Comparison platforms · 3 min read

Name the Category the Way the Buyer Searches

A category is only worth building if a buyer types its name into a search box. Everything else follows from that.

On a comparison platform, the category is the product. A buyer does not arrive looking for your site. He arrives looking for “local SEO company” or “shopping cart software,” and either you have a page that answers exactly that, or you do not exist for him.

Most of the category work I did over the years was unglamorous: renaming, redirecting, splitting, cutting. Here is what it looked like at the time.

Rename to the buyer’s words

In August 2011 I sent our developer a full review of the topseos categories. Much of it was renaming:

Rename Local Search -> Local SEO

Rename: Content Creation -> SEO Copywriting

Rename Training Programs Category, 301 Redirect. Training Programs-> SEO Training

The old names were how the industry described itself. The new names were what buyers typed. For each category I listed the phrases buyers actually searched, for example “Local Search: local seo company, local seo service,” and the page titles were rewritten to match.

Where a rename changed a page’s address, the spec called for a 301 redirect from the old one. A category name can change. The link equity it has earned should not be thrown away with it.

The same email also cut a category outright: “Remove Performance Tools.” Not every category deserves a page.

Give a strong category its own home

In May 2013 the next step was giving the strongest categories their own addresses: local SEO, video SEO, ecommerce SEO, reputation management, SEO copywriting and more, each on its own subdomain with its own title, description and headline. Some names changed again on the way: “Virtual Spokesperson” became “Video Spokesperson,” “PPC Bid Management” became “PPC Software,” “SEO Shopping Cart” became “Shopping Cart Software.”

The same plan carried categories into other countries: an India site, a Singapore site, and Canadian versions of the reputation management rankings.

Expand fast, and be willing to cut

In March 2014 I listed web design comparison sites for Canada, Australia, the UK and India. In December 2014 I sent our registrar a list of thirty-eight domains we no longer needed, including four of those country sites.

Expansion that fast has to come with the willingness to cut. A domain you no longer use is not an asset; it is a renewal fee.

Scope the category to what is really on the site

In 2020, reviewing a set of white paper topics for our platforms, my one change was about scope:

let’s change marijuana not be all about dispensaries, since the website covers products and suppliers too

A category that is narrower than the site misses buyers. One that is broader than the site disappoints them.

A category without search volume is a hope

In 2021, reviewing strategy documents for a new NFT comparison site, I sent the developer my main criticism: they missed what a review site has to be.

Review sites have a whole source of features they tend to offer, blogs, products, reward systems, rankings by categories filters, reviews on products/services.

And in 2025, when I proposed a set of new AI-optimization categories to a partner agency, the reply was that those terms were “still not very widely searched at this point.” He was right. A category nobody searches for yet is a bet on the future, and it should be priced and built like one.

What I still do

Name every category in the words a buyer types. Keep old URLs alive when names change. Give the strong categories room of their own, scope each one to what the page actually covers, cut the ones that do not earn their place, and do not mistake a new idea for a category until people are searching for it.

Getting the category right at the outset is the cheapest decision in building an industry platform, and by far the most expensive one to revisit.