High competition between online stores pushes their owners to create an increasingly comfortable resource for users. Filters are one of the effective ways to speed up and simplify the choice of goods for the buyer. But they can also be a powerful SEO tool if set up correctly.
SEO optimization of online store filters
Filters are one of the essential tools for effective SEO promotion of your site. When set up correctly, it will help increase organic traffic. Take a closer look at why you need to work with filters.
Reasons to Optimize Your Online Store Filters
Firstly, filters help the user navigate through your products. Without their use, he can get lost among many goods and change the resource to a more convenient one.
But special attention should be paid to the ability of filters to increase the reach of your target audience. With their help, you can segment products and allocate individual landing pages for different groups of queries.
At the same time, we recommend focusing on mid and low-frequency queries.
For clarity, let's look at a more specific example.
For example, a user wants to buy food for a sterilized cat with salmon.
If the filters were not optimized when setting up the SEO of the site, then when entering the mid-frequency query "buy food for a sterilized cat with salmon," the user will simply go to the page with food, just like the query "buy cat food." You will have to search for the one you need manually.
A similar request, but with proper filter optimization, will lead the user directly to the page where he will see the selection of goods he needs.
What does it give you
Not all sites work with low-frequency queries because they give less traffic. But with the correct filter settings, your site's visibility on the search page will increase. To do this, you should use extensive coverage of queries of medium and low frequency. This way, you can stand out from the competitors in your niche.
That is, the results will be as follows
- Increasing site visibility
- Growth of organic traffic due to requests of low and medium frequency
- Improve user experience
- Increasing conversion by serving the user with the right product for his target request
Is it possible to do without filter optimization?
In some cases, indeed, such optimization is not necessary. For example, if your online store:
- A small list of goods
- There is no search for the selected parameters
- Relatively low competition
But also, we should not forget about the existence of individual moments when, in these cases, filter optimization can be recommended. For example, if in a strategic plan, you have an assortment expansion. Our experts can help you decide on the SEO optimization that is right for your site.
Stages of filter optimization
To conduct SEO filter optimization, you need to conduct a series of studies to answer the following questions:
- Which filtering method is right for your site?
If you choose to create additional filter pages:
- How should URLs be formed?
- How will meta tags be generated?
To answer these questions, you need to take the following steps:
- Competitor analysis
Carefully research how the filters of your direct and indirect competitors work, and describe everything in the table. Do not neglect this point, as a detailed analysis of competitors will help you both in setting up SEO and in analysis and determining and which are indexed.
- Data analysis
Based on this data, find out which filters can already be implemented for your niche, and which ones still need to be added.
- Collection of information for the semantic core
Think about what queries might be relevant to your users. If you have a reasonably popular focus (cosmetics, food, clothing, etc.), you can also create semantic groups that will cover two criteria at once (for example, for the query "black short dress," the landing page is optimized for "black" and "short" dresses)
Filter optimization methods
After you have conducted a competitor analysis and determined precisely what meta tags your product needs and how they will lead to the required page, you can move on to an equally important stage - the software one.
We highlight three essential methods:
GET-parameter in URL
Relatively simple system. It is based on adding a GET parameter that begins with the character "?".
There are also filtering pages with UTM tags:
- new goods
- price range
- sorting by price, popularity, etc.
Pros: supports the creation of landing pages, which serves as a source of additional traffic
Minuses:
- duplicates may appear
- excessive consumption of the crawling budget
- poor indexing quality
AJAX technology
An excellent solution for shops with a small catalog. It also does not require reloading the page after selecting the required criterion. Sometimes a # symbol is added to the main URL.
But it is important to note that such documents do not get into the index and do not bring additional organic traffic.
Pros:
- unlike the GET parameter, do not have duplicates in the index
- crawl budget savings
Minuses: no additional traffic because it does not provide a filter page
Static URLs
This method's main advantage is ensuring the best ranking in the SERP. A static URL uses letters and numbers with separators.
Pros:
- Low chance of duplicates
- Ideal for creating landing pages and promoting filter pages
- provides CTR (percentage of clicks to impressions) higher than in previous methods
- you can optimize and specify metadata
Minuses:
- rather laborious and costly method
- We do not implement it on all sites.
Conclusions
SEO filter — an excellent tool for attracting low-frequency and medium-frequency traffic.
Difficulties may arise at the stage of implementation and configuration, but otherwise, the technology is as simple and clear as possible.
Before implementing the functionality, we recommend dealing with the link mass, expanding the scope of the nomenclature, and improving the behavioral factor (UX).
The functionality of SEO filters is ideal for online stores with many products (from 1000 items), but in exceptional cases, it will also be helpful for small stores.