 Hey, Mazers, it's time for our next speaker, who I introduced for the first time at MozCon on stage a couple of years ago, and he wowed us with his expertise of technical SEO. His visibility really exploded around that time when he went independent and became an independent SEO consultant, specializing in e-commerce and large site SEO. If it's a large site, if it's technical, if it's e-commerce, if it has to do with crawling and indexing or even conversions, Luke Carthy is the person you go to. It's a talk with a lot of insights. I know we're going to learn something, especially if we do work with large sites or manage large sites. It's the ultimate how-to for faceted navigation SEO and e-commerce. Please welcome Mr. Luke Carthy. Hi, I'm Morgan Freeman, and welcome to the afterlife. All right, you see with this really white background, Bruce Allmighty, where Morgan Freeman goes all Jesus-like. Honestly, I feel like I'm trapped in that set right now. Anyway, this is not a Bruce Allmighty audition, and I'm not Morgan Freeman. My name is Luke Carthy, and of course, I'm here to talk to you about faceted navigation at MozCon this year, which I cannot wait to jump into with you guys. So let's, without further ado, let's get started. So the ultimate how-to guide even for faceted navigation. So who am I? Well, my name is Luke Carthy, and I do e-commerce stuff for e-commerce people. But you don't really care about any of that, let's be honest. You are here because you want the good stuff from this presentation, specifically how to do incredible things for SEO with your faceted navigation. So specifically, I drove a 25% increase in organic traffic and a two-fold increase in organic keywords using faceted navigation. And we're going to jump into, in this presentation, precisely how I did that and how you can do it as well. So faceted navigation, first things first, faceted nav and SEO aren't usually friends, right? They just don't get on like clash. And yeah, this is what we have. So Paul Sr., Paul Jr., for American Chop, if you've ever watched that program, if you haven't, it's incredible, go and check it out. You've got one side of the business who's like filters are important, and of course they are. They're incredibly important. They help people define what they want on e-commerce sites. But to the contrary, you've got Paul Jr., who's kind of like, $60 million excluded URLs in Google Search Console tells me that's bullshit, which of course, you know, it's all about finding that middle ground. But by the end of this presentation, there's one thing I can promise you, and that's they'll be best friends just like these guys, Harold and Arnold, right? Best buds, hey, Arnold, best program ever. And one day, I hope to have hair just like Gerald. It's Gerald, isn't it? It's not Harold. Whoever it is, I can't remember having watched this show for years, but the cool black guy is who I aspire to have hair like. This is the point I'm trying to get to. All right, so real quick, before we jump into it, what exactly is faceted navigation? What is it? Well, it's this stuff. It's this stuff on the left-hand side of e-commerce sites, typically. And this is the things that allow you to refine, to filter, to sometimes sort if you want to include that as well. And on this one page alone, this is a screenshot taken from Richard Sounds, which is an audio visual specialist here in the UK. There's 115 filter URLs on this single page alone. There's a lot of URLs to potentially take a look at, right? And this is where we start to get into what's wrong with the world of faceted navigation, which is this. All of these URLs that faceted nav generates, they're ugly, they're long, they're complicated, they're driven by parameters, it gets messy. And it makes it difficult for search engines. It impacts your rankings and lots of other bad stuff. In fact, here, right here, right now, is Googlebot squaring up to go and crawl 3 billion filter URLs on a website somewhere. It creates problems, it creates bloat, it creates mess, right? So in most cases, and I say most cases because there's exceptions to everything, each filter option has a unique URL against it, right? Many of which have really small, if not negligible, value to search engines when we think about rankings and all that sort of good stuff. In fact, here's one specific example. So right now, I'm looking at JohnLewis.com in the search engine. For people who don't know, if you're not in the UK, which of course I mentioned the majority if you aren't, hello people in the US. This is a filter option for JohnLewis.com for price brands. So for just filter alone, just filtering by price alone, there's 24,000, almost 24,000 filter URLs that Google has decided to index, which means there's probably going to be a heck of a lot more that is available on the website, you know? So for context, JohnLewis is an electrical retailer, a bit like Best Buy, but it also is a department store. It's basically where you go to get anything posh, all right? That's who JohnLewis is and what they do. So looking at another example of fatted navigation, here again, Googlebot to the side, scoping out all of these URLs for different sizes of clothing, in this case, Burton. So it's a menswear store with a couple of high street stores as well. There's a lot of different sizes here, and each one of these URLs on every single category, potentially every single page, all different sorting options, it gets really messy, really fast, right? So as we've kind of alluded to, the issue here is it can create a huge number of bloat URLs which explodes with the more options, more filters, and more categories that you have available on your or your client's site. And additionally, what it does is it thins out equity of categories, reducing their ranking potential, right? So imagine this across all of your categories. If all of these facets are accessible and indexable, it creates a problem because you've got loads of links that are taking link juice away from that particular page and it's thinking out and reducing the importance of how powerful those pages, those category pages can rank, right? It can also make it challenging for search engines to crawl effectively. If you've got to go around all of