Thread by @_buildd

Walmart gets 250M+ monthly traffic via SEO!

Of course, they ace many areas in marketing. But is there something we can apply to our own startups?

To answer that, let’s uncover the SECRETS of Walmart’s SEO strategy that powers $43B in online sales! 🧵

We'll cover one of Walmart's SEO strategies:
1) What was the issue to be solved?
2) Is there a solution to this?
3) What did Walmart do?
4) How did it help?

Thread continues below 👇

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1/ What was the issue that needed solving?

In any online retail store, items are organised into different parts.

So, we have -
Categories -> Sub-categories -> Products

This helps with organising the products, but, it could be disastrous, SEO-wise.

(contd.)

How?

Well, consider a product 'A', under sub-category 'Y' and category 'X' — (X -> Y -> A)

Now a category can have many different products
For example:
- Category = Computers
- Sub-category = Computer Accessories
- Then, Product = Keyboard, camera, mice, etc

(contd.)

But if you optimise product pages for keywords like 'camera', 'keyboard', 'mouse', etc.

Then every page will rank for the same keyword, which will result in them competing with each other.

For a website like Walmart that has millions of product pages, this is a huge problem.

2/ Got it, so is there a solution to this?

Yes! We use the concept of taxonomy to solve this.

Taxonomy is simply classifying items in a structured way.

It is an SEO technique used to organise pages into categories with help of tags.

But why should sites use this?

(contd.)

Well, 2 reasons
1. Pages can compete with each other
2. Product catalog keeps changing, so optimising pages for main keyword can be wasted effort

With SEO taxonomy, the content is clear to search engines.

So visitors are led to specific pages for a given search query.

3/ Now, what did Walmart do?

Every product page on Walmart is created using a parent-child structure — a perfect example of taxonomy.

Let's refer to their page and URL structure to learn how they do it!

(contd.)

A) Page structure

The main domain, Walmart .com has 50M pages

There are 2 main categories here
1. Departments - things you can buy (shoes)
2. Services - services you can utilise (auto care)

The electronics department is one such department, among others.

(contd)

It is further split into TV, Tablets, Computers, etc.

Computers are then split into laptops, desktops, etc.

So if you search 'laptops', it will show you a landing page with all available laptops.

Clicking on any one laptop will take you to a dedicated product page.

(contd.)

Final structure:

Domain -> Walmart .com
Department -> Electronics
Category -> Computers
Sub-category -> Laptop

Which leads to a product!

Here, each preceding page is the 'parent' and the following page is a 'child'.

Each page is optimised for a unique keyword.

B) URL structure

Similar to the page structure, there is also a URL structure.

A rule of thumb in SEO is that URLs should be short.

So instead of mentioning each stage of the structure like:

walmart.com/electronic/com…<product-name>

(contd.)

Walmart simply uses the product name as the slug!

So the URL structure is — walmart .com/ip/<product name>

In the case of category or subcategory pages, the 'ip' changes to 'cp'

So the URL is — walmart .com/cp/<category>

4/ Amazing, right? But how did it help Walmart?

Well, using taxonomy tells Google that 'children' pages do not mean to compete with 'parent' pages.

This is helpful, because
- search engines can navigate through pages easily
- users can clearly find what they want

(contd.)

Overall, this very extensive strategy has paid massive dividends.

Walmart's SEO stats speak for themselves.

Acc to Ahrefs, Walmart gets 252 million monthly organic traffic!

Crazy, right?!

(contd.)

Walmart's SEO & marketing efforts with the taxonomy strategy act as a booster for their sales.

In 2021, while the world was in lockdown, it reached $43B USD in online sales - that is a 70% increase year-over-year.

Clearly, Walmart has aced SEO and the results are showing!

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