eCommerce Site Structure: How to Structure an eCommerce Website for SEO

In this blog post, we’re diving into one of the most critical topics in eCommerce SEO: the right eCommerce website structure. Recent studies indicate that poorly structured Shopify stores could be losing over 75% of their organic traffic. The culprit is a common yet hidden issue: improper webshop structure for SEO. According to a report by Ahrefs, 91% of online stores get no organic traffic from Google, often due to issues with the structure of eCommerce websites.

In this article, we’ll highlight the most common mistakes with the webshop structure for SEO and show you what needs to be done to ensure your online store attracts customers through Google search. By optimizing your store’s structure, you can significantly improve its visibility, leading to higher traffic and more sales.

Our SEO and Shopify teams have pooled their extensive knowledge to help you maximize organic traffic and boost sales:

• Webster Webmeridian is a BDM and eCommerce expert with over 5 years of experience in business development and Magento optimization, bringing strategic insights to drive SEO success.
• Oleg Fediv, a skilled team lead and senior Shopify expert with over 7 years of experience guiding eCommerce businesses through website and marketplace development and Shopify theme customization. 
• Oleksandr Kryvotsiuk, an eCommerce SEO expert with over 10 years of experience, focuses on search engine optimization and marketing strategies. Oleksandr has extensive practical experience in developing ecommerce site structure, conducting eCommerce SEO audits, fixing technical errors, and link building.
• Veronika Kovalska, an eCommerce marketer with over 5 years of experience, specializes in branding and digital strategies, implementing effective SEO techniques to optimize sites and drive targeted traffic to Magento stores.

An eCommerce website’s structure is similar to a house’s foundation. A website’s structure determines how pages rank in search results and how user-friendly the site is, much like a building’s foundation determines how long it will last and how secure its residents are. According to a SEMrush study, 50% of websites have structural issues that hinder their SEO performance, emphasizing the importance of getting this aspect right.

By understanding and implementing the best practices in webshop structure for SEO, you can overcome the limitations that hinder your store’s performance on Google and unlock its full potential.

eCommerce Website Structure: What It Is and Why It Matters

A bit of theory is needed to understand the importance of website structure for SEO and algorithms. 

So, what is the eCommerce website structure? It is a scheme that visualizes all the pages of an online store, showing their hierarchy and the connections between them.

Why is the webshop structure so important for SEO? In short, if the eCommerce website structure is incomplete or contains errors, you could be losing over 75% of your traffic. According to a study by SEMrush, 50% of websites have structural issues that can lead to poor indexing by search engines, resulting in lower visibility and reduced traffic.

How does it work? Google’s algorithm takes into account the structure of a website to better understand its content. A well-structured site helps search engines crawl and index pages more efficiently, leading to better rankings. For instance, a clear hierarchy with properly linked pages ensures that link equity flows throughout the site, boosting the SEO value of individual pages. 

By addressing structural issues and implementing best practices, you can significantly enhance your store’s visibility on search engines, attract more organic traffic, and ultimately drive more sales.

To further illustrate the impact of webshop structure for SEO, we recently published a video that supports these claims, and I recommend checking it out:

eCommerce Website Structure: What Google Says

According to Google, understanding and optimizing your eCommerce website structure is crucial for better search engine visibility. Here are the key takeaways from Google’s documentation:

• Site Navigation and Links:

• • Google analyzes the relationship between pages based on their linkages to understand site structure.
  • The number of links to a page and the number of links needed to reach a page indicate its relative importance.
  • Ensure your navigation structures, such as menus and cross-page links, are well-organized and logical.
• Crawler-Friendly Navigation:
  • All pages should be reachable by following links through your site’s navigation.
  • Link from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and from sub-category pages to product pages.
  • Use structured data to help Google understand the purpose of different pages on your site.
  • Avoid relying solely on search boxes for navigation, as Googlebot doesn’t submit searches. Instead, ensure direct links to all products.
  • Use <a href> tags for creating links, and avoid using JavaScript events for navigation.

