🛍️ Difference Between Building Topical Authority for an Ecommerce Website vs. Other Websites

Why?

👉 The difference lies in website information architecture and multi-dimensional source context.

🧩 The information architecture contains:

• Brand identity
• Products with their categories
• Supporting informational content

🔄 The ongoing alterations of product lines may result in multi-dimensional source context.

But the first principles will remain the same.

📌 First Principle: Holistic Coverage of Products

✅ Covering all the possible and relevant search activities.

📂 How Content Coverage Can Be Bucketed:

1️⃣ Brand Identity 💼

It includes covering all the attributes of a brand on a website, which includes:

• Brand mission
• Origin
• Background
• Founder
• Staff
• Expertise
• Market positioning, etc.

2️⃣ Product Pages 📄

There will be holistic coverage of all product attributes for better user satisfaction.

📦 All the relevant entities of products will be processed, including:

• Brand
• Material
• Inventor
• Alternatives, etc.

📐 The dimensions of the product, brands, related entities, and their attributes will be processed by generating the best possible questions and ordering those questions to match with the document template.

🔍 That product information may include:

• Price
• Color
• Size
• Availability
• Shipping or refund policy
• Usage guideline
• Product-related questions

3️⃣ Messy Middle 🔄

💡 The way people make decisions is messy.

That’s why decision-making of purchasers is not linear.

📚 From a topical authority POV, there should be documents on the website that satisfy such user activities.

It includes:

• Reviews
• Comparisons
• Alternatives
• Obstacles
• Opinion-based documents

🧠 The correlated and sequential queries should be satisfied with the best possible document templates according to the source.

4️⃣ Informational 📘

This part of architecture will satisfy all the related and possible search activities of target users.

It will include:

• Definitions
• Questionnaires
• Guides
• Factual content

🎯 Strategy Based on Business Goals

Each bucket of information will be processed based on the BUSINESS GOALS.

✅ Commonly, it starts from building the brand identity.

This may include:

• Homepage branding
• Pages to fulfill attributes of all the related and possible brand attributes (e.g., About and Company pages)

➡️ Then, building commercial documents:

• All the relevant product lines with their document templates will be published according to the source architecture

➡️ And then, processing messy middle and informational documents to cover all the possible and related search activities.

📐 Framework by Koray Tugberk GUBUR

According to the framework, the coverage can be done in the following order:

Root document > Seed documents > Nodes

✅ Final Goal

Whatever the information architecture of an ecommerce site has —

The goal will be to cover:

• All possible search intents
• Correlated queries
• Sequential queries
• Entity-seeking queries

👉 With the best possible contextual vector.