SEO Friendly URL Structures Are Severely Underrated

Intro

SEO friendly URL structures are severely underrated, because only by having them will you be able to precisely find out which page type is responsible for the rise or fall of your organic traffic from search engines. Imagine your client's online store sees a big change in organic traffic after a Google update. You read that the Google update was related to product pages. How are you going to check if that update had an impact on your client's product pages? That is only going to be possible if you watch this lesson to the end.

What Will You Learn

In this lesson you're also going to learn which URLs are considered SEO-friendly URLs and which aren't. What the best practices for every page type are, why it is not enough to have pretty URLs and why SEO-friendly URL structures play an important role in assigning the right entities to subcategories, which has a significant role in the Google algorithm, especially in Ecommerce. My name is Nedim and you're watching the SEOLAXY SCHOOL Ecommerce SEO Course.

What Are Not SEO Friendly URLs?

Once upon a time, most URLs were very hard to read, because they had one or more parameters in them. Today we call them ugly URLs. They still exist and you can recognize them easily, because they tend to be really long and have a question mark in them, so-called parameters. Today they are still part of sorting or filtering URLs in modern shop CMSs. Although nowadays most of them have clean and readable category and product URLs. In most cases, those URLs are not SEO-friendly URLs. They're just readable URLs. They look pretty, but they don't bring any SEO benefits. That's why we call them pretty URLs. But if we polish them a little bit, they can be a hidden SEO weapon. Let's take a look at an ugly category URL using parameters. The URL is perfectly readable by the Googlebot and isn't creating any SEO issues. The following ugly subcategory URL is also okay but it gets harder to read and especially to be remembered by humans. Readable or pretty URL versions of those two URLs would look like this. If we add a subsubcategory and a subsubsubcategory to that pretty URL, they can get really long, but they still give the impression of being clean and the category structure is clear. You might now think, okay, then I will get rid of that nested structure and get short pretty URLs like this. That should be a solution if you don't have a subsubsubcategory of "robots "in the subcategory "vacuum cleaners". You might have seen category URLs with a -2 at the end of the URL. Now you know where those URLs come from. Before we take a look at how SEO-friendly URLs look, let's see some examples of product URLs. Here are the ugly and pretty versions of them. The pretty version is sometimes nested in a category and then may look like this.

One last question before we get to the solutions. Imagine an online store sees a big spike in organic traffic from Google or a downturn, and you read that Google has rolled out an update reevaluating product pages. How can you be sure that the rise or fall in organic traffic in your online store is because of product pages if you're using pretty URLs? Yes, you can go through one product URL at a time and check the rankings, but if you have hundreds or even thousands of products, that may take a while. There is no difference between category and product URLs if they're just pretty. If you had ugly URLs, you could pinpoint it more easily, because at least in them you have the category or product parameter in the URL and could filter the URLs by them. The solution may have already crossed your mind. No, it is not to use ugly URLs - it is the combination. Let's see what they look like.

SEO Friendly URLs

We already know that the question mark is ugly and hard to remember, so let's get rid of it. If we don't use a parameter, we need to use a folder structure, so let's use a slash instead of the equal sign. Now a little slash at the end will make it a folder and will give us many possibilities in Google Analytics. It is just a clear and right way to do it. You don't need to understand it now. Okay that can be considered an SEO-friendly URL now, but it still has a weak point. The subsubsubcategory URL still looks pretty long. The question is what can we shorten in this URL without losing any benefits? We can shorten the word "category" to just one letter - "c". They can't get SEO-friendlier than this. We can do the same with product URLs. I will show you in one of the next lessons how you can use the Google Search Console to filter all sorts of URLs out and how to analyze them. So you can make the right conclusions from that data. Now I will show you how you can do that in the SEO tool called Sistrix. You're looking at the organic visibility graph of a German online store in Sistrix and we see that on the 22nd of November 2021 the online store gained a lot of visibility. Two days prior to that, Google released a core update. This core update's biggest winners were dictionaries, online stores and stock image websites, which had only one thing in common - they had clear structures, both from the content side and from the URL side.

