Ecommerce SEO Lessons From Wakefit (Breakdown)

After Reading This Guide, You’ll Understand 🡭

How to structure your eCommerce site
Internal linking strategy for collection pages
Optimizing category and product pages, and more.

NOTE: In this breakdown, we’ll try to reverse engineer the SEO success of Wakefit and also discuss what can be improved in this strategy.

Table of Contents

About The Business 🡭

Wakefit provides complete home solutions such as foam mattresses, chairs, tables, wardrobes, and many more. Primarily, the brand is known as the mattress store in India.

Results Achieved 🡭

Wakefit has almost 5x their organic traffic in the last two years and currently ranking for over 38k keywords.

Number of ranking keywords:

In the space of online furniture and work form home accessories, Wakefit is dominating most of the competitive search terms such as:

work from home furniture
mattress online
online chairs
wardrobe online, etc.

Content Strategy Breakdown 🡭

Let’s understand the key eCommerce SEO strategies of Wakefit.

1/ Optimized Product Pages

Optimizing product and category pages are some of the most important aspects of an eCommerce store.

1. Meta data

It may sound simple, but optimizing the product pages’ metadata can give you a huge boost in search results. In most cases, an eCommerce store has thousands of products, and sometimes optimizing the title and description according to the target keyword is difficult.

This is where you can have the edge over under-optimized eCom sites.

At Wakefit, almost every product page is properly optimized with the target search query.

For example, one of the least popular (low search demand) products at Wakefit is ‘floor runner.’

Instead of just adding the product name, the title is optimized for the search query and CTR.

Likewise, the description is also well optimized except for the meta description (description length is longer than as per Google).

In fact, most of the product pages have a similar structure like the following:

2. Internal linking

Internal linking helps crawlers to find all the important pages easily. Wakefit boost the internal linking from product pages in the following three ways:

Breadcrumb

Related products

Internal linking within the content

2/ Third-party reviews

Product reviews from individual users or third-party sources are one of the important aspects of evaluating Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness (EAT).

This is what Google QRG says:

Considering this point, Wakefit does a great job of demonstrating EAT on their product pages.

You’ll see hundreds of product reviews (by customers, shared on third-party platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, and Google).

Here’s a screenshot of product reviews:

This not only helps in demonstrating EAT but also builds users’ trust for the Wakefit brand overall.

4. Unique product description with schema markup

You’ll generally find product pages with thin or duplicate content. This may affect the ranking opportunity of product pages.

In this case, Wakefit has a clear advantage of the unique product description with custom visuals.

To add a unique product description, Wakefit does the following:

Product features with custom visuals

Content optimized mainly for SEO

Product FAQs with schema markup

When using product FAQs (recommended), ensure you’re also adding FAQ schema markup.

3/ Optimized Category Pages and site structure

1. Site structure

Like product pages, category pages are an important part of driving qualified traffic to your eCommerce store.

The site has created dozens of category and subcategory pages. But the best part is the site architecture.

Having too many categories and subcategory pages makes it difficult to follow a flat site architecture.

[Flat site architecture: Make every important page of your site accessible within no more than three clicks from the home page. This is called flat site architecture.]

Here’s how Wakefit has organized its navigation to make flat site architecture.

This has helped Wakefit to make all the important category and subcategory pages within two clicks away from the home page.

Benefits?

Crawlers (users too) can easily find the important pages of your website
Better indexing performance
Reducing crawl budget
Pass link authority from one page to another

2. On-page content for category page

Now, you might have already heard of adding content to the category page to add page relevancy.

Wakefit optimizes every category and sub-category page by adding relevant content and FAQs.

Key benefits Wakefit gets from adding content on the product category pages are:

It helps Google find the context and relevance of the category page
Internal links: This allows you to add a descriptive hyperlink to related category and product pages.

Earring rich results and featured snippets with HTML tables

One of the mistakes that many eCommerce sites make is that they add images to describe the pricing or features of the product.

There’s nothing wrong with adding images to improve the user experience but the better approach is to add text or HTML tables within the content.

This way, the content will add relevancy, and HTML can help you earn featured snippets in the SERP.

Here’s how Wakefit does this:

From the category page, Wakefi adds prices (starting from) for the products of the subcategory. And also, add internal links to those subcategory pages.

This creates a great page-level hierarchy for eCommerce sites.