those different URLs, it can make a mess. It can prevent search engines from accessing your products as quickly as possible. It can prevent search engines from crawling the website as thoroughly as it would do if things were clean and tidy, right? Or it goes the complete other way. And what actually happens is SEOs and product owners play it completely safe and lock off all of the faceted navigation URLs from being accessible to search engines whatsoever. So they get canonical, they get no followed, they get excluded in robots.txt, whatever that might be. And the point is that every single faceted URL gets no follow this shit out of. It's just not accessible to search engines. And the downside of that is, of course, that all of that long tail gold that can really help you to improve conversions and drive those really granular queries that result into sales, you've got none of them. They've all disappeared. They've all gone as a result of taking them all out. So the point I'm trying to make here is it's all about balance. Now, I love this image. I just love this image. I don't know how I found it. They're not my dogs, but I love it. And every time I see it, it makes me smile. But this is Yinyang, right? Perfect example, if you like, referring to balance. And that's what Faceted Nav is all about in SEO. All about balance. Right. OK. So moving on from the cute dogs. Making faceted URLs completely crawlable can cause huge quantities of URLs. But equally, locking them all off and preventing search engines from accessing any of them prevents you from hitting that long tail juice which we spoke about and that real opportunity. And that goes back to the point I said at the first slide in terms of really improving sales conversion and opening your e-commerce store to a lot more long tail queries as well, right? It's all about balance. I just wanted to put this image back in here again a second time. It's really, really powerful. I love it. So balance is the thing that we need to get right in Faceted Navigation. Now, let's take a look at a real world example here. Next.co.uk. So next.co.uk is an e-commerce store that sells clothes. I'm a big fan of them. I think I might even have one of their shirts on now, actually. And we can see here that we've got a category URL for men's shirts. Sorry, men's jeans. And what you can see here, nice and simple, clean category URL. Nothing wrong with this page. There are some filters, but we're going to jump into those in just a second. So we've selected a filter. In this case, men's slim fit jeans, as you can see. And we have the canonical URL, which is pointing to also that filter option applied, which means that this page can now rank for men's slim fit jeans, which is perfect. It's perfect. It's glorious, right? So let's take a look at another page. We've got a category URL here this time. Men's slim fit jeans, because we've got the men's category. We've got the slim fit filter applied. We've also now got the color black filter applied. So we've got men's slim fit jeans, right? In black, which means queries around that. So men's, you know, black slim fit jeans we can start to rank for. Next can start to rank for. But I'm getting a little suspicious now. This is almost, you know, what's going on? What's going on? I mean, that's a great keyword, great opportunity. And again, can help you improve your sales. But what's going on here? So let's now take a look at another option. In this case, we've got a whole host of different filter options. It's on the same category page. So category is men's jeans. But we also have slim fit applied. We have gray applied. We have black applied and we have straight fit applied. So we've got loads of different options applied. The downside to this is we have the same canonical URL as well, which means this URL, which is for use to nobody, no one's going to search for men's black slim fit gray straight jeans. This is just a query that's not going to happen very often. And the canonical is there. So that means this is indexable by search engines. And I just, just forget it. It's not, it's not right. It's not right. Throw in a strut. All right. This is not how it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be accurate. And this is an accurate. So next.co.uk got it really close, really close to getting it right, getting it spot on. But it's not quite right. So where's the sweet spot, right? Where's the sweet spot between huge bloat and creating lots of unnecessary URLs for search engines to chew on and keyword euphoria, where you've got the real opportunities to tap into those long tail queries, conversion. Where's the magic? Where's the magic? Well, that's the question I'm about to answer for you. So first step is you need to properly understand your taxonomy, your category structure, right? Because it allows you to better understand how your indexable filters when you choose to index those can complement your categories to create those really powerful long tail combination queries, right? Filters should only be used to add granularity to categories that shouldn't split down any further. Now, that's a bit of a mouthful. Somebody use an example in just a second and avoid opening up filters that already exist as categories because that creates cannibalization and just makes the whole thing a heck of a lot messier to have to manage, right? So here's an example. In this case, we're looking at cards. We've got birthday cards. Cards is a top category. And then birthday cards is a second tier category. And then it's a third tier category. We've got who it's for. So for him, for her, for kids, and that sort of thing. And the green kind of... Are they circles? Are they rectangles? I don't know what shape they are. That's not important. But the green things are basically filter groups. So relationships. So for example, cards, birthday cards for him and relationship as an option could be, say, for dad or for your brother, for your boyfriend or for your husband, right? This is almost like a perfect hierarchy, an example hierarchy of how your categories and filters can complement each other, right? So there should be no overlap between where your categories end and your filters begin. So you shouldn't have, using this