Problem

Overview

In the past, our e-commerce platform did not have canonical category pages; our links went to an overwhelming search results page. Based on user feedback, many of our customers did not know what to search for in terms of educational products and understand what our business provides. The search model was inefficient and ineffective to both the consumer and the business experience.  

Our immediate solution was to create fake category pages as an MVP to support the idea of discovery which led to a increase in conversion, sales, page views, and impressions. Yet, the executed solution caused another obstacle, as we also had to prioritize growth in organic traffic. Our taxonomy site architecture was not structured to be SEO-friendly. This affected our low impressions numbers and low domain authority with a rating of 54 (Based on ahrefs) . The UI design of the MVP was also not user-friendly, as the page had minimal content, links, and products. There was a lot of room for improvement in the front and back-end. 
 

Goal

The purpose of this project was to create relevant category pages and restructure our taxonomy to cater to our user's needs in discovery, while increasing our domain authority in google search optimization.

Research

We hired a technical SEO consultant to help us research the technical issues of our MVP category pages and increase our domain authority. Some examples of our technical audit:
• A lot of the PageRank is flowing through our current taxonomy tree through the top navigation, which included many non-SEO categories, 
• The titles, h1s, h2s, and body copy on our current category pages were either missing or duplicated, which hurts keyword relevance on our category pages
• Our category and product pages did not have any breadcrumbs.

Our head of growth also conducted a keyword research to identify opportunities for our categories and subcategories we can win on in terms of google search optimization to determine our taxonomy. This included long tail keywords, as we were still a niche market, ex. "3rd grade math books" instead of "math".

I determined our new taxonomy tree structure by combining both requirements from the optimized keyword research and initial card sorting session that was sorted based on the list of products in our inventory, from our MVP project. There were many factors that had to be taken into consideration, like most viewed categories pages and standardized assortment based on user feedback.