What is a Product Hierarchy and Why Does it Matter

A product hierarchy is a method of classifying your company’s products and services by their essential components into a logical structure. There’s a good chance you’ve encountered a one while shopping online: Women’s – Fall Collection – Jacket – Wind Breaker – Blue But product hierarchies aren’t just for fashion brands. They’re equally important for any businesses, even if you only have one core product. Free Actionable Bonus: Looking to elevate your content strategy? Get our our complete guide to creating a content strategy, plus a free content planning template and a list of 30+ places to distribute content What is a Product Hierarchy? Here is a simple hypothetical example of what a hierarchy might look like for a computer store: Looking at the picture this may seem like an obvious and simple concept. However, the impact is quite profound: it establishes a common language across your entire organization. An effective product hierarchy establishes a common language across your entire organization. Click To Tweet Why Does a Product Hierarchy Matter? Walmart, Costco, The Home Depot. These companies all have a hand full of subsidiaries, hundreds of product lines, and millions of products. With so many moving parts, you may think it’s a bit of an organizational dumpster fire. Yet, thanks to their intuitive and well-planned product hierarchy, it’s any but. But that’s not all. When done well they can also support the user experience, SEO, and internal search. User Experience The best user experiences let people complete their task quickly and effortlessly. You or I could visit The Home Depot’s website and find a 50-pack of stainless steel finishing nails in seconds. When shoppers can follow intuitive and helpful product structures, they will have a much easier time navigating to where they are trying to go. SEO The SEO value of product and category pages has been well established. A robust hierarchy offers multiple opportunities to create keyword rich content. Over the years we’ve written more than 1,000,000 product and category pages for big brands. We’ve seen first-hand how well-written hierarchy pages can support SEO. Internal Benefits One final benefit that shouldn’t be overlooked is how a hierarchy supports your employees by allowing anyone in your organization to be a product advocate and deliver a consistent message about what your product does, who it’s for, and its value. An effective product hierarchy allows anyone in your organization to be a product advocate and deliver a consistent message about what your product does, who it’s for, and its value. Click To Tweet How to Develop a Product Hierarchy Developing a product hierarchy isn’t an easy task. That’s because it can be difficult to drill down to the core need and key features. Step 1: Drill Down to the Core Focusing in on the core product need can be difficult. One approach that may help with step 1 is to start with your company mission statement. For example, Salesforce’s is a â€Å"Customer Success Platform that empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.† On the surface, this mission may seem simple, but it’s packed with useful information. â€Å"Platform† – Salesforce is an integrated ecosystem of software. They wouldn’t create a new product that doesn’t fit within the larger platform. â€Å"Connect with their customers† – Salesforce is about connection. So, add-ons like email marketing automation and community building software fit perfectly within that mission. â€Å"In a whole new way† – Salesforce is focused on innovation. The platform incorporates artificial intelligence and modern design that lets users work smarter and faster. This is purely an example, but it illustrates the point. Step 2: Choose Your Key Categories or Features For companies with lots of products, the next step is to build out your hierarchy with your key categories. For companies with just one product, this step is about highlight key features. While there is no â€Å"right way† to structure a hierarchy, I encourage you to err on the side of simplicity. Ideally, your categories should also reflect how the product is positioned to the customer. Step 3: Optimize for the New Hierarchy Once you’ve agreed on the core product and key features, you can begin to optimize it. There are 2 main things I’d like to highlight here: 1. Optimizing product titles 2. Optimizing category pages 1. Optimizing Product Titles With your new hierarchy in place, you can create a naming convention based on the tiers. Create standardized product titles makes it easier for both customers and staff to search for products. 2. Optimizing Category Pages A product tree offers several opportunities to create highly targeted web content for each category page. While the length and design of these pages will be determined by the types of business you’re in, these pages can offer plenty of SEO opportunities. Step 4: Scale Your Product Hierarchy As the business grows, so too will your hierarchy. If you’re planning on adding a new product line or feature, think about how it fits within the hierarchy. If it doesn’t fit, that may be an indication that the product isn’t a good fit for your business. That said, your hierarchy doesn’t need to be completely static. There’s nothing wrong with expanding the categories if they support the overall mission. Product Hierarchy Examples Example 1: Shopify Shopify’s product hierarchy centers around their main product, an ecommerce platform. Features such as payments and shipping support the core product. Example 2: MailChimp MailChimp is â€Å"an always-on marketing platform for small businesses.† They base their product hierarchy on customer needs (create, connect, automate, optimize) with more specific products and product features below those. This illustrates how a product hierarchy can guide future product decisions. MailChimp only recently released their landing page builder, but you can immediately see how it supports the overall hierarchy. Conclusion Product hierarchies are useful ways of classifying and categorizing your products. An effective product hierarchy can help guide product decisions, help staff articulate your product’s value, encourage positive user experiences, and even support your SEO strategy. Do you need a website content partner to support your product hierarchy with category page content and product titles? We can help.