How to Create New OpenCart Categories with SEO in Mind

What makes most Ecommerce websites easy to use and navigate is not so much their beautiful design, but the way the products are arranged. Usability in digital commerce depends on how easy you make it for customers to find the product or products they want to find.

Product categories and subcategories are used to organize your products, and their structure depends on you.

In this post, we will show you how the Categories and Subcategories work in OpenCart. You will learn how to create a new category, how to assign subcategories to it, and how to customize it.

Most of all, we will share how to do all that, with SEO in mind.

Create a New Category

Go to Catalog > Categories.

This is where all of your product categories are listed.

To edit an existing category, click on the action next to its name. To create a new one, click on Add New.

Clicking on Add New will lead you to the category creation field, which looks like this:

In the category creation section, you have three tabs - General, Data, and Design.

General

This is where you select the basic information for your new category.

Category Name - This is the name of the category that people will see in the front end of your store. It’s usually placed in the main menu of your site, where it’s visible. Make sure you give it a descriptive and clear name that will help users and not mislead them. This is also what Google looks for when scanning your website.

Description - The description of the category appears when users open the category to view all the products in it. This is where most of the SEO strength of your categories comes from. It’s where you can afford to place a bit more written content which gives you some room for a variety of keywords.

Meta Tag Title - The meta tag title is the text that appears on the browser tab when you open a web page. Another good place for putting a keyword for Google to find.

Meta Tag Description - The snippet that appears in the Google results is where the meta tag description appears. The ideal character count is between 155 - 160 symbols. Make it short, clear and place one or two long-tail keywords that will help with more specific user queries.

Meta Tag Keywords - This field lets you add all the keywords related to your category - both short and long-tail. From an SEO standpoint, Google has declared that the meta tag keywords have little to no influence on your ranking whatsoever. This means that even if you leave this field empty - it will not reflect on your position in the search results.

Data

The data tab allows you to edit a few more details that will make your new category more easy to find, use and recognize.

Parent - If you set the new category to have a parent, this will automatically make it a subcategory that will appear under the parent category (which will be in the main menu in the front end).

In the screenshot below, Macs and Windows are the subcategories of the parent that is Laptops & Notebooks.

Filters - The filters in your OpenCart store are managed in another field in Catalog > Filters. This is where you can assign various filters to your category and the products inside. Since this is a more extensive topic, click here to view our post written on the subject.

Stores - If you have multiple OpenCart stores, you can assign the category to them here.

SEO Keyword - If you have enabled your SEO URLs, this is where you write the keyword that will appear as a part of the URL. The requirement for the SEO keyword is to be written without spaces, with a dash: laptops-notebooks.

Image - Visuals are always comprehended faster than text, so put a nice image for your categories to help users get around faster.

Top - Selecting this option will put your category in the main menu of your OpenCart shop. If you leave it unchecked, it will not be visible there. This will only work for Parent categories.

Columns - If you want the subcategories to be sorted in columns (horizontally) instead of rows (vertically), type the number of columns you need for sorting your subcategories.

Sort Order - The sort order number arranges the position of your new category among other categories in the main menu of your website.

Status - Enable or disable the category.

Design

The Design tab allows you to assign different layouts to the specific category you are creating or editing.

Layout Override - Choose a layout that you want to use in your category. The modules assigned to the layout you choose will appear in the category.

In our example, we will assign the Account layout to the Laptops & Notebooks category. In addition, we have assigned the Filter module to the Account layout so it also appears in the category.

This is how the Laptops & Notebooks category looks like in the front end of the store, with the Account layout overridden to it.

This is how a different category with no overridden layouts looks like.

This means that you can use the Design tab in the Category to assign specific modules to each separate category in your store.

For example, you may have a category with just T-shirts and you want to have a module like PreOrder only in this category, and a module like SmartBar in another category where you want to show notifications or promotion messages.

You can assign those modules to a specific layout from Design > Layouts, and then override that layout in the Design tab in your category.

Summary

We hope you understand how the Categories work in OpenCart now. You have a lot of different functionalities to work with, and most importantly - you can add a lot of SEO power to your OpenCart website when you configure your categories properly. Let us know if you need any more knowledge on the subject in the comments below. Good luck!