And this helps win rich results such as:

4/ Regional Landing Pages

You’ll mostly find regional pages in service businesses. For example, brands often target search queries like:

[service name] in [location name]

E.g., app development services in Delhi

Best [service name] company in [location name]

E.g., Corporate gifting company in Chennai

Here, Wakefit does the same even with a product business. Looking at the footer, you’ll find the regional pages created for mattresses (their primary product).

And all of these pages target search queries (having a decent amount of search volume) like:

Mattress in Bangalore
Best mattress in Gurgaon
Wholesale mattress in Hyderabad

Opportunity for Wakefit:

Wakefit can also target different Indian cities with mattresses and other categories such as chairs, wardrobes, and many more.

This will help them to target a new set of high intent keywords for their eCommerce store.

4/ Educational and Inspiring Content Guides

One of the most important aspects of an eCommerce site is to build topical authority in the niche. Just having product and category pages isn’t enough for you to win on competitive search queries.

Wakefit builds topical authority by creating informative articles and guides on topics like:

Mattress buying guide
Home decoration ideas
Science of ergonomics
Study table design guide, and many more.

In fact, they have created a content hub for setting up a home office. This includes design guides, decoration tips, etc. And these informational guides help to build authority for transactional pages with internal linking.

Here’s what you should do:

Filter the important category and subcategory pages of the online store.
Build topical authority around those topics by publishing informational guides and solving users’ queries through blog posts.
Acquire links to the blog posts (or even category pages)

Note: Instead of creating links directly to the product pages, I’d prefer to build links to blog posts or sometimes category pages. This helps to pass link value from one page to another collection and product pages.

5/ Blog Content Categorization

Why is it never too difficult to find a book in a library even if there are thousands of books?

It’s because of the categorization of books.

The same applies to content marketing.

Every book is categorized by the topic/ industry/ popularity/ alphabetically etc.

The challenge with a site with hundreds/ thousands of articles is that old articles are hardly accessible by the user and the search engines.

An Example:

One reason is that WordPress themes (mostly) display only recent articles by default.

And it looks like this:

<< Previous 1 2 3 4… 87 Next >>

Challenges With This Approach?

Hard to find articles by topic and time.
The crawler needs to follow lots of links to get to page 86 (If there are a total of 87 pages)

“When content is buried hundreds of links deep, it sends a strong message to the search engines that you don’t think the content is important.

The pages will probably be crawled less often, if at all, and they probably will not rank very well.”

– Matthew Henry (SEO tool developer at Portent)

The Better Approach?

Categorize blog posts by category.

Here’s how Wakefit categorizes its blog content:

This will not only help readers to find the relevant content pieces but also help in crawling.

Key Takeaways:

Make a list of all blog posts published.
Create multiple categories.
Now divide all the blog posts by tagging them with the relevant category.
Update the ‘Blog’ page and add all relevant categories so readers can easily navigate articles on different topics.

Let’s first understand what faceted navigation is in an eCommerce website:

“Faceted navigation (or faceted search) is a type of navigation found on the category/archive pages of sites that deal with many listings.” – Ahrefs.

You may have noticed search filters in eCommerce sites that help you find products of your choice by adding filters like this:

Now, there are two types of faceted navigation you’ll often notice such as:

Faceted navigation with status URLs (when there is no change in the URL when using the search filters)
Faceted navigation with dynamic URLs (when URLs get changed when using the search filters)

Wakefit follows the faceted navigation with the static URL system. There are some cons and pros to using this approach.

Pros of static faceted navigation:

You don’t have to deal with duplicate URLs created by the search filters.
Prevents crawl budget wastage
Clear URL structure, etc.

However, there are some benefits you’ll completely miss out on when using status URLs which is targeting long-tail keywords with faceted navigation.

Here’s an example:

If you search ‘king-size soft mattress white colour.’ You’ll find Amazon’s collection page in the top 10. The fact is Amazon didn’t create this page manually. Instead, it was created by faceted navigation.

URL of the page: (https://www.amazon.in/Mattresses-Box-Springs-White-Bedroom-Furniture/s?rh=n%3A5689374031%2Cpnsizetwobrowse-vebin%3A1480416031)

Likewise, Amazon has thousands of URLs created that automatically target long-tail keywords like this.

