SEO-Friendly URLs for E-commerce: Best Practices

Your e-commerce website for Dubai may be ready to launch, but have you checked whether your URLs are properly optimized for SEO? It might seem like a small detail, but in a competitive market like Dubai, having SEO-friendly URLs for the site is important.

Just like the address for a physical store, the town, street, and building number direct people to the shop; a URL guides the customer to a particular product on your website. 

A well-optimized URL for an e-commerce store helps customers and search engines understand the website, the categories, and the products better. If you want a strong presence among e-commerce websites in Dubai, implement the SEO best practices for your site.

Importance of  SEO-friendly URLs for an e-commerce site in Dubai?

1. Clean URLs for shopping websites improve the product page rankings as search engines understand the products of the online store.
2. SEO-optimized URLs increase the CTR (Click-Through Rate) of the site 
3. SEO-friendly URLs are trusted by people when they are shared through links, as users can easily understand the content.
4. URL hierarchy helps in implementing a proper structure and linking throughout the e-commerce store.

Best Practices for URL Structure for Online Stores

• URL Structure for Online Stores

An organized and clear URL makes it easy for the search engine bots to crawl and index the site. Moreover, it also improves the user experience and keeps them engaged longer. You can see the URLs of web pages in the address bar of a site and the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of Google.

For example, “www.onlinestore.ae/electronics/tablets” clearly shows the structure and hierarchy of an e-commerce store to the search engines and the user. The homepage, category, and product are clear in the URL, which makes it easy to understand for the search engine and user. A structured URL is easier to follow than a dynamic URL with random strings, numbers, and characters.

The URL Slugs come after the domain name of the e-commerce site. In the URL mentioned above, electronics is the category slug, and tablets is the product slug.

2. Use appropriate characters as separators in the URL.

Always use hyphens to separate words of products and category names in the URLs on your shopping site. For example, the URL for the product page should be “www.onlinestore.ae/home-appliances/washing-machine”. This improves the readability of the URL, and the search engines and users can easily understand the product on a particular page. This format of the URL is more user-friendly than using underscores(_) or other characters as separators. This URL structure enables users to remember and even search for a specific product on Google.

3. Implement the HTTPS protocol.

Give priority to the security of the e-commerce website along with other on-page SEO practices, as it is one of the major ranking factors of Google. Implementation of an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS increases the trust of customers, as everyone prefers a secure website. If your website uses HTTP, prioritize migrating it to HTTPS.

4. Use short yet descriptive URLs.

Always make sure that the web pages of your e-commerce site in Dubai have short, keyword-rich URLs. It is important so that the search engine can understand the product listing or category of the e-commerce site easily. Also, avoid keyword stuffing in the URL as it leads to long URL and is not a good SEO practice . 

For example, instead of

“www.onlinestore.ae/electronics/best-laptops-for-office,” 

Use short, SEO-friendly URLs like

“www.onlinestore.ae/electronics/laptops”

Also, avoid dynamic URLs that contain many characters, strings, and numbers(Eg, www.onlinestore.ae/cat1243/prod354). Do not use a separate URL for mobile devices. Mobile-friendly URLs do not contain unnecessary parameters or characters.

5. Don’t use spaces in the file names of images. 

For an e-commerce store in Dubai, many product images are used throughout the site. Name each image with a relevant name without any spaces. URLs are also created from the file names of the uploaded images and PDFs. 

Each space translates as ‘%20’, which is not user-friendly. Use a hyphen to separate words in the file name of an image or PDF. For example, instead of orange shirt.jpg, use orange-shirt.jpg. The file name orange shirt.jpg gets converted to orange%20shirt.jpg in the URL, which confuses the user.

6. Implement canonical URLs.

In an e-commerce site, the same product can be listed under various categories. This leads to similar or duplicate content. This can be a problem from an SEO perspective. To handle this issue, you can use canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are used to tell search engines to index the important page to avoid confusion related to duplicate content. Use canonical tags on the preferred page for indexing so that duplicate content is ignored.

7. Manage URL Parameters and Filters

URL parameters are used in e-commerce websites for tracking, filtering, identifying, and searching products. It is helpful for website visitors, but it creates many URL variations that hurt SEO.

Use Robot.txt with a disallow directive to block unnecessary parameters so that crawlers avoid indexing irrelevant pages. It improves the crawl efficiency and prevents SEO issues caused by parameter-generated URLs.

Conclusion

For an online store in Dubai, e-commerce SEO and URL optimization are necessary to improve rankings. The URL structure of the e-commerce store has to be clear and user-friendly. When URLs are short with proper keywords, visitors can find it easy to navigate through different categories and product pages. Avoid using dynamic URLs and use appropriate URL slugs for categories and products. All these small tweaks help to increase the organic traffic of your online store.