Placement of products in URL-structure for best category page rankings

[Viktorsodd]

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.

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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

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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

[ChrisAshton]

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

[Mobilio]

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-link

So 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/