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I have mocked up a small URL hierarchy pic to illustrate the two above cases:

Type -> Geography

Geography -> Type

EDIT: I realized afterwards that the **Geography -> Type **illustration is incorrect in the second leftmost column. It should say domain.se/city-1/neighborhood-1/street-address-1/type-2 instead of domain.se/space-type/city-1/neighborhood/street-address-1/type-2, in the second leftmost column and second farthest down row. It should also include internal links inbetween that box and the one to the left.

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My question is regarding some difficult URL structure questions in an online real estate marketplace. Our problem is that our customers search behavior is very broad, but their intent very narrow. For IRL examples go to objektia (dot) se.

Example: Lease commercial space Stockholm

Is a usual search query, wherein the user searches for the **broad category **commercial space, in the geography of Stockholm. The problem is that their intent is actually much more specific, since:

Commercial space === [Office, Retail, Industrial, Storage, Properties]

I have previously asked the forum for help regarding the placement of products in our URL-hierarchy, in which I got some good answers. We chose to go the route of alternative #3, ie placing our products (real estate listings), directly beneath their respective category (neighborhoods).

https://moz.com/community/q/placement-of-products-in-url-structure-for-best-category-page-rankings

Basically we chose to have the following URL structure:

Structure: domain.se/category/subcategory/product

Example: domain.se/Stockholm/suburb-of-stockholm/specific-listing-12

Now the question is, how do we deal with the **space type **modifier in our URL structure. Nobody wants to see retail space when they are after office space, so our current search page solution (category page) is the following:

Structure: domain.se/space-type/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood

All space types: domain.se/commercial-space/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood

Specific space type: domain.se/office-space/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood

Now, the problem with our current solution in combination with our intent to move our product pages into this hierarchy, is that every product page will be (and is today) linking towards the specific type category. Our internal link network would be built around type categories that are extremely relevant from a UX standpoint, but almost worthless (surprisingly) from an organic traffic standpoint. Also, every search page (category page) for each space type would be competing for the same search broad search phrase.

The alternative is to place the type modifier at the end of the URL:

Category page type at the end: domain.se/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood/type

Listing page (product page), type at the end: domain.se/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood/street-address/type/listing-12

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