Faceted navigation drives visitors and gross sales for beneficial lengthy-tail search phrases as a result of it applies more and more refined attributes to consumers’ searches for his or her desired merchandise. Optimizing your faceted navigation is the important thing to harnessing that lengthy-tail potential and enhancing your search engine marketing.
The great thing about faceted navigation is that it creates an automated system of inner linking that, ideally, mimics the lengthy-tail key phrases that buyers enter into their favourite search engine. When optimized, that system of inner hyperlinks drives hyperlink authority from the home page and different prime pages of the location to the middleman navigational pages and on to the product pages, sending lengthy-tail key phrase relevance alerts each step of the best way. The mixture of relevance and authority is essential to gaining a foothold in aggressive ecommerce rankings, in addition to within the much less aggressive and huge alternatives to win lengthy-tail searches.
My article final week, “web optimization: Faceted Navigation Is Your Largest Alternative,” is a primer in faceted navigation and within the significance of lengthy-tail ecommerce searches. On this article, I’ll tackle the methods during which filters and sides could also be impeding your website’s pure search potential.
The great thing about faceted navigation is that it creates an automated system of inner linking that, ideally, mimics the lengthy-tail key phrases that buyers enter into their favourite search engine.
Opening Entry
The power to crawl a website’s faceted navigation is the primary and most important place to start out. If search engine bots can’t crawl your website’s filters and sides to index the content material discovered there, on a regular basis and energy spent on optimizing faceted navigation gained’t make a distinction.
In trendy websites, complicated JavaScript applied sciences drive navigational filters and sides. Sadly, a number of the many various decisions that builders make in implementing an ecommerce platform can block entry for search engine crawlers. Don’t be lulled right into a false sense of safety by Google’s pronouncement that it’s “usually capable of render and perceive your net pages like trendy browsers.”
Whereas it could execute many JavaScript features, Google has additionally stated that it doesn’t sometimes execute:
- Type features, which can be utilized by some builders to drive navigation;
- Info within the URL following a hashtag — until that hashtag is constructed because the hash-bang (#!) pair used within the now-deprecated escaped fragments method.
Thus Google executes JavaScript however avoids a number of the features which are widespread on ecommerce sites.
To study extra about what occurs when bots can’t entry your website, learn “SEO How-to, Part 9: Diagnosing Crawler Issues.”
In case your website provides multi-choose, which means that the consumer can choose a number of attributes from every filter — reminiscent of each black and white from a colour filter — the variety of pages that your faceted navigation might generate can be staggering. Presuming that the majority of those multi-choose filters gained’t be helpful to searchers, it’s virtually all the time in your greatest search engine marketing curiosity to limit indexation to at least one choice per filter. In different phrases, permit serps to index pages filtered for black or pages filtered for white, however don’t permit indexation of pages that might apply each the black and white attributes on the identical web page.
Optimizing Navigation
As soon as the crawl path is open in order that search engines like google can index the navigation’s content material to drive lengthy-tail search visitors and gross sales, search engine marketing’s subsequent alternative is to strengthen key phrase relevance alerts as serps index the location.
Each web page must ship a singular key phrase relevance sign. Each time a brand new attribute is utilized in a filter, the ensuing web page must sign in its title tag, meta description, H1 heading, and physique content material that this can be a distinctive web page worthy of indexation and rankings.
For instance, a website that sells excessive-finish pens may supply filters for pen fashion and materials. When a shopper applies filters for “fountain pen” and “gold,” the ensuing web page must sign from its search engine optimisation parts that it accommodates particularly gold fountain pens, not simply “pens” or “fountain pens” or “gold pens.”
Making certain that faceted-navigation-pushed pages are capable of ship more and more particular key phrase alerts requires that the platform be technically capable of modify the search engine optimisation key phrase alerts on faceted pages. Some platforms cease modifying the search engine optimisation-important parts — title tag, meta description, H1 heading, and any physique content material — when the web page stops making calls to the server and easily refreshes its content material on the browser aspect. This can be a widespread in faceted navigation because it improves web page-load velocity. Nevertheless, it additionally hides from search engines like google and yahoo any relevance alerts that the web page’s distinctive content material has modified.
As soon as distinctive key phrase alerts can be found on each faceted navigation web page, make sure that the alerts being despatched are literally beneficial. Deep key phrase analysis will determine which attributes of a product set are probably the most useful to clients. Make it possible for these attributes are literally mirrored in your faceted navigation.
For instance, your website may supply pens by sort and materials, as within the instance above with the gold fountain pens. However some pens could also be inset with colours on the barrel as properly. If key phrase analysis exhibits that searchers are on the lookout for inexperienced or black or white pens which might be additionally fountain pen fashion and product of gold, your website ought to optimally embrace a barrel colour filter in addition to filters for pen type and materials.
Together with the barrel shade filter in your faceted navigation would then immediately allow your website to programmatically generate and optimize pages for these lengthy-tail searches for pens that provide all three attributes.
Since your rivals might not have optimized their faceted navigation to serps, this might symbolize a aggressive benefit to your corporation. Shoppers typically know what they need. They’ve finished their analysis to slender down their search. They’re near buy. Lure the patrons to your website with optimized faceted navigation and win the sale.
Including New Sides
Open-minded key phrase analysis that features exploring areas which may not be represented in your website might uncover worthwhile sides so as to add. However including new filters gained’t be straightforward. Including new filters to the faceted navigation signifies that the product knowledge must be tagged if it isn’t being tagged for these attributes already.
For instance, if pen barrel shade isn’t an attribute that merchandise are tagged for, going again via the whole product set to retag based mostly on barrel shade could possibly be a big effort. It’s greatest to deal with the strategic suggestion for filter updates in a single mass moderately than asking your developer group for them one after the other. The chance shall be bigger when bundled collectively, making it extra more likely to be authorised, and the trouble can be streamlined when carried out collectively.
