Content Consolidation

There’s the old saying in the SEO industry that “content is king,” and it is still true in 2020. A website without content is like an empty house – the outside may be nice, but you’ll have a hard time convincing people to come inside and hang out with nothing to offer them.  If you make your website a place with valuable information, users will have a better experience and want to stay – and you’ll be rewarded with better rankings, as well. 

This is especially true for product category pages on an e-commerce store. An E-Commerce CMS often provides the ability to add a description to product category pages, but the biggest question is how much content is needed to help improve the visibility of the category page.

In this case study, we explore the results of two similar content problems and how they were each resolved.

Problem 1

Apfelbaum Inc is a company that sells collectible stamps from all over the world. Their inventory includes stamp collections, US & British Stamps, Topical stamps and more. While looking at the visibility of their topical stamps category page, we noticed the page had low visibility,  and therefore,  we needed to find a way for more people to find this page in the search results.

Problem 2

There was a similar challenge with the US Stamps page, which saw a steady amount of impressions and traffic, but we felt like there was room to do better.  While this page did have a category description, the existing content was too short.  

Strategy

After analyzing the topical stamps landing page, we noticed there was no category description. So the first step was to add a description to provide additional information about topical stamps. 

After finding an informative blog post on the site about topical stamp collecting, we reused it on the category page, making sure to  add a canonical tag (used to avoid duplicate content) to the original blog post that points to the topical stamp category page.

For the US Stamps page, a similar approach was used, as again, we decided to improve the content that was already present. The process was the same – find an existing blog post about US stamps that wasn’t getting much traction in search results, and reuse it on the already established category page.

Results

After reusing blog content, there was a quick improvement in the visibility of the page. The screenshot below, from Google Search console, shows the increase in impressions within the search result starting right after this change was made to the topical stamps category page. 

Figure 1Topical Stamps Impressions

The US Stamps page also saw positive results from the addition of the new content, as evidenced from the spike in traffic after the new content was added. Although it does fluctuate a bit, it still appears to be higher than prior to our content update.

Figure 2US Stamps Impression Data

In addition to the increase in visibility, we also saw a 180% increase in organic traffic to the US Stamps page, and an overall 47% increase in organic traffic year over year:

Overall, after analyzing this data, we found that including detailed information about the products on the category pages had a direct correlation to increasing visibility and traffic.