Let's see an example. We could also witness that those websites which hadn't had a clear content and URL structure, like Airbnb, were punished and direct competitors who made an effort and got clear and consistent structures were rewarded. But what page types benefited the most? Let's look back at our German online store. We want to know why our client or our competitor gained or lost visibility. It could take hours to find out why, if you have clear URL structures and without them you would possibly never find it out. So let's take a look at the directory report in Sistrix. And the blue line represents category pages. The red line represents product pages. So we can clearly see that product pages were winners and category pages profited from their gain. You will understand how I can be sure about that when you learn how internal link juice distribution works, but the essence here is that without SEO friendly URLs we wouldn't know why our client got better rankings and which page type was the reason why the client made 60% more revenue. It is the same with the pitfall in January 2023. There was no known Google update and the online store lost a quarter of its visibility. They could have guessed that it was because they have changed their SEO consultant or because they had redesigned their product page, or a thousand other things. Just by analyzing the directory report they could see this. It is instantly clear what page type was the reason behind the fall and everything was okay, because they had expected this to happen. They removed a few big categories from their online store and it had to happen. But if they didn't have the SEO-friendly URL structure it could easily happen that they would have blamed the redesigned product pages and would have lost a lot of time fixing the wrong issue. Hopefully you understand now the importance of today's topic.

SEO Friendly URLs For Important Page Types

Now that we have seen how SEO friendly URLs for the two most important page types looks, it's time to take a look at other page types. As you can see instead of "categories", we use the abbreviation PLP which stands for Product Listing Pages, a term more often used in Ecommerce businesses by other stakeholders. Instead of the term "main category" Level 1 PLP is used. Subcategories are called Level 2 PLPs. Sub-subcategories are called Level 3 PLPs and therefore sub-sub-subcategories are called Level 4 PLPs. I will later explain why there should not be any Level 5 PLPs. And PDP stands for Product Detail Page. Every PLP also has product filters which are used to filter products by their attributes, but "filters" is the wrong term for them. The right technical term is "facets". This is important to know, because if you're talking with developers - shortly called Devs and chief technical officers - shortly called CTOs you need to have precise and matching vocabulary, especially when you write tickets for developers to avoid any confusion and misunderstandings. Attributes are properties of products like color, brand weight and so on. A filter is a function that sorts attributes in the backend of an online store. Not all products attributes are shown in the frontend of an online store, but they exist in the database and can be filtered. If we show attributes in the frontend, the function to sort them is called "facet". We will explain in one of the SEOLAXY SCHOOL lessons that facets consist of attributes and attribute values, also called "facet values", but for now just get used to the term "facet" instead of "filter". When choosing a facet value the URL can get pretty messy, for example: only white sneakers are shown, but if we activate the "size facet" too, it can look like this. As you can imagine, there are many facet combinations and handling facet URLs is a huge lesson we will tackle in the future, but for now we just want to be able to detect them. So as we have used "c" for PLPs and "p" for PDPs, we should use "f" for facets and the URL would look like this. A very clean version of facets like this is rarely technically possible possible. That has multiple reasons, so don't wonder if you encounter these limitations. It is okay to have a partially ugly URL, as you know - that doesn't make its SEO-unfriendly, just make sure the "f" is right after the category name.

All the letters we are talking about today should always be after the root and not placed elsewhere in the URL. The facet is an exception. The situation is similar with search results. We very often see URLs like this. The-SEO friendly URL would be and we see URLs like this, which should be trimmed to this. Some online stores use internal search result pages as PLPs. Just take that information with you. But you shouldn't encounter these cases early in your career, as an Ecommerce SEO Specialist, because that fancy method is used almost exclusively by big players. If you want to get a well paid and future proof job as an Ecommerce SEO Specialist, you can become a certified Ecommerce SEO Specialist through SEOLAXY. With a certificate you will also get clients faster as a freelancer. We teach you exactly how to get employed or build a freelancer career and earn $10,000 monthly in the SEOLAXY MASTERCLASS. So join SEOLAXY and hundreds of others in an engaging and unselfish community. Now we need to talk about brand and vendor pages. Those are often important page types for online stores, but don't get the attention they deserve. That starts with the URL structure of those page types. Vendor pages exist only inside online stores that are a marketplace orparts of which are a marketplace and have multiple vendors selling their products on it. Their URL should have a "v" like this. As I said, not all online stores have those, but all online stores have brands and they should have brand pages. Please don't mix them up with the brand facet in each PLP. Brand pages are pages with a selection of products inside an online store. Here's an example of the Bosch brand page inside Amazon. For example, Nike is a brand facet in shoes, caps, shorts and so on, but the Nike brand page has all of those products on it or a bestseller list, whatever fits that online store. That page type should have a "b" in its URL like this. Here is how a brand page looks at target.com, pay attention to the URL. We have almost covered all page types. Only informational pages like "terms and conditions" are left. Those should have an "i" in their URL like this. But if you have cleaned all other page type URLs as presented, that won't hurt. You can do that as the last step. Now many of you are asking what about the blog. The blog is often placed on a subdomain, whether that is a good strategy or not, we will discuss in some advanced lessons. For now, you should know, if you have a block inside your root domain, then you can leave it there and you may and should use the blog URL. Now we're finally through all page types and we know how they should be. Here is the overview again, but this time with URL examples. Before we get to the part of how to make our URLs SEO friendly, by using our beloved .htaccess file, we need to understand the different URL structures and why no LVL 5 PLPs should exist.