• Importance of Internal Links:

• • Google doesn’t rely on URL structure but on the linkages between pages to determine their importance.
  • Promote your best categories or products by linking to them from the home page or other prominent locations.
  • More internal links to a page signal higher relative importance to Google.
• Content Quality:
  • Create useful and interesting content that is valuable to users, as this is the ultimate eCommerce SEO best practice.

By following these guidelines, you can help Google better understand your eCommerce site structure, ensuring that all important pages are indexed and ranked appropriately, driving more traffic and sales.

How to Implement the Correct Structure of an eCommerce Website

Now, let’s move on to implementing the correct structure of an eCommerce website. 

SEO filters

To build a robust structure, eCommerce product filters play a crucial role. This functionality allows you to generate separate groups of products as individual pages and interlink them with each other, enhancing the site’s overall SEO performance.

For example, consider a category with men’s t-shirts that includes a filter section. Each color filter option contains a link to a relevant page. When a user selects a color filter, the relevant page loads, displaying an appropriate heading, SEO text, metadata, and products. This method ensures that each filtered page is uniquely indexed by search engines, improving visibility for specific queries such as “red men’s t-shirt” or “blue men’s t-shirt XL”.

Interlinking via the menu

Another way to implement the eCommerce website structure is through simple interlinking via the menu. 

For example, a sidebar menu might include items for subcategories like “Men’s T-Shirts,” “Men’s Hoodies,” and “Men’s Jackets.” Each subcategory further breaks down into specific product filters, such as size and color. However, in this case, filters generate results through dynamic URLs, which are not indexed by Google as separate pages. While this approach is user-friendly, it is essential to combine it with SEO filters to ensure all product variations are indexable and searchable.

Webshop Structure: TOP SEO Mistakes

Now, let’s move on to the common webshop structure mistakes that can undermine your SEO efforts.

Dynamic URLs for Filters

The first mistake occurs when filters generate results through dynamic URLs. 

For example, when you navigate through the menu, select a color, and activate the filter, a dynamic “tail” is added to the URL. For search engines, this is not recognized as a separate page but merely an additional version of the main category. In the site’s code, the canonical attribute points to the URL of the main category. As a result, the site won’t appear in searches where the user specifies attributes like color or size.

Self-Referencing SEO Filters

The second mistake involves self-referencing SEO filters. 

When a page contains a link to itself, it confuses search engines and is considered an error. For instance, if subcategories in the filter section link to themselves, it creates redundancy. To avoid this, implement a condition where the checkbox should not contain a link to the relevant page if that page is already loaded. Alternatively, the link can be replaced with the main category link to prevent self-referencing.

Incorrect Use of Canonical Tags

The third mistake is the improper use of canonical tags. 

A good example is when selecting a color leads to a separate page loading without a dynamic “tail” in the URL. However, if the canonical tag still points to the main category’s URL, this subcategory is not indexed independently. Consequently, it won’t generate traffic from users searching for specific terms like “blue t-shirts ladies.” To fix this, each subcategory should have its own canonical URL and unique, relevant content, including metadata, headings, and SEO texts.

How is the structure of an online store built?

Here are the four essential steps for implementing a well-structured online store:

• Search Query Research. First, we identify how our target audience searches for our products.
• Search Query Grouping. Next, we categorize these search queries into relevant groups.
• Structure Modeling. We then visualize the structure based on these groups.
• Implementing the Structure. Finally, we implement the structure on the website.

Let’s delve into the details and best practices for each stage:

Keyword Research

Collecting search queries requires specialized tools like SE Ranking, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner. These tools work on a similar principle: you input a phrase that characterizes your product (e.g., “men’s t-shirt”) or the URL of a page/site, and the tools generate related keywords.

These tools provide a comprehensive dashboard that shows keyword frequency (how often users search for a query), competition level (SEO difficulty), and keyword trends over the year to identify seasonality. This data helps prioritize which keywords to target and understand the competitive landscape.

Using these insights, you can optimize your Shopify store’s content to align with your target audience’s search behavior, ultimately improving visibility and driving more organic traffic.

