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
-
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
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 -
Mobile website on a different URL address?
My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
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 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Google and Product Description Tabs
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0