I love a pack of pork scratchings with a beer in my local pub on a Friday evening, so I decided to have a look for online suppliers of this divisive snack. What I discovered was a great example of an unoptimised category page on a Wix website.
My ‘weak category pages’ example, shown in more detail in my video below, is from the fabulously branded “The Oink Company”.
Category Page Problems
It may have improved by the time you read this, but this is the category page that I discovered.
There are a few things wrong with it but, frustratingly, many of them are easy to put right and you don’t need to be an ecommerce SEO specialist, like me, to do it.
With a little awareness, time and effort, any ecommerce business owner can dot these i’s and cross these t’s to make a significant difference to their visibility in Google Search, as well as boosting their on-site conversion rates. All of which means more profit for your business!
Wix Category Page SEO
Oink is built on Wix. It’s a good option for people too busy to learn to use WordPress, but it has disadvantages around SEO optimisation and speed, due to the amount of code bloat a website builder like Wix uses.
How Oink could be doing better SEO with their Wix category page:
- No logo/brand at the top of the page (see the white space above the black line at the top of the image).
This is a real miss for brand recognition, especially for a business that’s developed a great style. - Wall of text at the top of the page is hard to quickly read for the visitor and pushes their product down the page. On mobile, this comes after the products.
Ideally, you’d have a keyword rich, descriptive sentence or two at the top of the page with other written content below the products. - Only one heading on the page, which is the “Pork Crackling & Pork Scratchings Snacks”. Thankfully it is an H1 and it’s keyword-rich.
This page would be improved by introducing a couple of H2s, or secondary headings, into the mix. Use these to highlight other, semantically relevant keywords to strengthen the page’s appearance in Google Search. - No filters or search means that the visitor can’t do something as simple as sorting by price or weight. Combined with a lack of search functionality, this could be costing conversions.
Make sure your Wix ecommerce setup includes some basic filters. It’s important to make it really easy for your visitors to find what they want quickly. - Questionable strategic Choice means that (I suspect) a new product is at the top of the list. It’s for dogs (is that why your customers are on this page?) and it only costs £3.50, so very low margin.
When you’re in charge of the product order, of course you should position them strategically, but think about what that means for conversions and margin. - Slow response times kill conversions. You can see in the picture above that the fourth product has a ‘Quick View’ overlay. However, it takes several seconds from pressing that to the product coming into view.
Wix does slow things down so, when this becomes a genuine problem, consider moving to a more versatile platform like Shopify or WordPress/WooCommerce. - Star ratings are hit & miss, which means that sometimes they’re not showing. You can see there are none visible in the video but they are showing on the screengrab above.
Those gold stars, especially when there are four or five, are great for conversions so make sure yours are being shown reliably. - No testimonials means another missed opportunity to build trust amongst your visitors and to demonstrate your EEAT credentials to Google.
You should always have testimonials visible on product and category pages in an ecommerce store. They’re another way to make visitors confident about purchasing.
The Video
For more detail on all of the above, plus a look at something odd in their checkout that needs fixing, watch my short video below.
Category Page SEO Isn’t Difficult
There’s a misconception by most people not steeped in the world of SEO that it’s some kind of ‘dark art’ but it really isn’t.
What I’ve set out to do in this mini case study is show you that a few simple tweaks can make a genuine, measurable improvement to your online store’s organic visibility and conversion rates.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing ecommerce store owners is time. Quite rightly, you’re focused on growing your brand and don’t have enough hours in the day to improving the SEO of your category page.
If that’s the case for you, get in touch with me using the form below. I’ll be happy to tell you how I can help and you’ll be surprised at how low the cost of that can be.