Placement of products in URL-structure for best category page rankings
-
Hi!
I have some questions regarding the optimal URL-hierarchy placement of products in a marketplace setting where the end goal is to attract traffic to category pages. Let me start off with some background, thanks in advance for the help.
TLDR
Goal: Increase category page rankings.
Alternative 1 - Products and category pages separated, flat product structure.
Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory
Product / listing page: oursite.com/listing-1
Alternative 2 - Products and category pages separated, hierarchal product structure.
Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory
Product / listing page: oursite.com/product/category/subcat/listing
Alternative 3 - Products placed directly under category page.
Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory
Product / listing page: oursite.com/category/subcategory/listing
I run a commercial real estate marketplace, which means that our potential search traffic is _extremely _geographic. For example, some common searches are (not originally in english):
- Office space for lease {City X}
- Office space for lease {Neighborhood Y}
- Retail space {Neighborhood Z}
- And so on...
These terms are already quite competitive, where the top results are our competitors geographic and type category pages. For example: _competitor.com/type/city/neighborhood , _is a top result, where the user reaches a landing page that shows all the {type} spaces for lease in {neighborhood}.
These users are out to find which spaces are available for lease in these geographical areas, and not individual spaces. I.e. users do not search in the same extent for an individual product, in this case a specific empty space.
Our approach has been to place an extreme bias towards a heavy geographical hierarchy. This means that basically any search, resulting in a category page, on our site results in a well structured URL like the following:
_oursite.com/type/state/city/district/street, _since we are using Google Maps API's, this is easy and relevant for the user. Our geographical categorization beats our competitors both on extensiveness and usability, especially in long-tail search phrases where our competitors don't care to categorize where we are seeing real search volumes. The hierarchy only extends as far down as the user has searched, for example a lot of our searched just end up being _oursite.com/type/state/city/district. _
Now we are wondering how we should place our products, the empty spaces, in this URL structure. Our original hypothesis was that we should include the products in the original hierarchy, resulting in: oursite.com/category/subcategory/product. Our thinking was that we would both be serving the user with an understandable and relevant URL, and also provide search bots with a logical structure for our site and most importantly content for our category pages. Our landing pages are very dynamic, providing information by relaying graphical information on a map instead of in an SEO-friendly manner. I would however go as far as to say that these dynamic pages provide a ton of value for the user, much more so than our competitors, by describing relevant information about the neighborhood kind of like Trulia, just not in a bot-readable manner. This results in trying to rank them on their own merits being a challenge, whereas we were hoping we could create relevancy by placing products / listings and maybe even blog posts on the topic within the same URL-hierarchy.
As of right now our current structure is oursite.com/products/category/subcategory/product. In other words, they are categorized in the same geographical fashion but under a separate URL-path. Our results so far is that we basically only rank for the product pages, and rank extremely poorly for our category pages, which is our ultimate goal to enhance. This is why we developed the above hypothesis.
However, what we learned when we did some initial research is that very few e-commerce stores place their products directly below their categories. Most of the major websites we studied, and we looked at quite a few, just go for **alternative 1 **from above. The crux is that most of them choose alternative 1 but simultaneously implement bread crumbs that emulate alternative 3, just without the actual URL's.
So, what I'm asking is, what are the actual benefits or downsides of the three alternatives? I feel as if I have a pretty firm grasp on how this could be done, I just need to better understand why most seem to choose to flatline their products or listings in the alternative 1 fashion.
Thanks,
Viktor
-
I think I'm a little confused here as to what you mean by "product" in the context of real estate. Are you referring to different types of listings (e.g. office lease, retail lease etc?)
If I were designing a real estate website, the structure would be as follows:
website.com/listing-type/state/area/suburb
You mentioned the site isn't in English so just to clarify above, the last two will be depend on regional user preferences. For example, here in Brisbane (Aus) it would be expected that I can search for properties in the "Greater Brisbane" area, meaning Brisbane City and surround suburbs. Within that region there are a bunch more suburbs
More specifically:
website.com/office-lease/qld/greater-brisbane/west-end
The reason I'd be doing this is that not only is it an easy logic to follow but it really caters toward a user's intent. If I'm looking for an office space to lease, there's no point in presenting me with all types of listings from an area because all I want to see are office leases.
Having those lease types further up your hierarchy is going to give them a little more preferences in terms of SERP position as well. From what I understand, these are the sub-category pages you're looking to rank?
As a working example of this as well, I just had a look at realestate.com.au's URL structure and it's the same as my suggestions above. Their site is very flat because it's almost entirely search-driven but the URL still lets us see their site architecture
http://www.realestate.com.au/property-townhouse-qld-spring+hill-416944062
-
I think that N:3 is optimal for crawlers and for humans.
