Here’s a quick tip that I use all the time to help prioritise my ecommerce SEO work.

We know that we’ll get better results more quickly by working on optimising a topic rather than individual keywords (it’s not 2005 any more lads). We also know that for maximum clicks you want to be in the top 3 organic positions.

If you are running a mature ecommerce website with a large catalogue then you’ll probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords related to your products just outside the top 3. Grouping them into logical topics that you can optimise together can be a pretty boring and time consuming task.

But there is a quick and easy way to group them. Google has a product taxonomy available which provides logical groupings of product categories in a hierarchical structure. Exactly like an ecommerce website in fact. This is mainly used for product feeds into Google Merchant Center, but why not use it to group our keywords into logical topics too? I mean, it’s how Google understands product hierarchies so it’s got to make sense from an SEO perspective right?

So, how do we group the keywords? Guess what, it’s one of those tasks that you offload onto a generative AI tool like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini.

So, first grab your list of keywords. I generally use SEMRush but any keyword tool, even search console will do. Export the list, paste it into your AI assistant of choice and ask it

“Can you group these keywords into logical sets based on Google’s product taxonomy, only use categories explicitly included in the taxonomy documented at this url google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-GB.txt?”

Hey presto, you’ve got a logical grouping of your keywords to build out your optimisation plans around.

Couple of tips/gotchas:

• Depending on the AI assistant you use then you might need to upload the taxonomy as a text file. I’ve seen Gemini in particular hallucinate categories and then gaslight me when I said some of its suggested categories didn’t exist
• You might need to tweak your prompt in order to prioritise use of sub-categories / smaller sets rather than returning parent category groupings
• It doesn’t need to be perfect – this is a time saver to help you build a plan around your main topics, not a magic hack for SEO dominance

I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s become a standard part of my workflow that generates some rather good organic search results in the ecommerce space.

If you’d like to know more about my ecommerce seo consultancy services please contact me for a no obligation chat