Virtual Categorization

Virtual Categorization was developed by Wheelhouse to significantly increase e-commerce revenue generation via organic search. It uses advanced coding and logic to strategically expose product options, sizes and attributes to search engines. Retailers can surface custom subcategories derived from single or compound application of navigational facets, resulting in hundreds of pages of unique content. It requires minimal changes to underlying database architecture and minimizes administrative overhead for site managers.

How It Works

On a typical e-commerce site, faceted navigation allows shoppers to refine product searches through the selection of product attributes. The practical effect is to surface highly refined subcategories (e.g. Brown Leather Men’s Boots). But there’s a problem: selecting these attributes typically does not result in a change to the page’s foundational content (URL, meta-data, imagery, category descriptions, etc.), so these subcategories are necessarily blocked from search engine indexation to avoid duplicate content penalties.

By mapping search strategy and market demand to navigational facets, Virtual Categorization enables e-commerce retailers to selectively expose product facet combinations to effectively target and attract “long-tail” search traffic—traffic that converts at a high rate because of the close match between query and landing page. Newly exposed Virtual Categories contain unique URLs, meta-data, category imagery and category content—the combination of which ensures that Virtual Categories are interpreted by search engines as unique, highly targeted content.

Benefits of Virtual Categorization

  • Increased organic revenue
  • Highly optimized landing experiences for long-tail search queries
  • Minimal changes to underlying database architecture
  • Lower administrative overhead

Implementation of Virtual Categorization enables the creation, optimization and promotion of hundreds of highly optimized product subcategories—all of which can be mapped to market demand.