But if you follow a static URL system for faceted navigation, you’ll never get the search visibility benefit from this. In that case, you’ll need to create collection pages targeting long-tail keywords.

For example, Wakefit has to create a collection page manually for the same keyword (king size soft mattress white colour) to compete.

Both dynamic and status URL systems have their cons and pros. I highly recommend reading this guide to get more traffic from faceted navigation.

What Can Be Improved 🡭

In this section, we’ll be discussing what areas Wakefit can improve in terms of SEO and content. Let’s uncover them one by one.

Issue 1 → Missing H1 tags:

Many product pages are missing the ‘H1’ tag. Google doesn’t say that the H1 tag is a must-have element for every page.

However, having a unique H1 tag helps search engines to understand the page structure. Therefore, a unique H1 tag should be added to every product page.

Issue 2 → Cannibalization or duplication

Product duplication is one of the most common technical issues of eCommerce sites.

Here’s the issue found on Wakefit:

Product pages often have multiple variations (colour, features, etc.).

But it is necessary to add a canonical tag to specify which URL the search engine should follow for ranking.

An example:

Black and grey chair (product page URL) → https://www.wakefit.co/office-chairs/draco-medium-back-office-chair/WSCHRDRACOMBNBBKBKGY
Black and Orange chair (product page URL) → https://www.wakefit.co/office-chairs/draco-medium-back-office-chair/WSCHRDRACOMBNBBKBKOE

As you can see, the URL changes when you select a different chair colour. From the human eye, we can identify that the product is the same in both cases. But Google will treat both URLs as separate and different pages.

In this case, we can do one of the followings:

Making URL structure the same for product variation that means the URL will be static when you select different colours – This also has some cons (discussed later).
Use the canonical tag to point to one URL as the primary

Otherwise, it may cause serious SEO issues such as:

Duplicated pages
Crawling in-efficiency
Multiple URLs competing for the same query

Wakefit uses completely different navigation for blog content. This is how it looks:

Now, this approach is good for a content-heavy website. But it can be improved for eCommerce conversion by adding product categories at the top of the navigation.

Here’s another example from Wayfair:

As you can see, the top-level navigation is the same as the eCommerce store.

This approach helps in several ways, such as:

Helps to drive visitors from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel
Link value passes from high authority articles to product collection pages
Higher chances of conversion from blog articles

Key Takeaways 🡭

1. Optimize product and category pages

Write unique product and category page meta data
Optimize title for higher CTR (example: use power words in the title like free delivery, lower price, [xx%] off, etc.)
Use FAQs and schema markup on product and category pages (if relevant, add internal links within the FAQs)
Add unique and short content on collection pages (don’t make it too long; instead, add content related to the collection items on that page)
Use HTML tables when writing pricing for products. This helps to win rich results, and the internal linking improves dwell time.

2. Focus on EAT

Demonstrating EAT is important for every eCommerce site. It is not a clear ranking factor but improving the EAT information helps you build credibility and trust in the search.

Showcase the expertise, awards, recognition, and experts on the about us page
Use author bio to tell the users that the content is written by experts – which makes it trustworthy.
Make third-party reviews a part of your brand strategy. Don’t make the mistake of getting all of the customer reviews on your own website.

3. Improve site architecture

Try to follow a flat site structure.
In general, all of your important collection and product pages should be under three clicks (or less) away from the homepage. Use mega navigation to categorize the pages.

4. Find opportunities for regional landing pages

Regional landing pages (here, collection pages) are a great way to drive high-intent traffic as you’ll generally find less competition than broad keywords.
Map important locations (where you deliver products) and collection pages to find opportunities to create regional content.
Again, use unique content and optimize the meta data for the target keyword.

5. Build top-of-the-funnel content

Don’t ignore the blog part for an eCommerce website. Blog articles might not give you a higher conversion rate but help you in many ways, such as passing link value, building topical authority, educating the audience, etc.

6. Blog content UX

Ensure that the blog navigation has collection pages in the navigation. For a better user experience, you can create multiple navigations (one to categorize blog articles and the other one to showcase products and categories)
Use internal links to product and category pages.

Optional Assignment 🡭

Pick any eCommerce website in the online furniture space and try to find SEO growth opportunities.

Here’s an example site for your reference: https://www.furniturewalla.com/

If needed, compare the above website with Wakefit’s SEO strategies, see what can be improved, and list the current issues.