Almost All Web Shops Overlook This SEO Potential!

The SEO Trap Hidden in Brand Collaborations

In 24 years of doing SEO I worked with brands so big that whole teams can’t even spend the full allocated budget for brand marketing. That’s the worst outcome for them, because unspent budget often gets cut in the next period. So they look for every opportunity to spend it. One of those opportunities is collaborating with online stores. They start by booking ad banners on the homepage and certain categories, then they run promotion campaigns, and in the end they ask for the same thing: a brand page. Online stores usually accept those promotion campaigns, because of the money that comes with them. Sadly, if it isn’t done right, that often creates SEO and UX issues and hurts the online stores revenue.

So what exactly is the problem here? Creating a brand landing page is not a bad idea, if you don’t have one already. If you already have one, the amount of customization that comes with a paid collaboration usually doesn’t fit the existing brand landing page, so a new custom page gets created. Now you have two of them and a cannibalisation issue. But it doesn’t end here. If your SEO is set up properly, your categories include a brand filter. Activating it generates an URL for combinations like “sneakers” plus “nike”. That URL should rank for the keyword “nike sneakers”. In addition to that, on a product page for a Nike sneakers model, the brand name should link out to the brand landing page which ideally has a “b” folder in its URL so it is easy to tell apart from categories that use a “c” and products that use a “p” folder. The brand landing page itself should show a list of best selling products, which usually isn’t the case. But let’s assume that you have set those things right

Two Main Issues

Now imagine Nike approaches you with a collaboration proposal. They want to promote new sneakers and new socks. They ask for banners on your home page, banners in relevant categories, and the same banners on their brand landing page. So far, so good. But they want that those banners lead to a custom brand landing page with a fancy design. Their goal is to raise brand awareness, not to drive your store’s sales directly. For them it isn’t important that customers buy at your online store, only that they do buy somewhere, including offline stores. Those custom brand landing pages usually link to their newest products and to some product categories like Nike sneakers and Nike socks. Besides preferring to list the newest products instead of the bestselling ones, that wouldn’t be an issue, if those category promotion banners wouldn’t usually be linked to a subcategory page of that custom brand landing page.

The first issue is that you would have two brand landing pages, your old good one and the new one which would cannibalize the old good one on different URLs. The second issue that the old good one would list the bestselling products and give them link juice, but the new one would link to new products which usually don’t have so much search volume, and what is much worse, they would link through banners to subcategories of that new brand landing page, which would have an URL like this, instead of linking to the category brand filter combination URLs we mentioned earlier. So what’s the issue with that? Those subcategories would then cannibalize the already existing and ranking category brand filter combination URLs and Google will get confused and your rankings will change, and in some cases even disappear.

The Solution

So what’s the solution? First, don’t create custom brand landing pages. Use the ones you have and agree only to implement banners on the existing brand landing pages. Second, don’t create subcategories under brand landing pages. Instead, link from the brand landing page to the category plus brand combination URLs. By doing that you strengthen those URLs and rank better for those keywords instead of creating a cannibalization issue. Third, make sure you list the bestselling products on the brand landing pages. If they want to list the newest products too, try to use banners for those or at least let them not list more than 10 new products on your brand landing page. And four, don’t use pagination on brand landing pages. List the 50 best selling products on them. Only in that way, you won’t waste your crawling and indexing budget, and you will sell more by ranking better and matching customer expectations.

But how do you implement the special requests for the branding campaign? Simple: you don’t! When brands ask for collaborations, send them your price list and conditions and offer banner placements only. They’ll still buy, because the money needs to be spent. If they ask why you don’t offer a custom brand landing page, explain that this approach increases your online stores’ sales and the sales of their products, and it keeps your site structure clean and consistent with your agreements. Usually they aren’t allowed to propose something against it, because that would be against their contracts with your company or the wholesaler. But don’t forget - they need to allocate their budget, so don’t worry too much about pleasing them. They also don’t think so much about your success too.

Important To Remember

Your ability to rank for brand names like “nike” grows with the authority of your store. If you are a recognized brand with a strong backlink profile, your chances are good. If you are a small unknown store the chances are lower, unless you are in a niche where competitors ignore this opportunity and do not have brand landing pages, which is often a case. But the category brand filter URLs are a gold mine for every online store! If you set them up as explained, you’ll sell more, especially if you generate dynamic title tags, H1s, and meta descriptions at scale for them. Watch this video next to learn how to automate dynamic titles and meta descriptions for category brand combinations. See you next time!