Faceted navigation lets ecommerce shoppers filter and sort products by various product attributes. While it makes the shopping experience much more personalized and enjoyable, it can pose significant ecommerce SEO challenges when not managed properly.
In this article, we’ll explore the double-edged nature of faceted navigation for online shops, highlighting its pros and cons. We’ll also discuss how you can mitigate its negative impact on SEO, specifically through pre-rendering tools for ecommerce like Prerender.
What is Faceted Navigation for Ecommerce Websites?
Faceted navigation, also known as faceted search, is a powerful tool that empowers shoppers to refine search results through multiple filters or facets.
Faceted navigation significantly enhances the online shopping experience by allowing customers to quickly narrow down product options based on specific attributes like color, size, or price.
Faceted navigation is usually located on the sidebar or at the top of product category pages, as seen in the examples below.
Related: Check out other types of product page navigation, such as internal and search navigation, to optimize and keep ecommerce visitors engaged.
4 Benefits of Implementing Faceted Navigation on Retail Sites
As one of the common ecommerce navigation, faceted navigation offers numerous advantages for both businesses and users. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Enhances User Experience and Conversion Rates Through Filtering Options
Shoppers visiting an online store with a specific product in mind expect a swift and easy buying journey. Simplifying this process can significantly boost sales and conversion rates. Faceted navigation is a powerful tool to achieve this. By allowing customers to filter quickly and sort products, it empowers them to find their desired item efficiently, enhancing their overall shopping experience.
2. Improves Product Discoverability
Unlike internal search system, faceted navigation relieves shoppers from the burden of guessing the right keywords to search for a specific product. Instead, they can use available filters to find what they need.
Additionally, faceted navigation can outline some item attributes shoppers might want to consider when choosing the right product and offer suggestions on their search.
3. Personalizes and Customizes Individual Preferences
According to Epsilon, 80% of customers prefer to buy from brands that offer personalized shopping experiences.
Faceted navigation gives shoppers the power to customize their search journey based on what matters most to them. Looking for clothing options in a particular color? You can filter for that. Need to stay within a specific budget? Just set the price range, and you’re good to go.
This level of personalization makes your shoppers feel valued and understood, which in turn sets your online store apart.
The SEO Challenges of Faceted Navigation for Ecommerce Businesses
Many SEO issues with faceted navigation stem from URL parameters. In faceted search, these parameters are additional pieces of information added to the end of a URL to tell the server how to handle a request.
For example, in this URL:
The parameters “category=shoes” “sort=price_asc” “page=2” may provide users with specific results based on their selected filters, but they also create many possible URL combinations with similar content. Consequently, this can result in several SEO issues, such as the following.
A. Duplicate Content and Diluted Authority
One of the major headaches with faceted navigation is duplicate content. Different filters and facets can generate multiple URLs displaying similar or identical content. This can hurt your ecommerce SEO because search engines may view them as duplicate content, not knowing which version to prioritize.
Furthermore, duplicate content often leads to the dilution of your ranking signals. In a worst-case scenario, search engines may deindex your pages.
Related: Follow these 6 recovery steps if your ecommerce product page got deindexed by Google.
B. Potential for Keyword Cannibalization
When multiple pages targeting the same keyword due to different faceted combinations exist, they compete against each other. Instead of having one strong page that ranks well, you have several weaker ones that struggle to make an impact.
This spreads your link equity thin across the duplicate pages and can confuse search engines about which page to rank for specific queries, ultimately hurting your ecommerce SEO performance.
C. Wasted Crawl Budget
Search engines allocate a certain amount of resources to crawl and index each site, known as the crawl budget. With faceted navigation creating numerous URL variations, search engines can waste that budget and time crawling these redundant pages instead of indexing more valuable ones.
Pro tip: Learn how to guide Google crawls specific URLs in your retail site.
D. Index Bloating
Depending on the size of your online store, hundreds or even thousands of extra URLs caused by faceted navigation can lead to index bloating.
For example, your site has 15,000 essential pages, but Google Search Console shows almost 40,000 pages indexed. This indicates that Google’s index is filled with numerous low-value pages.
Having so many low-quality pages indexed can slow down your site and hurt the user experience, making it harder for search engines to find and rank the pages that matter most.
Combat Faceted Navigation SEO Challenges with Content Pre-rendering
We’ve established that faceted navigation can be a real headache for SEO. So, how do you tackle these issues effectively?
Most modern ecommerce sites rely on JavaScript (JS) frameworks to create dynamic, interactive user experiences. However, JS introduces SEO challenges similar to that of faceted navigation, including difficulties with indexing dynamic content.
One way to tackle these SEO challenges is to use technical SEO tactics like canonical tags, no-index tags, and robots.txt directives. But this needs constant monitoring and maintenance, especially as your ecommerce product catalog evolves. Fortunately, there’s a more practical approach: pre-rendering.
Pre-rendering involves pre-loading and rendering web pages before they are requested by crawlers or human users (or on the fly). This benefits sites with complex navigation systems like faceted navigation. It ensures that search engines get a fully rendered page that can easily be crawled and indexed.
Here’s a breakdown of how pre-rendering works and why it’s effective:
- Server-Sider Rendering (SSR): SSR generates HTML on the server, ensuring that search engines can easily crawl and index your pages.
- Static Site Generation (SSG): SSG pre-builds the entire site into static files at build time, reducing the need for JavaScript execution during crawling.
- SEO tags: prerendered pages should include essential SEO elements, such as meta tags and structured data, to help search engines understand and rank your content.
While you can build your own pre-rendering system, it can be costly and time-consuming. You may spend $120k+ and countless development hours. For a more affordable and practical solution, try Prerender.
By using a prerendering tool for ecommerce like Prerender, you can still achieve your desired indexing results without extensive development cost and effort.
Prerender renders your Javascript content ahead of time and feeds a static version to crawlers—averaging a response time of just 0.03 seconds. This drastically improves your site’s server response times, creating a seamless experience for bots and human visitors.
Related: See how much money you can save by choosing Prerender over building your own SSR.
Improve Your Ecommerce Site Experience with Prerender
There’s no denying the immense user experience advantages of faceted navigation for ecommerce sites, especially those with large product catalogs. It is essential to be aware of potential ecommerce SEO issues and stay ahead of these challenges with a pre-rendering solution in place.
After all, the ecommerce world is evolving, and only those who adapt and innovate can come out on top. So, what are you waiting for? Get crawled, indexed, and found with Prerender.
If you want to know about ecommerce SEO optimization, these resources are at your service:
