Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Are these URL hashtags an SEO issue?
Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on. What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Should I Use City Name in URL?
Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes? Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss0