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Category or Filter? Setting Up Your Online Store to Help Your SEO

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Should this be a category or a filter? This is a question that I have come across while working with our clients and one I’m sure many think about when launching their ecommerce store. The problem is that the answer will vary from store to store and even from product to product within the same store!

But what does this have to do with SEO? A lot, believe it or not. A big difference between categories and filters is the URL of the page that is created. Categories usually have SEO-friendly URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword.html

While filters usually create URLs that contain a query string, like this:

http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword.html?price=100&color=blue

If a URL has a question mark in it, then it contains a query string and is not considered an optimized URL for the search engines. Search engines are more likely to index category pages and send potential customers there instead of a filtered page. Category pages can be optimized, and filters usually can’t be.

So how do you know if something should be it’s own category or just a filter within a category? Certain things should always be a filter, and that includes price and size. Some people might tell you that color or brand should also always be a filter, but I think that depends on the product. Some sites have had great success by letting their customers shop by color and making color categories, but, again, it all depends on your product.

To determine what might make a good category, I suggest turning to good ol’ Google. I use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what people are searching related to the product, and then use those results to help determine categories on a site.

For example, let’s say your store sells jeans. I do a search for “jeans,” and then sort by “Local Monthly Searches” to see what related terms get the most searches:

Jeans Google Keyword Search

Right away, you can probably tell that it would be a great idea to have your jeans separated into categories for men’s jeans and women’s jeans. But should you go even deeper?

Women's Jeans Google Keyword Search

From these searches, it looks like it would be a good idea to have categories based on style and cut of the jeans (“skinny”, “bootcut”, “straight”) or even brand (“lee”, “wrangler”).

You should look out for having too many sub-categories though. If your site gets too deep, it will be harder for search engines to crawl. I typically recommend going no deeper than 4 pages. (A page that is 4 pages deep takes 4 clicks to get to from the home page.) Having less than that is definitely fine, but going deeper will make it harder for the search engines and your customers to find the product pages.

Using the jean example, a 4 page deep site might follow this path:

Home Page –> Jeans –> Women’s jeans –> Women’s bootcut jeans –> Product page

Each arrow represents a click from the home page, making it 4 pages deep to get to a product page.

Always be aware of how many products will be in a category if you decide to create it. For example, if you decide to create categories based on brands, but you have just one or two products for some of your brands, it’s probably better off as a filter. Filters might narrow down to 1 or 2 products, but categories should always contain more. Think about what you want a customer to see when they come to your store. It’s better to give them more options on a category page and then let them narrow it down with filters rather than only giving them a few choices to start with.

You also don’t want to create a certain type of sub-category if it means you would be creating more than 10 or so (and I think that’s even pushing it). If you sell 50 brands of jeans, you don’t want a customer to come to a page with 50 different categories because that would be overwhelming. Categories to sub-categories should be a funnel that is natural and follows the customer’s thought process, and a filter should help them narrow that initial thought down to exactly what they are looking for.

This process can be difficult when you’re just starting an online store, but if you know your products and what your potential customers are searching it gets easier.


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