Site/URL structure?

A

Akufan

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Hey everyone,

First time posting here, and it really seems like at great place to get information from a lot of people.

I am currently working with a big ecommerce site, but it has a very hard time ranking on the main category pages - It is not even ranking in the top 500 of the specific keyword.
Only 50% of the main category pages can be found on page 1-3, the rest can only be found if directly searched for (they are indexed).

I've done the most basic SEO, Meta-titel and description, H1, H2, content and more.
I have even done some backlinks (what i believe to be enough from experience).

I am beginning to believe the site structure might be wrong, since it is an odd one. It is just a simple flat from shoporama:
homepage.com
homepage.com/product-category
homepage.com/product-subcategory
homepage.com/product-subcategory2
homepage.com/product

There is on average 20-30 subcategories with another 20-30 subcategories again, and then another 20-30 products. So there is A LOT of different stuff. And i think Google has a hard time figuring out what is what, because the url structure isn't:
homepage.com/product-category/product-subcategory/product-subcategory2/product
and because there essentially is more than 1.000 products with nearly the same name

We tried doing basic breadcrumbs and schema-markup breadcrumb lists.
but nothing worked.

So my question is, can it really be the url structure because of so many different categories, subcategories and products?
have you seen a similar site/url structure with a massive amount of pages/products rank well, which and how?

Thank you for your time and answers!
 
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Mmmm. If I correctly understood, then maybe?

homepage.com
homepage.com/product-category
homepage.com/product-category-subcategory
homepage.com/product-category-subcategory-subcategory2
homepage.com/product-category-subcategory-...-subcategory222
 
Hard to tell without looking at the page.

a) Content quality: Thin or well optimized lengthy content?
b) Niche: Competetive vs non-competetive
c) Search intent: Looking at the top 10 results, are those pages that rank the category pages or rather individual product pages?
d) Age: Is the website newly indexed or since quite some time?

If all those factors are in your favor, I would say to see if there are any technical issues (run a crawl with Screaming Frog).
 
Sorry for not returning back sooner.

I dont really get what you mean Majento?

a) Decent content
b) 10-20 big competitors and 50-100 small
c) category pages - all results are
d) it has been indexed for a long time ago

What kind of technical errors should i be looking for?
 
Akufan said:
Hey everyone,

First time posting here, and it really seems like at great place to get information from a lot of people.

I am currently working with a big ecommerce site, but it has a very hard time ranking on the main category pages - It is not even ranking in the top 500 of the specific keyword.
Only 50% of the main category pages can be found on page 1-3, the rest can only be found if directly searched for (they are indexed).

I've done the most basic SEO, Meta-titel and description, H1, H2, content and more.
I have even done some backlinks (what i believe to be enough from experience).

I am beginning to believe the site structure might be wrong, since it is an odd one. It is just a simple flat from shoporama:
homepage.com
homepage.com/product-category
homepage.com/product-subcategory
homepage.com/product-subcategory2
homepage.com/product

There is on average 20-30 subcategories with another 20-30 subcategories again, and then another 20-30 products. So there is A LOT of different stuff. And i think Google has a hard time figuring out what is what, because the url structure isn't:
homepage.com/product-category/product-subcategory/product-subcategory2/product
and because there essentially is more than 1.000 products with nearly the same name

We tried doing basic breadcrumbs and schema-markup breadcrumb lists.
but nothing worked.

So my question is, can it really be the url structure because of so many different categories, subcategories and products?
have you seen a similar site/url structure with a massive amount of pages/products rank well, which and how?

Thank you for your time and answers!
Click to expand...

"homepage.com/product" this should be perfectly fine as most of the eCommerce are currently following this pattern. The reason behind it is most of your link-juice will be transferred towards to the first directory link of your domain.
 
I meant that search engines do not like more URL nesting, so you need to look for options that would give nesting at least 4th level

And as written above, analyze your competitors, how it is implemented in them
 
@Akufan
Try to build backlinks for your each of the inner pages and sub-pages that you called categories.
If you build backlinks for deep inner pages then it will surely get better ranking. I am sure your website might not be very old and it is still trouble in ranking for high traffic keywords, that is pretty normal at the beginning.
Stick to your aim and build more and more powerful backlinks. Instead of having more and more backlinks try to get higher and higher quality and authority backlinks.
 
What i dont understand is, i have made decent backlinks to these main category pages - I dont want product pages to rank, but the main category.
What i believe is that because everything is domian.com/category-page and domain.com/product-page - Every 1000 product page is competing for the same keyword as the category page, and because of that Google can't figure out which page to rank.

majento said:
I meant that search engines do not like more URL nesting, so you need to look for options that would give nesting at least 4th level

And as written above, analyze your competitors, how it is implemented in them
Click to expand...

What do you mean by i need to look for optiuons that would give "nesting at least 4h level"?

Competitors:
I researched, and there are only about... 50-75 competitors, so it wouldn't make sense if i didnt rank in at least the top 500 with a decent site that ranks for top 5-10 on decent search keywords.
It is kinda different how they rank, some of them is front page, som is domain.com/page others are domain.com/main-category/sub-category

Seems like something technical is wrong here.
 
It is likely a combination of being a new site, thin content and limited backlinks.
 
jack121400 said:
It is likely a combination of being a new site, thin content and limited backlinks.
Click to expand...

Page is from 2013, but not any SEO has been done since 2016.
There are category pages with +1000 words.
backlinks in total is around 200 - So not thaaat limited, but i am not asking for page 1 ranking, i am just asking for any ranking so that should be enough
 
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