seo for faceted navigation€¦ · © copyright 2017 builtvisible. all rights reserved. private and...
TRANSCRIPT
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
SEO for Faceted NavigationSmart solutions for better organic performance
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Just so we’re clear…
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Sometimes it can be great
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Turn visibility into cash
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
Long-tail“samsung galaxy s8 64gb”
260 searches
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
SEO can often be a secondary concern which can lead to problems
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Different facet combinations can create endless URLs
kj If these are left open to crawl and indexation, we have a problem.
There are only 147 products in Debenham’s ‘ceiling lights’ category…
…But over 1,000 faceted category pages indexed!
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Spot the difference…
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Our crawlable architecture becomes too flat
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
• We have little ability to rank for anything other than head terms, losing out on HUGE opportunities.
• Head terms are super competitive • We’re blocking pages targeting mid and long tail terms
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Hugely competitive & generic
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
Head term“mobile phones”110,000 searches
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
More specific, but still competitive
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
Mid-tail“samsung mobile”
8,100 searches
Head term“mobile phones”110,000 searches
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Very specific with intent to buy
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
Long-tail“samsung galaxy s8 64gb”
260 searches
Mid-tail“samsung mobile”
8,100 searches
Head term“mobile phones”110,000 searches
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
What can you do about it
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
One size does not fit all
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Remember what you are trying to achieve…
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and ConfidentialRobyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
How do you get there?
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Develop your strategy
• Understand user’s search behaviour • Which pages drive traffic - are they being indexed?
• Analyse competitors and define your brand’s quality benchmark• Set criteria for a ‘thin’ page – should it be indexed?
• Mirror search demand with technical config• E.g. Cut off point for indexing URLs with a specific number of facets applied
o black short sleeve petite maxi dress between £20-30 = 0 searches
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
What tools are at your disposal?
Reduces crawl budget waste
Reduces duplication / keyword cannibalisation
Passes link equity
Cleans up indexation bloat
Robots.txt disallows
Noindex,follow
Canonical
Rel=“nofollow” internal links
Often depends on the site’s configuration…
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Scaling up
• Learn to speak your dev team’s language• Understand your platform• Understand your priorities
• Add noindex,follow to a URL when:• It reaches a certain subfolder depth• It has a certain number of facets applied• Multiple facets are selected in the same facet category
• Prevent further facet refinement when product offering remains the same• Prevent clickable links / URLs created• Add rel=“nofollow” to link
• Enforce strict, consistent ordering of facets in URL string• Avoids further URL string combinations
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Common sense also applies...
• Look for obvious facets that don’t drive search traffic
• Check search volumes and test
• QA search data with GA data
Tip:
• First add noindex,follow to allow URLs to drop out of index
• After ~4 weeks, add robots.txt disallows
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Putting the process into action
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Classic ecommerce website
Architecture prone to severe levels of duplication and keyword cannibalisation through deeply faceted category structures.
• 1,000s of categories with multiple facets creating an infinite number of URLs• Huge numbers of duplicate pages indexed • Keyword cannibalisation • Thin pages (low products, no optimisation, no content)
• Inconsistent ordering of facets in URLs
• SEO not a historical priority
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Over 90%
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
0.007%
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
No development scope for overhauling their existing architecture.
Instead, we carried out a platform review with the aim to reduce crawl budget waste, and reduce
duplication and cannibalisation.
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
First up, data collection
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Excel
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Scaling crawls
• Screaming Frog for crawl sample• ~150k URLs
• Regex exclusions to filter out product pages• Leaving just category & subcategory pages
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Custom extraction for facet analysis
Use Xpath or CSS selectors to extract 4 useful data points to help us identify duplication:
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
For example - number of products
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Another one - product titles
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Add in some GA data…
All channels and organic data can show if a faceted URL is receiving traffic and/or converting, regardless of search volumes.
• 3 month data sample
• Organic & all channel data
• Traffic, revenue & transactions
Bulk export GA data using Analytics Edge (free)
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Now the useful part
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
What we need
• Clean dataset of organic pages
• Supporting data from GA
• Common identifiers to classify duplicate pages
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Identify duplicate pages
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
Filter to organic dataset
Create unique string Find duplicates
Analyse duplicate pages
• Status code 200• Indexable• Canonical
• COUNTIF unique string
• A-Z unique string column
• Concatenate custom extractions
• No. products• Product 1• Product 2• Product 3
• Work out best solution
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
For example
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
7 different URLs with
• The same number of products
• The same first 3 products
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Strategy is important, execution is everything
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Code changes
• Updated robots.txt disallows• Inconsistent URL structure – created 6 different disallows
• Started discussions around creating rules to avoid generating unnecessary faceted URLs• 5 or less products / product selection doesn’t change with additional facets
• Updated sitemaps• Removed blocked URLs
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
On-page optimisation
For faceted pages where search demand was present but the pages were underperforming organically:
• Optimise meta data
• Add on-page copy
• Internally link between related pages
Monitor performance and gauge next steps.
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
35%Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
To summarise
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Get the right data
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Identify areas of crawl budget waste
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Understand your devs & work with them to implement fixes
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Wash, rinse, repeat
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]
-
© Copyright 2017 Builtvisible. All rights reserved. Private and Confidential
Thanks
Robyn Lodge | Senior Consultant | [email protected]