Creating SEO-friendly URLs for Product Pages

The URL structure of your ecommerce site works a lot like the address system of a huge city. Without clear addresses, both visitors and search engines can get lost in the maze.

Short, descriptive URLs always beat long, clunky ones for performance. Product URLs should use your main keyword, not a bunch of meaningless parameters.

Good: yourstore.com/mens-running-shoes/nike-air-zoom
Bad: yourstore.com/category.php?id=42&product=3894&color=blue

The first URL tells you exactly what’s on the page. The second? It’s just a mess of code, totally useless for users or Google.

Plenty of store owners trip up here. I remember a housewares retailer who struggled until they swapped their parameter-heavy URLs for clean, keyword-focused ones.

Their product page traffic shot up by about 40% in three months. Honestly, if they’d updated all their internal links to match, they probably would’ve seen even better results.

Pro Tip: Always set up 301 redirects when you change to SEO-friendly URLs. If you skip this, you’re basically moving houses without telling anyone where you went—your visitors and search rankings just disappear.

Category Page SEO Best Practices

Category pages are crucial signposts in your e-com site structure. Their URLs should show a logical hierarchy but stay short and sweet.

Top-performing category URLs usually look like this:

yourstore.com/category/subcategory/

Here are some examples:

yourstore.com/electronics/smartphones/
yourstore.com/clothing/womens/dresses/

Each segment builds on the last, creating a breadcrumb trail. This helps everyone understand how you organize your products.

Try to avoid category URLs with things like:

• Dates (unless you run a seasonal shop)
• Database IDs
• Session IDs
• Unnecessary stop words

Take for example, a camping equipment online store that switched from flat URLs (yourstore.com/camping-tents) to hierarchical ones (yourstore.com/camping/tents). After the change, their category rankings shot up by 15 positions. That clearer structure just made more sense to search engines and gave their SEO a real boost.

Quick Tip: Stay consistent with using either singular or plural terms in your URLs. Don’t use “shoe” in one and “pants” (plural) in another. Pick one style and stick with it across your whole site.

Site Hierarchy and Siloing Strategies for Ecommerce

Think of your online store as a library. If things aren’t organized, finding anything turns into a nightmare.

That’s where siloing comes in—it groups related content into a logical hierarchy. Most successful ecommerce sites stick to a structure like this:

1. Homepage
2. Main Category Pages
3. Subcategory Pages
4. Product Pages
5. Supporting Content (guides, how-tos)

Search engines pick up on your topic relevance faster this way. Plus, your internal links actually start to matter.

There was a home improvement store that did a full site reorg. They set up clear silos like “Kitchen,” “Bathroom,” and “Outdoor,” each with their own subcategories.

After six months, their organic traffic to subcategories jumped by about 60%. Not bad at all.

Still, I can’t help but think they missed a trick. If they’d added more supportive content—like buying guides or maintenance tips—each silo could’ve built even more authority.

Expert tip: Be careful with cross-silo links. Too many links between unrelated topics can water down the strength of each section.

Try to keep most links within their own silo. If you need to connect categories, make it intentional and strategic.

Handling Pagination and Filtering Parameters

Pagination and filtering create nasty URL headaches for many ecommerce sites. These features help users but can wreck your SEO if handled poorly.

The main challenge? Stopping search engines from indexing thousands of variations of essentially the same page with different filters and pagination states.

For pagination, try these approaches:

1. Using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” – Google claims they don’t use these for indexing signals anymore, but they still help with crawling efficiency.
2. Adding a “View All” option – If your server can handle it, a single page showing all products typically outperforms paginated results.
3. Implementing canonical tags – Point paginated pages to either the first page or the “View All” version.

For filtering parameters, these tactics work wonders:

1. Noindex filtered views – Block search engines from indexing every possible filter combination.
2. Set canonical tags – Direct filtered pages to their unfiltered parent category.
3. Use parameter handling in Search Console – Tell Google which URL parameters should be ignored during indexing.