SEO Friendly URL Structures

We will start with the easier part. The Googlebot doesn't like to crawl URLs which are more than three clicks away from the homepage. That is what most SEOs know, but that is the case for every URL. The Googlebot doesn't like to go deeper. That is also important for the internal link juice distribution, because everything further away than three clicks from the homepage will either get less link juice or no link juice at all, because Google won't calculate it, either correctly or not at all for those pages. So having a category depth of more than four levels is risky. But that could change someday. What is not going to change is that URLs which are so far away from the homepage, especially in online stores where the homepage already has hundreds of internal links, LVL 5 and especially LVL 6 PLPs won't get a lot of link juice and therefore won't have enough link juice to achieve any good or excellent rankings. So the longest PLP URL should be four levels deep as we have already shown. Now we come to the harder part, PDP URL. You might have already wondered why I didn't mention that PDP URLs can also be nested under categories, like this. But it should be obvious that we lose all the effort with the single letters in the URL after the root domain if we use this version. We could also use it like we use facets. This has also one important disadvantage too, besides being very long in real life. What if you have the same product in two different categories? You would create duplicate content and you would need to set up a canonical URL after deciding which URL should be the main URL. It is way easier to use the short version. If you have thousands of products it would be a hard task to maintain those, especially if your products have many product variants about which we haven't talked yet. Let's take a look at the famous example: the iPhone. This is a PDP and after we activate all the variants it could look like this. Look at that URL sausage behind the combination with the LVL 4 PLP. So stick to the short version and you will not get a headache in the future from this important SEO topic. For big online stores it even makes sense to do the same for PLPs. Let's see why.

SEO Friendly URL Structures For Big Online Stores

Big online stores can have many issues with all levels of categories. They can be renamed often, moved from one parent category to another, temporarily or permanently redirected it to another category and they can be deleted. If you want to move basketball shoes from the fashion category to the sports category, like we did in the last lesson, you need to set up a redirect just because the URL change. Imagine now big online store expanding fast. That online store might have to restructure its category structure multiple times. Many categories would be deleted, others would be joined together and so on. The result would be a big list of redirects. As with every list, the .htaccess file can also get too big and inefficient. So to avoid that mess, spendinghours handling redirects and to have the flexibility to join categories together and rename them, it would be better not to use this kind of URLs. Because if we need to rename, for example the level one category from "Home" into "Home and Garden", we would need to redirect all the category URLs below the LVL 1 category or even if we rename "fridges" into "refrigerators", all the facets would need redirects too. Not to mention the paging of the category, like page 2, page 3 and so on. We will talk about category paging in the link juice lessons, because it is so big it needs a separate lesson. So what should big online stores do? They should give their categories IDs and not write the category name in the URL like this. A few years ago it was beneficial not to do this, because URLs were shown in the Google SERPs, but now, for online stores, the breadcrumb is shown if it exists. You should take care that it exists and in one of the next lessons, you will learn why it is not only important for this issue, but for an even greater topic. So it doesn't matter if you're talking about LVL 1 or LVL 4 category URLs, they all should look like this in big online stores. You can use the number of digits to indicate which category level it is. Most common shop CMSs don't support this, only big solutions to natively support it. So if your client's CTO says it can't be done, you can then be sure that your client isn't a big online store yet, n most cases. Now that we know what we need to do, we need to learn how we can do that and that is what we are going to do in the next lesson. Remember to watch the last lesson about .htaccess redirects and the one before that about the robots.txt file. It is crucial to watch them to be able to understand the next lesson. If you have got value out of this lesson, please consider subscribing or hitting the new "hype button". That would mean a lot to us. One more thing, if you're still watching, here's a bonus screenshot for you. It is is the visibility graph of an American big online store - target.com, and as you can see, the URL structure is giving a lot of information for the SEO team, which will be even more valuable in the future for every Ecommerce SEO Specialist. Thank you for watching. See you next time!