Product pages
Product pages usually generate relatively little traffic for online stores. Based on my projects, they account for no more than 20% of total traffic. A product page primarily attracts traffic for searches containing the exact name of that particular product.
For example, suppose you sell sofas and a product page is titled “Sofa name + product code or specifications.” That page is unlikely to reach the top for broad queries such as “buy sofas” or “buy a sofa.” The category page will usually rank instead. The product page will only rank for a long, low-volume query such as “sofa + specifications + product code + brand + model.”
These searches are usually made by people who already know the sofa’s model name or specific characteristics. They may have seen it in a physical store or on another website and are now looking for a better deal: a lower price, a local seller, a discount, free delivery, or another bonus. If your product is cheaper than your competitors’ offers, promoting individual product pages can make sense.
Homepage
The homepage is usually the strongest and most authoritative page on the entire website. However, at best, it can effectively target 10–20 keywords, or occasionally up to 30, while an online store’s semantic core may contain several thousand queries. Therefore, the homepage should target the primary, highest-volume keywords in your niche. Before selecting them, analyze the top search results and check whether homepages are actually ranking for those queries.
Categories
The remaining keywords should be distributed across category and tag pages, which should then become the main focus of your optimization efforts. Promoting categories provides the greatest potential impact on traffic. You can build an online store structure that covers the entire semantic core, including queries related to specific characteristics, models, and brands. You can also create dedicated tag pages that group products according to particular features.
Competition in some categories may be relatively low if you divide products thoroughly by type, variety, and characteristics. This helps the page match the user’s search intent more precisely and provide relevant results: visitors see exactly what they expected when entering the query.
Conclusion
Product pages generate a relatively small share of traffic because users rarely search for a specific product by its full name. The homepage can target only a limited number of queries, which are usually highly competitive. Therefore, product categories are generally the most effective pages to promote in an online store. They offer significant traffic potential with relatively low competition.
I recommend avoiding the simultaneous promotion of every category. Instead, identify and prioritize the most promising ones. Evaluate their potential traffic, competition, product range, profit margins, seasonality, likelihood of repeat purchases, and other relevant factors.
There is a reason why we are actively working on the “Parts for Delta” category in our online store: https://motozilla.com.ua/model/Delta/. We have already brought it to the top of the search results, as discussed in the previous post. This category has the highest combined number of relevant queries. In addition, Chinese mopeds break down frequently, which leads to many repeat purchases.
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