A fashion site had over 10,000 URL variations from color, size, and price filters. After setting up canonical tags and noindexing filtered pages, they slashed indexed pages by 80% while maintaining traffic levels. Search engines could finally focus on their important pages instead of crawling endless variations.

What they missed is creating dedicated landing pages for popular filter combinations (like “red dresses under $100”) with unique content would have captured even more search traffic than their purely technical fix.

Quick Tip: Check your analytics for popular filter combinations. If lots of users search for specific combinations (like “waterproof hiking boots”), build dedicated, optimized landing pages for these terms rather than relying on dynamically filtered URLs.

The Role of Subdirectories vs. Subdomains

The subdirectory vs. subdomain debate never seems to end. For most stores, subdirectories (yourstore.com/blog/) deliver stronger SEO benefits than subdomains (blog.yourstore.com).

Why? Subdirectories share domain authority with your main site, letting your content benefit from your main domain’s strength. This particularly matters for:

• Blog content
• Support docs
• Buying guides
• Product tutorials

That said, subdomains make sense in specific scenarios:

• International stores (uk.yourstore.com)
• Dramatically different user experiences (m.yourstore.com for mobile)
• Marketplaces with independent seller stores

Consider an electronics retailer moving their buying guides from guides.electronicsstore.com to electronicsstore.com/guides. Similar cases have seen organic traffic jumps of roughly 30% in couple of months. The guides benefited from the main domain’s authority, while links to the guides strengthened relevant product categories.

Pro Tip: If you must use subdomains for technical reasons, build strong internal linking between the subdomain and main domain. This helps search engines understand they’re related and passes some authority between them.

URL Redirects and Product Lifecycle Management

Products come and go in ecommerce all the time. The way you manage discontinued product URLs can seriously shape your SEO health.

When a product vanishes, you’ve got a few choices, as follows:

You can keep the page up and update it to show off related products that are still in stock. Or, you might redirect with a 301 to a similar product, which helps pass along that hard-earned link equity.

Some folks just send users to the parent category instead. That’s not perfect, but it sure beats tossing up a 404. If you really don’t have a good alternative, at least make your 404 page useful. Suggest similar products and don’t leave people stranded.

There was a seasonal decor shop that kept their holiday product URLs live all year. Even when items were out of stock, they’d add info about upcoming collections and offer email alerts for restocks.

Turns out, this tactic kept about 25% more organic traffic compared to when they used to just delete those pages.

But, they probably could’ve squeezed even more out of it by recommending complementary products on those out-of-stock pages. Why not give customers another nudge?

Pro tip: Every month, check your top 404 errors in Search Console. You’ll probably spot some valuable old URLs worth redirecting instead of letting them die.

International URL Considerations for Global Ecommerce

For stores selling internationally, URL structure gets complicated fast. You’ll need to choose between:

• Country-code Top-Level Domains (yourstore.fr, yourstore.de)
• Subdomains (fr.yourstore.com, de.yourstore.com)
• Subdirectories (yourstore.com/fr/, yourstore.com/de/)

Each method has its strengths, but subdirectories typically offer the best balance of SEO value and management simplicity for most businesses.

Whichever route you take, implement hreflang tags to tell search engines which version of your site should appear for users in different countries and languages.

A clothing retailer expanded from US-only to serving Canada and the UK using subdirectories (example: yourstore.com/ca/ and yourstore.com/uk/) with proper hreflang implementation. Their organic traffic from these regions surged roughly 200% within six months compared to when they served all regions from their US site.

They missed an opportunity by not creating truly localized content addressing regional preferences, seasons, and terminology. Simply changing currencies and shipping info left significant traffic on the table.

Pro Tip: Don’t just translate your URLs when expanding internationally. Research local search behaviors and keywords, which often differ dramatically from your home market. Direct keyword research in each target country should shape your international URL structure.

Smart URL architecture might sound a bit dry, but it really is the backbone of good ecommerce SEO. Nail it from the start, and you’ll dodge a ton of headaches down the line.

Clear, tidy URLs help shoppers and search engines alike find your stuff. In online retail, a great address can mean more visitors—and, let’s be real, bigger profit margins.