Faceted navigation is a way to aid visitors to navigate and personalize a page to pinpoint precisely the products they are searching for. The faceted navigations created can also help people searching for specific longtail queries find the exact products they are searching for in the results.
Although faceted navigation is helpful in many cases, it can result in serious problems for your SEO if you are not cautious. This article discusses issues you might face and ways on how to mitigate them.
Be familiar with how faceted navigation works on your site
For you to diagnose faceted navigation problems, you will need to have a thorough understanding of how your site utilizes faceted navigation.
You might want to ask questions such as do facets exist only on category pages or do you utilize facets on other sections of the site, such as the blog?
You might also want to examine if there is a hierarchical order of how facets are utilized on your URLs. Are there limits to how many facets you can add, or are there endless combinations possible on your website?
By getting to know the faceted navigation of your site, you will gain an optimum understanding of the scope of the SEO problems it might be causing.
Evaluate the traffic of your faceted pages
Once you understand how many and what kind of facets are on your website, you can utilize your analytics applications to determine if any of those pages have value. In other words, you might need to check which faceted pages are driving organic value to your website.
You can easily see this by checking active pages. There are applications online which allow you to see which pages are not driving traffic. These pages may result in a budget risk for crawls.
Determine crawls wasted on faceted pages
In some cases, faceted pages will drive traffic via organic search. However, some only waste your crawl budget. You must know which is which.
It is critical to utilize crawls by Google or visits from Google. URLs with up to three facets take up a considerable portion of the crawl budget since they get a majority of the hits from Google more than any other URL on your website. However, those pages will only be generating a tiny trickle of visitors from Google organic.
Detect search demand for your faceted pages
Once you have an understanding of what is happening on your website, look off-site at search demand. In other words, is there sufficient search demand for the pages you are creating?
If a page created by your faceted navigation has extremely low or zero demand, you may want to consider keeping it out of the index. On the other hand, if a page created by your faceted navigation has an extremely high demand, meaning many people are searching for it, it is ideal to ensure that these pages are indexable.
Check out your inventory to know where you could serve more results to your visitors and users
Finally, it is critical to utilize your inventory, such as your product or content, to understand where you can serve more results to your users. You can customize everything to identify how many products you have on every category page in some applications. After this, you can prioritize optimal products to drive enhanced traffic and conversions.