This WooCommerce SEO Plugin is a True Game Changer!
Want to rank for powerful long-tail keywords like “black Nike t-shirts”? In this video, you’ll discover the most common SEO mistakes with filter combinations and how to avoid them. Learn how to control Googlebot, indexing, and crawler budget using one powerful WooCommerce plugin.
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“This WooCommerce SEO Plugin is a True Game Changer!” Transcript
The Power of Long-Tail Filter Keywords
The most reliable way to get sales as an online store is to rank for long tail transactional keywords with combinations of category names and filter values which have search volume. Setting them up in a way to have real chances to rank for them can look easy, but it isn‘t. I will show you the most common mistakes which prevent web shops to rank with filter combinations and how you can avoid them all. At the end I will show you a plugin which can help you to get the job done faster and rank easier with filter combinations.
Let‘s take a look at the preconditions and which web shops have actually a chance to rank with filter combinations.
Long tail keywords usually have a much higher conversion rate if the product listing provides enough related products for the user to choose from.
The first challenge therefore is to have enough products in a certain category so that filters make sense at all. The second challenge is to ensure that all products have their attributes set and attribute values entered.
For example „black tshirts“ have a nice search volume, but if you want to rank for that keyword you need at least 12 black tshirts in your shop and their color attribute needs to have their attribute value set to black. This seems obvious for an attribute like color, but you wouldn't believe how often even that one is missing for way too many products in most web shops.
Once we have enough products for all colors, the color filter makes sense. Clicking on one of the colors should open a new URL related to the category. In our example the category is tshirts and the color black, so the URL usually looks like this, or like this (if you have made your URLs prettier) yourshop.com/c/tshirts/f/black/
The SEO basics are that the Title Tag and H1 have the keyword at the beginning. So the Title Tag and H1 in our example should start with „Black T-Shirts“, but in reality most web shops don‘t have this. It's called dynamic title tags and H1s.
Because in some CMSs is can be challenging to set dynamic Title Tags and H1s up, some decide to convert filters into subcategories. We see this most often with brands. Instead of leaving the brand as a filter, they create subcategories with the brand, so the URL isnt anymore like this but looks like this which for most web shops is the completely wrong approach, because users love to combine multiple filters while trying to find a suited product and you shouldn‘t give filters the same amount of link juice as subcategories, which you do if you set them up as subcategories and you weaken further filter combinations by doing that.
Now that we have enough products with filled out attribute values, our filters generate seperate URLs and we have dynamic title tags, we are done, right? Sadly, not even close!
Crawlability & Indexing Essentials
First we need to make sure that those filter URLs are crawable by Google. If your filter is being generated by Javascript CSR or consists of form elements, Google won‘t see them. They need to be ahref html elements to be discovered by the Googlebot.
If certain filters dont have search volume, but you still want to let the user use that filter, you can hide it from Google by using a form element with PRG masking.
To be able to turn one filter on and shut another off is not natively supported by most shop CMSs and therefore you usually need to decide whether you want to index them all or none, which is a two sides sword. By indexing them all, you can loose crawler and indexing budget to unimportant filters with no search volume or you can decide not to rank for these extremely good converting keywords.
Therefore we have built a plugin to help you set it all up perfectely. But before taking a look at the plugin, let‘s see what else we need to take care of from an SEO perspective regarding filters.
The filter URLs meta robots should be set to index,follow if we linked them from the filter selection and noindex,nofollow if we have hidden them from the filter selection.
But what if we have multiple pages of a single filter? For example hundreds of black tshirts? Take a look at this video for an explanation. In our example we will stick to the category centered setup and we need to setup single filter paging URLs to noindex,nofollow.
The Multiple Filter Minefield: Preventing Infinite Loops & Budget Drain
Now we have one more important thing to take care about - multiple filters. What if the search volume for „black nike tshirts“, which is a combination of black as the color filter and Nike as the brand filter is good? Should we index all multiple filter combinations?
No. In most usecases we should prevent multiple filter URLs from being indexed. There are many reasons why we shouldn't let that happen and the first one is that this could create endless loops where the Googlebot gets lost. Imagine the Googlebot clicking on every filter value and combining them all. This could eat all of your crawler budget in the first category the Googlebot finds. You would not only see crawling issues, but also indexing issues and therefore will have a hard time to rank even for categories and subcategories.
So take care that the double filter combinations and especially multiple filter combinations are set to noindex,nofollow.
Introducing Crawler Budget Control plugin
For some web shops double filter combinations make sense, but most shops need just a few double filter combinations to be indexed. With our Crawler Bugdet Control plugin, you can exactly do that.
You can set multiple filter combinations to noindex,nofollow but chose certain combinations to be on index,follow. You can even choose just certain filter values to be indexed. It generates also dynamic title tags with prefixes.
You can finally take control of your category filter combination keywords and boost rankings for those with a search volume and save your Google crawler budget for the more important URLs and not waste them on tricky filter handling.
SEOLAXY WooCommerce Plugins & Future Insights
You can download the SEOLAXY WooCommerce Crawler Budget Control plugin at plugins.seolaxy.com where you'll find also our Link Juice Control plugin and well as our CTR Optimization plugin, all made for WooCommerce.
We are developing the same plugins for Shopify. If you don't want to miss them out or get more useful tips and tricks for Ecommerce SEO, join our free newsletter at seolaxy.com. See you next time!
