categories) and put my main category page with all my produts in noindex ?

Or I should still try to optimize both my Homepage and my main category page ?

Thanks

Yrbini said:

So because I have an EMD, 99% chance that Google will rank my homepage for my main keyword (and not my category page).

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This is a false assumption unless the domain has authority and long history
My suggestion is to avoid kw stuffing as much as possible

I would say that the EMD itself doesn't matter anything at all. Just focus on the real questions regarding the products and the structure to rank the site the right way.
You seem to be focusing now on a thing that will not matter much in terms of rankings, so it could mess everything up.
Even an auction domain that is somehow related in topic with your product in particular, could do much better than such EMD domain.

HustleTong said:

This is a false assumption unless the domain has authority and long history
My suggestion is to avoid kw stuffing as much as possible

Click to expand...

Okay, so I your opinion I should still try to optimize my homepage and my category page even if they target the same keyword ?

Emlicorm said:

I would say that the EMD itself doesn't matter anything at all. Just focus on the real questions regarding the products and the structure to rank the site the right way.
You seem to be focusing now on a thing that will not matter much in terms of rankings, so it could mess everything up.
Even an auction domain that is somehow related in topic with your product in particular, could do much better than such EMD domain.

Click to expand...

Yes, I understand but if I optimize both my homepage and my category page that are targeting exactly the same keyword, there are risk of cannibalization no ?

I liked EMDs too and a few years ago I was in a similar situation as you with a KW 80K monthly volume.

It was for an e-commerce site and this ended up being a huge mistake branding-wise later down the line.

The second issue was the link building. I think Google didn't distinguish my domain from the keywords I was targeting and it thought I was building keyword-related links and I got punished with each update.

Most links/anchors you build should be different variations of your domain/business name (at least this is always what I have done) and when you have a good EMD with a huge monthly volume then this is going to be a huge problem because people search your keyword and business at the same time, this confuses Google and they think you are on heavy link-building mode.

One way out of this is to have tons of funds to do proper branding to become an absolute authority in your niche but sooner or later you are going to ask yourself was all this worth it?

It's hard to give up those EMD domains. You are like married to them so I know where you are coming from.