This was explained few times here:
https://moz.com/blog/information-architecture-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
https://moz.com/blog/ugly-seo-mess-recovery-case-study (read about "flat" structure)
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/
http://www.bruceclay.com/eu/seo/silo.htm
https://yoast.com/how-to-clean-site-structure/
https://yoast.com/seo-friendly-urls
https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-linkSo as you can see it's lot of information against flat structure and implementing silo url structure in site.
Edit1: there is also great article here:
http://www.stateofdigital.com/optimising-urls-seo-ux/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best address to use on Google business listing for youth sports program
Hello, Moz Community! I'm helping a friend with some local marketing for his youth sports program. He trains his kids at a community center and a public park where court times are managed by the city. His address in his Google business listing is currently the community center, but that is shared with multiple businesses including the community center itself. I know he needs an address that is unique to his business, but he lives outside of the city in which his program is located. Our goal is to boost exposure in the city in which his program is located. Since 1) his business address is located outside of the city in which he conducts business and 2) the addresses at which he conducts his business is utilized by multiple businesses including the actual property owner, what options do I we have for an address that Google will recognize as valid and won't cause ranking issues? If there is nothing we can do in the current situation, what are steps we can take to address this issue for his business? Thanks a lot!
Local Listings | | Tony_GP0 -
Local Landing Page Optimization and Multiple GMB Listings
Hello, We’re building out a site for our business that has close to 100 office locations in different cities. Many of these are ‘partner brands’ that we have acquired under our brand. Similar to a franchise model. We want to be able to help users find offices near their location. Each office will have it’s own landing page with a physical address and contact information. We know we’ll have to build out unique copy and markup customized to the office/location. We’ve already read through https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages as well. We’re also considering ‘silos’ to build out pages for each location. To preserve authority and avoid cannibalization; our thought was having each location as sub-folders off of our domain (i.e. domain.com/locations/Partner#1/). The other option would be using a sub-domain (i.e. Partner.Domain.com/) which we noticed competitors doing and treating each sub-domain as their own independent site. Is all of the above the correct strategy? Any further suggestions? Should we fill out a separate GMB for each office and should they all use the same brand name? (in other words “BrandA” vs. “BrandA” - Brooklyn Office). In addition to GMB; would each location need local listings created (also all under the same name)? Any help or insight would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thank you in advance. Best,
Local Listings | | Ben-R0 -
Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?
Our company has multiple (3) offices, including our headquarters, and each has its own Facebook page. Other than the primary company page, the other two locations have only been claimed and do not have posts, reviews, check-ins, etc. Now, Facebook recently granted us access to Facebook Locations, which, if I understand correctly, would remove 2-out-of-3 office pages and add a "Locations" tab to our primary company page where people can see the other offices. _See Starbucks Example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Starbucks/locations/?ref=page_internal _ I've read mixed reviews regarding using the Locations feature, but nothing definitively answers whether or not this would negatively affect local rankings. Does anyone have firsthand experience going from individual business pages to a single parent business page with Locations? Is there any trustworthy documentation out there about this?
Local Listings | | MPlata1 -
Best Tips to Get In the Local Pack
Apart from making sure your business information is 100% accurate, etc., what are your best tips to get a company ranking in the local pack? Do they need to rank well organically to be considered for the local pack or is it solely based on the consistency of their GMB page?
Local Listings | | BlueCorona1 -
Google My Business Pages - Still Relevant or Phasing Out?
Google My Business plays a big part of getting your company to rank in the local pack for local search queries. Apart from making sure this is correct and up to date, where do you think the future of GMB pages is headed? Will Google eventually start phasing these out and come up with a different way to populate the local pack?
Local Listings | | BlueCorona1 -
Local Seo Service Url Best practices.
Hey Guys and Gals, What's the best format for service urls for local seo? http://www.example.com/basement-remodeling or http://www.example.com/basement-remodeling-ashburn-leesburg-sterling-va/
Local Listings | | hde0 -
A customer made a duplicate google plus page, now what?
A customer of mine went to a business conference about a year ago and one of the speakers told them of the importance of having an optimized google plus page. Instead of talking to me about it, they went ahead and created a brand new page and began posting content and reviews to it. I've contacted google and they've told me they deleted the first page, but it still always shows up in the local search results even though the new page has much more content on it. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation that could help me? I have them ranking #2 organic, but barely showing up local...
Local Listings | | jag10251 -
Google Business Categories: Criminal Justice Attorney
Google has updated their business listings dashboard and are cleaning up categories. Let's come to a consensus on what should be obvious: Who else agrees with me that a lawyer who practices criminal defense law should be categorized as a Criminal Justice Attorney using Google's new business categorization? BoulderCriminalDefenseAttorney.jpg
Local Listings | | Rich_Coffman0