Creating a Niche Specific Category Structure - Part 1

October 15, 2007

By Now, I am sure all of you have jumped into your stores and done some experimenting! I have not touched the Grill Auctions site since my last post on Friday and will use today’s post to help you take the category structure from a non-focused category list and turn it into a Niche Specific directory of the categories of items people are buying!

For today… you are going to need a notepad by your side and be ready to use some of the tools we have already discussed to drill deep into making your site Niche Focused! As I started this post I had every intent on showing you how to narrow the build in categories from BANS as well as developing your OWN category structure that would drive the niche site. I am well into this single post and have decided to break it into 2 segments as each are equally important!

Lets get going…

Developing your Hierarchy Category Menu 

One of the first things we need to do is develop a PARENT or main category list. These will be the top level categories and links that show on the website. They will lead to several choices of sub or child categories. One of my goals in creating the top level categories (not just for BANS sites, but any website) is to limit the choices to a visitor. You dont want to display 75 different links and let them get lost in the navigation so I will create a short list of 10-20 main categories that lead to related sub or child categories within.  This is a pretty easy task for the Grill Niche, it may not be so easy on some others… use the web as your friend and start researching your niche more!

If you go into your own store admin and on the setup page, change the home navigation structure to OPEN, you will see all the choices a visitor may have right now… not too pretty or even related to the Niche is it?

Tip: A good design rule, is to lead your visitor to what they want within 3-4 clicks, or risk losing them!

You will find that over time, your main page is NOT the landing page of most search engine referred visitors! I know, makes no sense huh? Search engines are very intuitive creatures that will index your site and direct visitors EXACTLY where they want to be based on theie search string in relation to your page content. That being said, you still want to focus on basic design principles and develop your hierarchy menu as if every visitor landed on the main page all the time!

I need to state that there are many different ways of doing this research for your top level categories. The methods described below are those that work for me. I suggest everyone experiment with various ways until you find the best way that works for you. Once you have a set method in place, you will find this research can be done within the course of an hour or two and can be modified or coaxed as time passes the site is earning money! (Remember that 1-hour a month thing?)

Eliminate the Non-Related Categories 

At this point, you will begin using eBay to get rid of the categories you will NOT NEED in your store. Open up ebay in your web browser and in the main search box, type in grill, choose home and garden (The main category decided to set your store under in our last post) and click on search.  On the results page, you see a list of sub categories on the left side of the page, with the number of items in each. Click on the link for “See all Categories” directly below the list.

What you have now is a FULL list of sub-categories in the Home and Garden section that contain some form of Grill in the product listings. It’s time to get rid of the ones we dont need in our store admin. Starting at the BOTTOM of the subcategory list, click on each link one at a time and see if the products are related to your Niche store. For me, if there is less than 3-5 niche related products listed, they are likely there due to error and I will delete them.

You may ask - WHY start at the bottom? Well, in most cases, people are quick to just write down the ones they want to KEEP and miss out on several niche related items by skipping past the others. It only takes 5 minutes to browse each subcategory.

For Example, from the bottom:

• Electrical and Solar (1 product, delete)
• Vacuum Cleaners (Non-related, delete)
• Pet Supplies (delete)
• Wholesale Lots (Not many products, but I will leave for future use)
• etc etc….

Repeat this process of elimination for each listed category until you have a list of those you will delete AND those you will KEEP on your notepad. If you find 100 items in a category but only 1 relates to your niche market, delete it! In this case, Outdoor power equipment had 80+ items… they were primarily grills for lawn tractors! :-) I ended up with 5 main categories when I was done:

• Patio & Grilling
• Kitchen
• Major Appliances
• Food and Wine (For the grilling books)
• Wholesale Lots

Now that you have your list… log into your store admin and click on the “Store Pages” link. You should see a LONG list of categories that fall under the main heading of Home and Garden. In my own admin, I have added code to one of the administration files that shows all parent level categories with a yellow background. It just makes deleting the ones I dont need, easier.

In this case, the top category is listed as Home and Garden, in bold black text. The first category beneath it is Bath, with a slight indent. Take note that directly beneath the Bath category, each of its own sub categories are listed, also with a slightly farther indent. I KNOW Bath is not part of my niche… so I delete it! I do NOT have to delete each of the Bath subcategories, since they are deleted automatically when the parent is gone. When the page refreshes, the next one is Bedding… same thing, deleted!

Note: Once you are comfortable with the alignment of the main categories, you can safely walk through this in one single step by ticking the boxes to the right of the parent categories you will not be using. You dont have to tick all the subcategories, since, just like above, they are deleted when the parent is axed!

Once you have finished this initial process - you will have a much cleaner store structure and you are ready to repeat the SAME PROCESS for the revised category tree in your store. In other words… Go back into eBay again, but this time you will be searching through the second level subcategories for related items. I already know that the first category in my store, Patio and Grilling is very niche specific, I can skip that one… but what about  “Kitchen”? Kitchen has quite a few subs itself that may or may not have items I wish to list.

In the ebay search box, here I go again with Grill. Choosing Home and Garden again from the drop box, and once again… choosing to see all categories. The result list is identical as before, but this time we will click on the “Kitchen” link. I can see that there are only 7 0r 8 subs that have grill related items in them, so I first jump back into my store admin and delete all but those listed on this page.

The process is identical to the first level categories I explained above… Yes, it is time consuming, but it is also needed to make the site Niche Specific! As you work through each of the subcategories looking at the items, make notes about the items you find within. For instance, as I was looking through the Kitchen subs, I found:

• Digital Grill Thermometers
• Grilling Aprons
• Grilling Mits
• etc…

In the Food and Wine category:

• Grilling Sauces
• Grilling Recipes
• Seasoned Grilling Skewers
• etc…

These terms will come in handy for the time we start building the Niche Store category tree! 

By the time you have finished going through all your parent and sub categories, you have a very defined list of Grills, Accessories, and basically narrowed your store to focus on only categories that have relation to your Niche Store!

At this point - I am going to leave you all going through and clearing out the non-essential ebay categories from your store admin. If you get to a point that you dont know whether to delete one or not, simply click on the “View” link to the right of it inside your store admin. When the resulting page is displayed, type a generic term into your search box and see if you get niche related results. If not, delete it!

Tomorrow, we will begin drawing out our new category tree.. until then, Good luck and feel free to contribute, ask questions, or anything that you feel may help us all out!

BTW - Take a look at the category tree starting to shape up at www.grillauctions.com/

Mark

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