Formation of Groups of Search Queries (Grouping)

Grouping search queries is a crucial stage in SEO. Google users expect quick and relevant answers to their queries, which can range widely. Some users may enter broad queries like “men’s t-shirt,” while others specify their needs, such as “men’s polo t-shirt,” “men’s printed t-shirt,” or “men’s oversized t-shirt.” Google understands these intents and provides relevant results.

There are over 13,000 queries related to t-shirts, and our task is to group these effectively. Keyword research tools offer functionalities to view keyword groups based on various characteristics (color, size, etc.). Additionally, tools like Keyword Grouper automatically cluster keywords based on SERP results analysis, ensuring logical keyword distribution across website pages, which is crucial for SEO and contextual advertising.

The resulting groups should be systematically organized and displayed in a table. For example:

In the table, the “Product Classifier” column indicates the feature used to group the keywords (color, size, material, collar type, etc.). The primary search query for the group with the highest frequency is displayed in the “Main Keyword” column. A link to the list of search terms for that group can be found in the final column. 

Take note of the subgroups (rows 4-6) that combine multiple classifiers, like size and color or size, color, and neckline. These subgroups will come in handy when building the online store’s structure and configuring Shopify. 

Building the Structure of an Online Store

Once we have grouped search queries for a category (e.g., men’s t-shirts), we need to align these groups with your product range. Consider the groups/subgroups for which you have products. Since your product line may change or expand, keep groups that are not included currently.

The site structure is a diagram that visualizes all the pages of your online store, showing their hierarchy and relationships. Tools like Octopus, FlowMap, draw.io, or Miro can help graphically display your store’s structure.

Implement the Right Structure in Shopify

Shopify has many advantages, but it does have a significant drawback: it does not natively support nested collections, or “subcollections.” This can be addressed by customizing your store. A simpler solution is to create subcollections through the navigation menu. Shopify Sub Collections contain some products based on specific conditions. 

Another more complex solution is setting up SEO filters. These filters generate separate pages for filtered products based on specific parameters (classifiers). These pages are interlinked within a specific category, each with its own unique URL, metadata, and content, and search engines index these pages individually.

At this stage, ensure that subcategories have unique content, are not generated through dynamic URLs, and do not have attributes that prevent indexing by Google, such as “noindex” or canonical tags pointing to top-level pages (categories).

Implementing these steps will allow your Shopify website to create separate pages for search queries at different levels of detail. For example, the online store structure can have at least four levels of detail:

1. Men’s T-shirts – 1st level
2. Men’s T-shirt XS – 2nd level
3. White Men’s T-shirt XS – 3rd level
4. Men’s White Polo T-shirt XS – 4th level

Such a structured approach will be favored by Google, as it aligns with their preference for well-organized and detailed content.

Takeaways

In summary, the eCommerce website structure plays a crucial role in your SEO success. Poorly structured online stores can lose significant organic traffic, as evidenced by the fact that over 75% of online stores receive no organic traffic from Google. Implementing a robust webshop structure for SEO is essential for improving visibility and driving more sales.

Key points to remember are the following:

• SEO Filters: Use SEO filters to create separate, indexable pages for different product attributes. This enhances visibility for specific search queries.
• Interlinking: Ensure a logical and crawler-friendly navigation system that links categories and subcategories appropriately.
• Avoid Dynamic URLs: Dynamic URLs for filters can hinder indexing. Use static URLs with unique, relevant content for better SEO performance.
• Proper Use of Canonical Tags: Make sure each subcategory has its own canonical URL to prevent indexing issues.
• Keyword Research and Grouping: Conduct thorough keyword research using tools like SE Ranking and Ahrefs, then group search queries effectively to align with your product range.
• Site Structure Visualization: Utilize tools like Octopus and FlowMap to visualize and implement a clear hierarchy for your online store.

With WebMeridian’s SEO and Shopify teams, you can effectively address these aspects and optimize your webshop structure, improve its SEO performance, and ultimately attract more organic traffic and increase sales.