Why is URL Structure Important for eCommerce Sites? How To Get It Right!

In our latest blogs we’ve gone over meta tags and schema markup. The next phase in improving your ecommerce website is looking at best-practice URL structure.

First things first – what is a URL? Short for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is simply a unique address for file path for a page on the web. This could be a website HTML page, an image, backend file etc

If we think back to the analogy that the www is like a Library and your website is like a book being catalogued in that library, the URL is how the catalogue indexes the page and contents of the website. If there was a table of contents, instead of a page number there would be a unique code. 

Because of the above, the URL structure is a very important factor for ecommerce websites because it can impact how search engines crawl and index your website. It also affects how users interact with your website and can influence their decision to click on a link. It is a factor often overlooked by web developers and IT professionals but poor URL structure can have a negative impact on your SEO strategy in a few ways:

• It can decrease the click through rate from SERPs
• The content can become hard to link to and share by users
• Search engines may not be able to crawl (or see) your content 
• It can make page rank distribution ineffective
• It can create ‘virtual folders’ (see more on this below)
• It can make it difficult to extract specific branch data and track performance in Google Analytics

 Here are some of the most common issues that we find with website URL structure. We will use our fantasy Megantic Wear clothing brand (http://www.meganticwear.com.au/) as an example.

Example 1: Virtual Directory Structure

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/category/clothing/

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/id/clothing/

A virtual directory is when a folder is added after the domain and before the actual category, but the page doesn’t exist. For example in the top URL, there is no actual page which is https://www.meganticwear.com.au/category/ and therefore it doesn’t need to be in the URL. The desired URL structure would be https://www.meganticwear.com.au/clothing/

Why are they not ideal? Search engines view the virtual folder as being a parent of the actual category page but it’s not passing any value to it because the page/ folder doesn’t exist.

Example 2: Dynamically Generated URLs

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/product.asp?id=SKU124342&category=page1 

Dynamic URLs are often used when the content from a website is stored in a database and pulled up on demand. This would be common on ecommerce sites when a search query has been used or filters have been applied. 

Why is this not recommended? They are fine in those 2 instances, but because these URLs aren’t static (not permanent), search engines can’t crawl and index them and the content on them. So if all of your category and product pages were dynamic, nothing would appear in SERPs if someone is searching for your products.

Example 3: Complex Directory Structure

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/buy-clothes/shirts/purple/

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/category/mens/clothes/buy-tshirts-australia/

A complex directory structure means too many folders and is often used by SEOs or web devs to ‘keyword stuff’ URLs. The theory is that search engines will see the keywords and rank the page based on that.

Why is this looked down upon? By adding lots of folders into the URL, the hierarchy of the website becomes confusing to search engines and a user. Keyword stuffing in any form is against Google guidelines. 

Example 4: Single Level URLS

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/purple-tshirt/

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/megantic-plain-tee/

The above examples are single-level because they are attached to the homepage and there are no folders or parent.

The ideal structure would be:

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/tshirts/purple/

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/tshirts/purple/plain/

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/jeans/ladies/

Why is this not best-practice? Your website content should be organised and have a hierarchy. In the example of the ideal structure, the subcategory is a child of the category, and the product is a child of the subcategory and so on. This is important for page rank distribution.

So what is the recommended URL structure for the best results?

Parental Directory Structure

The best-practice URL that fits all of Google’s eCommerce guidelines is the parental directory structure. It is logical and makes the most sense to a search engine or a user. Each page fits into a clear hierarchy – no pages are buried, it’s easy to navigate and easy to be crawled/ indexed.

Things To Remember 

Whether you’re building a new site, upgrading or migrating to another platform or you need to improve the current site, URL structure is integral to a successful website.  Keep the below in mind when crafting your URLs: 

• Map out the website hierarchy. A tree is a good visual way of doing this and it will help you naturally name your categories and subcategories and parents/ children
• Don’t join words together in a url eg. /plaintshirts/
• Use hyphens between words and not underscores eg. /plain-tshirts/ not /plain_tshirts/- it helps users and search engines identify concepts in the URL more easily
• Google recommends not joining words – ie. /purpletshirt/
• Ensure all URLs have a trailing slash at the end. To a user, a / at the end of a URL doesn’t really make a difference but to a Search engine it does – they see a URL with a / on the end as a directory and one without as a file

Example: 

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/tshirts/  – directory

https://www.meganticwear.com.au/tshirts – file

• Don’t keyword stuff
• Don’t have dynamically created URLs for important pages
• Avoid virtual folders

For more tips straight from Google, see their URL Structure advice here.

Example Hierarchy Tree

More Questions? Get In Touch

Megantic are the experts in ecommerce SEO. We do this day in, day out and love every minute of it. If you’ve got any questions, please contact our team today.