eCommerce Filters: Best Practices for Increasing Organic Traffic (SEO)

Effective product filtering is more than just a tool for enhancing the user experience—it’s a powerful lever for boosting your eCommerce site’s SEO performance. But what exactly are eCommerce filters, and how can they be optimized to drive more organic traffic to your site?

In online retail, search engines play a crucial role in guiding potential customers to your store. However, poorly implemented eCommerce filter pages and issues in eCommerce website structure can significantly damage your SEO efforts. According to a recent study by SEMrush, 64% of eCommerce websites struggle with SEO issues related to filter usage, leading to missed opportunities in search engine rankings.

On the flip side, when product filters are configured with SEO in mind, they can hugely improve your site’s visibility. Well-optimized filters not only help customers find the products they want more efficiently but also create additional indexed pages, boosting your presence in search results.

For example, applying a filter to a product page generates unique URLs and meta descriptions. This presents a valuable opportunity to enhance your SEO score by incorporating relevant keywords and tags into the metadata, ultimately driving more targeted traffic to your store.

In this article, we’ll dive into the best practices for setting up eCommerce filters that align with SEO goals. Let’s get started.

Product Filtering: What It Is and Why It Is Important in eCommerce

eCommerce filters are a crucial tool in online stores that allows users to sort and view products based on specific criteria like color, size, price, and more. 

But why is this functionality so essential for an online store? To answer this, let’s explore the AIDA behavioral model, which illustrates the user’s journey from recognizing a need to making a purchase through four emotional stages: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Imagine you need to buy a new T-shirt.

• Attention: You’ve seen an ad for T-shirts, a friend has recommended a good brand, or you’ve noticed your old T-shirts are worn out. These triggers capture your attention and spark your interest in purchasing.
• Interest: You start browsing online stores. This is where product filtering becomes crucial (!). Filters help you refine your search, allowing you to easily compare colors, prints, prices, and sizes, helping you identify exactly what you want.
• Desire. By enhancing the user experience (UX) with intuitive filtering, online stores reduce the time customers spend searching for products, moving them more quickly from Interest to Desire. 
• And eventually to the Action stage—making a purchase. 

Benefits of eCommerce Search Filters for Conversion, Analytics, and SEO

For eCommerce businesses, product filters do more than just improve UX; they also boost conversion rates and reduce abandoned carts. Additionally, filters provide valuable data for analytics, enabling more precise remarketing strategies and deeper insights into customer preferences across different product categories.

And there’s more: SEO-friendly eCommerce filters can generate separate, indexable pages for filtered results. These pages enhance your store’s visibility in search engines, driving more traffic and increasing overall exposure.

eCommerce Filters vs SEO Filters

In this section, we will examine the distinctions between SEO and standard eСommerce filters. 

Regular eCommerce filters are designed to enhance user navigation once they enter a product category, helping them quickly find what they’re looking for. However, these filters typically generate dynamic URLs, which aren’t always indexed by search engines, meaning the filtered results don’t contribute to your site’s visibility in search results.

On the other hand, SEO filters are specifically designed to enhance your store’s presence in search engines right from the moment a user enters a search query. 

Let’s break this down with two examples:

• In the first example, a website uses standard product filters. When a user selects a filter, such as “blue T-shirts,” the results are displayed under a dynamic URL. However, the canonical URL remains unchanged, signaling to search engines that these filtered results are not unique pages but merely variations of the main category. As a result, these filtered pages do not appear separately in search engine results, reducing the site’s potential visibility for specific queries like “men’s blue T-shirts.”

• In contrast, let’s consider a site that employs SEO filters. When a user applies the color filter, a distinct page is generated, as evidenced by a unique URL, an updated page title, and SEO-specific content. The canonical URL also changes, signaling to search engines that this is a unique subcategory. This approach ensures that the page is indexed and can rank in search results for relevant queries, such as “men’s blue T-shirts.” This SEO-focused strategy is highly beneficial, as it allows the creation of multiple, highly relevant subcategories that cater to specific search terms. For example, in the United States, the search query “men’s blue T-shirt” is entered approximately 1,900 times per month. 

When analyzing the search results, it’s clear that Google prioritizes pages that are directly relevant to this query—only categories with blue T-shirts appear at the top.

The search engine’s algorithms are finely tuned to understand user intent, ensuring that the most relevant pages are displayed to save users time and effort. In this scenario, the first website, which only uses standard filters, won’t appear in such search results because it lacks separate, relevant subcategories. This can be easily verified by using the “site:” operator in Google to check the indexed pages.

Conversely, the second website, with its SEO filters, makes a variety of subcategories available in search results, organized by attributes like color, size, and style.

This approach significantly increases the site’s visibility in search engines, driving more organic traffic and improving overall SEO performance.

How to Configure SEO Filters?

Configuring SEO filters requires a strategic approach to ensure your online store’s filtered pages are both user-friendly and optimized for search engines. Our team has extensive experience in implementing SEO filters across a range of platforms, from custom-built websites to online stores using open-source CMS like WooCommerce and Magento.

For custom websites, the process typically involves two main sections:

1. Category and Subcategory Creation: Here, you create distinct categories or subcategories, each with its own unique metadata, URL slug, title, SEO content, and a specific group of products to display. This ensures that each filtered page is treated as a separate, indexable entity by search engines, enhancing your store’s visibility for specific queries.
2. Filter and Classifier Setup: In this section, you define classifiers, filters, and conditions that determine how users are directed to these separate pages or when a dynamic URL is generated. This logic ensures that users find relevant products quickly while also ensuring that search engines recognize these pages as distinct, valuable content.

WooCommerce & Magento: Ecommerce Filters

In platforms like WooCommerce and Magento, configuring SEO filters follows a similar logic. For example, in Magento, you can use the Improved Layered Navigation extension, which offers robust tools for setting up SEO-friendly filters that generate static, indexable URLs for filtered results.

Shopify: eCommerce Search Filters

However, on Shopify, the situation is a bit different. Out-of-the-box solutions often rely on dynamic URLs that are not indexed by Google, limiting the effectiveness of SEO filters. Customizing the functionality becomes necessary to achieve proper SEO filtering. For more details on this, we’ve discussed the challenges and solutions in a separate article dedicated to Shopify SEO.

WordPress: eCommerce Product Filter

For WordPress, the HUSKY – Products Filter Professional plugin is a comprehensive solution that provides all the necessary functionality for setting up effective SEO filters, ensuring your filtered pages are both user-friendly and optimized for search engine visibility.

Key Takeaways

Poorly configured filters can severely hinder your SEO efforts, but when done correctly, they can significantly enhance your store’s presence in search results. Here are the key takeaways from eCommerce filter best practices:

• Impact of SEO Filters: Unlike standard eCommerce filters that improve user navigation within categories, SEO filters generate unique, indexable URLs for filtered results. This helps search engines recognize these pages as distinct, boosting your site’s visibility for specific search queries.
• SEO Benefits: By setting up SEO-friendly eCommerce filters, you create additional indexed pages tailored to specific user queries. This not only drives more organic traffic but also improves your store’s relevance in search engine rankings.
• Platform Considerations: Implementing SEO filters varies by platform. While WooCommerce and Magento offer robust tools for setting up these filters, Shopify often requires customization due to its reliance on non-indexable dynamic URLs. WordPress users can leverage plugins like HUSKY – Products Filter Professional to achieve similar results.

To gain the maximum amount of traffic and sales for your online store, it’s essential to configure your eCommerce product filters with SEO in mind. Ready to optimize your eCommerce filters and boost your organic traffic?