Product or Shop in URL
-
What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website.
websitename.com/product/keyword
OR
websitename.com/shop/keyword
-
I agree with alecfwilson, especially the part about superfluous directories.
One thing I'd add, since it's probably a wash whether you use "products" or "shop". See if either word gets used in searches for the products your selling. This won't be the case in everything you sell online, but sometimes the words "product, shop, store" get used in the searches.
If everything else is equal, I'd pick the url structure that includes the words most used in searches ... ONLY if you can also do that while maintaining a natural, semantic, streamlined url path.
-
For SEO purposes, either structure will work so long as it's clear where in the site navigation the page is, since it will just be making it easier for the site to be crawled. For optimizing for sales, the other commenters are right in that you are getting bogged down in things that aren't going to substantially impact customer behavior. Really the only thing you should be worried about with your URL in terms of conversion is whether you are using SHA-2 (people trying to come to an https:// version of your site will get a warning and no green reassurance in the address bar, and a red warning in the address bar if you aren't using SSL at all) and whether a visitor could look at the URL and have a good idea of what the content of that page is. Beyond that, you're optimizing at the extreme margins.
However, if you really do want to attempt to optimize your URLs to an extreme, it really depends on your site structure. If the entirety of the website is a store, then the /shop/ subdirectory is unnecessary. If you have a store as a part of your website, a subdirectory of /shop/ or /store/ or something like that would be helpful in indicating where in the site the URL is pointing. Similarly, having a product subdirectory makes sense if you have multiple categories of products (in your case, say you had both vitamins and paleo cooking ingredients, each with multiple SKUs within the product category). However, if your store only has 9 SKUs, all of which are vitamins, /products/vitamins is unnecessary for indicating where in the site you are (or, you could use /products/ to direct to a page listing all 9 SKUs, in which case the /products/keyword would ultimately turn into products/nameOfProduct).
If you have a site that has a store with multiple product categories all with multiple SKUs, you could consider /store/products/keyword as a format, although that starts to get a bit long. Have you considered using a store.website.com subdomain?
My URL process is: Is it the best indicator of where in the site navigation the visitor is? In most cases, this should mean it indicates that they are in a store, where in the stores navigation they are, and what item they are looking at (keyword). If that's true, then it's a good URL. Secondary concern is keeping the URL from being too long, aim for the most concise but clear indication of where in your sites navigation the user is. The final piece of the URL string (that indicates the specific page the visitor is on) is where you can add the keyword you care about.
-
Hi Lesley, I am targeting above 50 products.
I am using woo-eCommerce in wordpress, It provide default option for product and Shop. (So i need to select out of 2)
I don't know If we can change the url to 'buy'
-
You're getting too bogged down in things that will make no difference to your customer.
-
I think it comes down to a few things:
1. How many products are you going to offer?
2. How do people search for this product or service?Personally, I like the "websitename.com/shop/keyword" format because it flows better. This is the same type of URL structure we use on a client that just joined. This also allows us to separate the normal site content from the store, as you can see from the top links. These do not include "shop" in the URL structure.
-
How many products are you going to have? Depending on your url structure, you might think about using the word buy instead of product or shop, so your urls could be buy/fancy-health-product.
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
-
Index an URL without directly linking it?
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Altering Breadcrumbs based on User Path to Product URL
Hi, Our products are listed in multiple categories, and as the URLs are path dependent (example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/, example.com/fruit/green-fruit/granny-smith/ and so forth) we canonicalise to the 'default' URL (in this case example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/). For mainly crawling bandwidth issues I'm looking to change all product URL's to path neutral so there is only ever one URL per product (example.com/granny-smith/), but still list the product in multiple categories. If a user comes directly to example.com/granny-smith/ then the breadcrumbs will use the default path "Fruit > Apples", however if the user navigated to the product via another category then I'd like the breadcrumbs to reflect this. I'm not worried about cloaking as it's not based on user-agent and it's very logical why it's being done so I don't expect a penalty. My question is - how do you recommend this is achieved from a technical standpoint? Many sites use path neutral product URL's (Ikea, PCWorld etc) but none alter the breadcrumbs depending upon path. Our site is mostly behind a CDN so it has to be a client side solution. I currently view the options as: Store Path to product in a cookie and/or browsers local-cache Attach the Path details after a # in the URL and use Javascript to alter breadcrumbs onload with JQuery When a user clicks to a product from a listing page, use AJAX to pull in the product info but leave the rest of the page (including the breadcrumbs) as-is, updating the URL accordingly Do you think any of these wouldn't work? Do you have a preference on which one is best? Is there another method you'd recommend? We also have "Next/Previous" functionality (links to the previous and next product URLs) on the page so I suspect we'd need to attach the path after a # and make another round trip to the server onload to update the previous and next links. Finally, does anyone know of any sites that do update the breadcrumbs depending upon path? Thanks in advance for your time FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux1 -
Overly-Dynamic URLs & Changing URL Structure w Web Redesign
I have a client that has multiple apartment complexes in different states and metro areas. They get good traffic and pretty good conversions but the site needs a lot of updating, including the architecture, to implement SEO standards. Right now they rank for " <brand_name>apartments" on every place but not " <city_name>apartments".</city_name></brand_name> There current architecture displays their URLs like: http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=overview</client_apartments> http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=floorplans&floorPlanID=121</client_apartments> I know it is said to never change the URL structure but what about this site? I see this URL structure being bad for SEO, bad for users, and basically forces us to keep the current architecture. They don't have many links built to their community pages so will creating a new URL structure and doing 301 redirects to the new URLs drastically drop rankings? Is this something that we should bite the bullet on now for future rankings, traffic, and a better architecture?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit0 -
Should you replace the url on a damaged page and 301 to it ?
Hi, We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links. I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%. My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?. Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc. Thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Is My Competitor Beating Me With A Better URL Structure?
A competitor is consistently beating my website on non-competitive, long tail keywords. His DA is 32 compared to my 46. His average PA is 23 to my 28. His average On Page Optimization Grade is a C compared to my A. His page speed score using YSlow is a 71 compared to my 78. The only thing I can think of at this point is that he has a better URL structure. We both have the keyword in the URL, but his structure goes like this (keyword: apw wyott parts): www.competitor.com/apw-wyott/parts While mine goes like this (I had nothing to do with this site's architecture; this is what I'm stuck with for the time being): http://www.etundra.com/APW_Wyott_Parts-C347.html It should be noted that the last word in these keywords is always the same - "parts." These keywords are for parts by different manufacturers so they follow a consistent pattern: [manufacturer-name] followed by "parts." Also, the "C347" on the end of my URL is the category number given to this particular category of products in our database. Are his URLs beating me or should I continue to look for other factors? If so, what other factors should I consider?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0
