How to Optimize Categories & Tag Pages for Local Businesses

Local businesses can boost their SEO if they have a working knowledge of optimization. As much as the content of your website needs optimization, it is equally important to focus on category and tag pages.

If you have a local e-commerce business, your focus on optimizing category and tag pages should be higher. Let us look at seven helpful tips for optimizing category and tag pages.

7 Tips to Optimize Category & Tag Pages for Local Businesses

1. Understand the Difference Between Categories & Tags

Before optimizing these pages, you must understand what categories and tags are. Categories are broad groups where your content is put on your website. These are hierarchical; hence you can make subcategories.

Check the below screenshot of SEW site having various categories followed by tags in the end. 

On the other hand, tags describe your page or post. They help in further categorizing the page content in a specific niche. These are non-hierarchical.

You can easily create categories, subcategories, and tags if you have a WordPress-based website.

2. Make Keyword-Rich Categories and Tags

To optimize your category and tag pages, you need to indulge in extensive keyword research. The onus is finding the trending keywords with high search volume and fewer keywords difficult to reap the maximum benefits. 

It is crucial to engage in competitive analysis. Based on the research, you must choose the optimum keywords. 

Search engines and your audience should clearly understand what a page holds. Your keywords should be relevant to the categories and tags to increase the accessibility and readability of the website.

Local businesses must focus on keyword research using tools like SEMrush. 

3. Have Unique Meta Tags for Each Category and Tag Pages

Duplicate content is a massive bummer for the SEO of any business. If you wish to rank your local business higher, you must eliminate that same content. It starts with writing unique meta tags.

Meta tags are meta title/ SEO title and meta description of the page. While writing meta tags, add the primary keyword. Give an exact concise idea about the page's content and do not exceed the character limit. 

Here’s an example of a meta title and description that help search engines understand the contents of a page.

You can use the free Meta Tags Generator to create perfect meta tags.

4. Create Unique Content for These Pages

As mentioned above, similar content takes away the authenticity of your website. Also, Google has algorithms like Panda, penguin, and others to penalize sites that duplicate the content. 

Here’s a screenshot showing how these algorithms affected a site that used plagiarized content. 

Thus, while writing content for category pages or tags, you should add unique descriptions.

Especially for category pages, a unique description shows right beneath the page heading. Each category should precisely talk about what to expect on the page.

You can check duplicate content using the Plagiarism tool easily. 

Read: Step-By-Step Content Strategy For SEO

5. Enable Breadcrumbs and Have a Proper Schema

Suppose search engines can figure out your site structure. To achieve the right website structure for your local business, you should enable breadcrumbs. Each item on your website should link back to the most relevant category. 

Here’s how the breadcrumbs look on SERP, helping both search engines and users know the relevancy of search results. 

Similarly, schema markup tells the search engine about your website in detail. You can add rating schema or review schema to your site if you have an online shop.

To find different types of schema, you can go to schema.org.

6. No-Index, No-Follow Tag Pages

Focusing on tag pages specifically, they have minor functions in SEO. But that does not call for negligence. Even if tag pages rank lower, they are essential for site structure.

You must carefully analyze your tag pages. No pages index can be a good solution if they do not provide a vital internal crawl path. But be careful about frequent no indexing, or it will convert into a soft 404 for search engines.

Here are the tags you should use to let Google understand your page-level settings. 

You can verify Google Search Console to check removed URLs.

7. Keep Different Names for Categories and Tags

Category and tag pages help people find similar or exact content/ products. It is advisable to have unique categories and tags. It is pertinent to have different categories and tag names to eliminate duplicates. 

For example, take a look at this site having completely different categories to help the audience easily navigate the desired section. 

Having a category and tag page of the same name will confuse search engines. They will not know which one to rank higher. It will go against your website rankings.

If you have duplicate names for categories and tags, you can use the Merge terms tool on WordPress.

Key Takeaways

• Be clear about categories and tags before optimizing category and tag pages.
• Do proper keyword research for each category and tag page.
• Write a unique meta title and meta description for the category and tag pages.
• Add unique content to each category and tag page to avoid duplicates.
• Enable breadcrumbs and use proper schema for your website.
• Use no-index, no-follow options for tag pages, if required.
• Do not keep a category and tag of the same name or confuse the search engine.