How to steal Amazon’s ideas to optimise your category and product pages

No retail site is bigger than Amazon. Even if you can’t compete with them for sales, you can mine their strategy to optimise the most important pages on your eCommerce website. Here are some quick tips. For more actionable advice on carrying out thorough keyword research for your eCommerce website, there’s a link to a free, downloadable guide at the bottom of the page (chapter 1 of a trilogy)

 Product page keywords

First, head over to Amazon and enter a keyword that describes one of your products.

When you do, Amazon will list suggestions around that keyword. This is great for informing product keywords to use for your own website:

The keywords Amazon suggests tend to be very targeted, long tail, keywords (note also the suggestion of “Search instead for WOOD CHESTS of DRAWERS).

Rinse and repeat for the most important products on your site.

Category page keywords

You can use broader keywords for category page than for specific product pages as they are less likely to convert; but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put time into discovering how to optimise – and structure (more on this later) – them.

An obvious first step is to visit competitor websites to see how they structure their categories

But Amazon is again a source of inspiration; with such an enormous range of products, the retail giant has got category organisation, and naming, down to a fine art. If you narrow their list of departments to subcategories, you can get very granular. For example, if you sell accessories for hikers and campers, you could identify category names like this:

 This gives you a great list of suggestions for the categories on your site, and you can repeat the exercise for each line of your products. As well as giving your insight on the best keywords to use for categories, it might even make you rethink how had previously organised them in the navigation.