Why Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO

Have you heard people asks if breadcrumbs is Important for SEO? Does navigation links in your ecommerce website affects SEO that much? Have you every wonder what it is there for?

Today we are going to be talking about Why Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO.

Well, breadcrumb navigation is like a secondary navigation system available for your visitors. It tells your website user where they are currently located on your website in relation to the home page. It allows your users to go up and down in the hierarchy of your links. It’s primary purpose is to provide your website visitors an easier way to navigate around.

Breadcrumbs give users direction

If I am navigating around a website without a breadcrumb, it gives me the impression that I am lost and dont know where I am going, and probably, what I will do is make a few clicks on the back button to see were I was previously. Now, that is not smart! An ecommerce website must have a way for potential buyers to easily navigate around it, to know where he is at all times of his experience while in the website. It also helps search engines to understand the hierarchy of links on a web page. Thereby, making it easy for it to present results to web searchers.

Search engines have started showing breadcrumbs in their search results as you may have noticed already, if not, take a look at this image below showing how Google gives the result of a search along with the breadcrumb for each item of the list. It is usually placed under the title of a website in the search results. This gives your ecommerce website more visibility in the search engine results and most importantly increases your site click through rate.

Google developers page has this to say about breadcrumbs:

Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results. Often, as illustrated in following use cases, users can arrive at a page from very different types of search queries. While each search may return the same web page, the breadcrumb categorizes the content within the context of the Google Search query.

It is clear from the above statement that Google search engine, and for the matter along with other major search engines, have been using breadcrumbs to help them “categorize the information from the page” in search results.

And further it recommends this to social media profiles,,

In addition to the general structured data guidelines, Social Profile markup should create one or more breadcrumb trails without a crumb for the target page if it’s possible to find the page within a larger set of search results. Continuing the previous examples, because the search query award winning science fiction novels would find many other pages in addition to ancillaryjustice.html, you might include the breadcrumb trail to reflect the broader search category:

Breadcrumb is important for SEO and is an important aspect of Google’s search results.

It makes it easier for Google to categorize and determine the information on the page in its relation to the overall hierarchy of links in a certain website.

When implementing breadcrumb to your ecommerce website, you must tell Google Search engine to recognizes the following properties as detailed in the BreadcrumbList. You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result. Below is a sample code for insertion into your product pages and content pages:

<div class="breadcrumbs" typeof="BreadcrumbList" vocab="http://schema.org/">

    <?php your PHP code here?>

</div>

Noticed that the code above references the “BreadcumbList” schema type form the schema.org vocabulary of schema types. This tells search engines that your website is using the required properties for breadcrumbs. Allowing your contents to be included or be eligible for inclusion in the rich snippets search results. That is how breadcrumbs is Important for SEO.

Check out the image below to see the required properties and structured data definition for inclusion of breadcrumbs in search results for your website:

Spicing Up Your Ecommerce Website With Breadcrumbs is Important for SEO, because:

1. breadcrumb tells your website user where they are currently located on your website in relation to the home page. Thereby increasing user experience.
2. It allows users to go up and down in the hierarchy of your links, giving them a better experience.
3. Breadcrumbs provide your website visitors an easier way to navigate around your website. It keeps them from being lost in the maze of your contents. This is much important when you have tons of categories and products as well as contents.
4. It gives your ecommerce website more visibility in the search engine results and most importantly increases your site click through rate, as per Google breadcrumb structured data rule.
5. It makes it easier for Google to categorize and determine the information on the page in its relation to the overall hierarchy of links in a certain website.

Breadcrumbs command a great deal for searches

Breadcrumbs is a tiny part of an ecommerce website, but it commands a great deal for search engines. Why? Because it helps search engines in categorizing the content of the pages. It helps the users have a better experience navigating a website.

There is one thing that must be mentioned before I end this article about why breadcrumbs is Important for SEO. Implementing the correct data structure and schema type will not guarantee your ecommerce website to rank higher.

Important statement from Google about this:

Important: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Structured Data Testing Tool. Here are some common reasons why:

• Using structured data enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present. The Google algorithm tailors search results to create what it thinks is the best search experience. Google may determine that one feature is more appropriate than another.

• The structured data is not representative of the main content of the page, or is potentially misleading. The structured data is incorrect in a way that the testing tool was not able to catch.

• The page does not meet the guidelines for structured data described here, the type-specific guidelines, or the general webmaster guidelines.

In conclusion

We hope this article helped you understand the importance of breadcrumbs in SEO and get you to display breadcrumb navigation links in your ecommerce website.

Helpful resources for your ecommerce website:

If you are looking to speed up your prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce website to a page load speed of less the a second, do it with Cache-API module for prestashop-thirtybees.
Check out this post to see the importance of a blog module for prestashop-thritybees ecommerce.
Stay ahead of your competition in search engine results with Schema Pro module for prestashop-thritybees,
Rack Up Sale for Your Website with Prestashop-thirtybees Holiday Sale Module

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