Building a topical map for an e-commerce catalogue

A keyword list tells you what people typed. A topical map tells you what the subject is made of. For a catalogue site the second is more useful, because it shows the gaps a keyword tool cannot: the questions nobody has written about yet, which are exactly the ones worth answering.

Start from the entity, not the search volume

Pick the central thing your catalogue is about. Not a keyword, a thing: a product type, a profession, a problem. Everything in the map hangs off that, which is what gives the eventual site a coherent shape rather than a pile of articles.

Write it as a noun phrase a customer would recognise. If it only makes sense to you, it is too abstract and the map built on it will be too.

List the attributes

Attributes are the properties of the entity that someone might reasonably care about: price, material, compatibility, durability, legality, maintenance. Each attribute is a potential page, and the combination of entity plus attribute is usually a better page than the keyword that approximates it.

The fastest source is your own support inbox. Questions customers already ask are attributes with demonstrated demand, and they arrive pre-written in the customer’s own vocabulary.

Separate the two halves of the map

• The core section covers the entity and its attributes directly. These pages are closest to the product and carry the commercial intent.
• The outer section covers adjacent subjects that matter to the same person but not to the same purchase. These build the topical coverage that makes the core section credible.
• Both are necessary. Core alone reads as a thin catalogue; outer alone ranks for things that never convert.

Order by dependency, not by volume

Some pages only make sense once another exists. A comparison of two approaches is weak until each approach has been explained. Publishing in dependency order means every article can link to a page that already exists, which is how internal linking stops being an afterthought.

Within a dependency level, then sort by volume. Not before.

Map it onto the catalogue

Every content page should name a route to a category or product, and every category should be reachable from at least two content pages. If a section of the map cannot link to anything you sell, it is probably in the outer section and should stay short.

This is also the check that stops a topical map becoming a content plan for its own sake. If a cluster has no commercial destination at all, ask what it is for before writing twenty articles into it.

Measure coverage, not rankings, at first

Early on, the useful metric is how much of the map exists. Rankings lag by months and will mislead you into rewriting pages that simply have not aged yet. Track published coverage against the map, and start reading rankings once a cluster is complete.