example, you shouldn't have birthday cards for dad as a category. And equally, for him, shouldn't exist as a filter because that creates overlap. That creates a problem. So here is an example of what not to do more specifically. So you've got birthday cards for him, for her. And on the left, you can see here we have the birthday cards as a category. We've got gender as the filter group and then you've got for him, for her. You don't want that because in that situation you've got for him, for her as a category and for him, for her as a filter. It just, it makes it difficult from a UX perspective and navigation perspective and it makes it a real challenge from an SEO perspective as well. So we don't want that. That's stuff we don't want. So let's now size up the keyword opportunity and demands. So we've now got an understanding as to how your categorization works and how your taxonomy stocks up and how your filters shouldn't cross over with your categories. And let's now identify the keyword opportunities that are really going to help you to understand what filters you should start to turn on and start to have accessible to search engines. So SEMrush and Systerix both have really cool tools to really help with this. So SEMrush has the keyword magic tool and Systerix has the keyword discovery tool and this will really help you to find what that demand is in SEO. So right here we've got a screenshot for Systerix and you can see right here we've got, I've highlighted a couple of things. 50th, 60th, 21st, 40th. The key milestones if you like for birthdays. So I've done a search here in Systerix for birthday cards. You can see here these are the common I guess long tail or combination queries that come up. So 50th birthday card, 21st birthday card, that sort of thing. So there's a real opportunity here, the key takeaway from this is that there's a real opportunity here to allow an indexable filter to have ages in, 18, 23rd, 50th, 60th, that sort of thing because people are searching for specific milestones of birthdays which of course is of no surprise to us. We probably do it all at the time. So going over to Semrush, exactly the same thing. Another search for birthday cards. You can see 50th again, 60th and those milestone things. And the opportunity around them. There's tens of thousands of people every month that are searching for specific birthday milestones. So with the right category and the right filter combination and making that indexable, you could then open up the opportunity to then convert and to capitalise on that query. So another way which you can source keyword opportunities and demand is filter parameter URLs and Google Analytics and find which ones are the most popular. So here's an example I brewed up earlier. So this is a client of mine who lives in the world of security and networking and that sort of stuff. And there's common filter options that are used and this I think is across a week or maybe two weeks or something like that. So you can see brand is a filter. That's used quite often. We've got HicFusion here and we've got rack units as well. So not to bore you with the science but rack units. If you're buying a server rack, you want to specify how many racks you can fit in a particular server unit, right, a particular rack unit. So a rack unit is how many racks it has, how many things you can put in it. So that is of course a common thing that people search for want to filter by. So maybe having rack units and brand as filterable options. Again, you capitalize on what people are looking for. You're satisfying that query. You're putting products in front of people who want to buy the products. Win, win. Now, there's one more sort of information that you can go and really start to build that search demand and query map and that is using your e-commerce site search because it's an absolute goldmine of information and query and insight. I said that close in my eyes because I'm now passionate about it. Site search is crazy. But there's real, real opportunities here. And of course, I have an example that I made earlier for you. So here is a client of mine who works in the world of stationery. And you can see some of the popular queries contain size. So in this case, we've got A4, A5, we've got dotted and that sort of thing. So people are constantly searching for a type of size or a size, whether it's A4, A5. I know you guys in the US, you're like, what? Maybe it's just you as a letter if you're over there or whatever because paper sizes I don't think translate very well. But that's not the point. The point is there's queries here that people contain specific features and specification in their search queries quite frequently. So use this information. This is information that you can use and you can start to turn on these particular filters to get access to that longtail juice, right? Why the hell not? All right, cool. So now you've got those pockets of demand and identify which filters to begin to start indexing. But it's not yet that simple. Don't just jump and switch them on yet because you'll be in trouble, right? Now let's make those facets sexy. Let's do it. Let's do it. First of all, URL structures. This is really, really quite important. So avoid using underscores as spaces in your parameter variables. Instead, use hyphens, right? Because believe it or not, and we'll come to one in a minute, actually. I won't spoil this price just yet. But you have here in red option underscore free delivery. And then what I'm basically telling you to do is rather than use underscore, I don't know why I keep doing this. Like this is just the way that I scale things. But instead of using this, use this. Instead of using an underscore, use a hyphen. And the reason why is because Google, at least, and most likely the search engines, don't interpret an underscore as a space. Yeah, that's right. That's what I've got to say. So by using hyphen, then when you've got two words like free delivery, for example, Google can, I mean, Google's clever enough. But you know what I mean? If you're doing this from scratch, being a situation where you're helping search engines to understand and rank those URLs and queries effectively, all the URLs effectively, that was a really bad way of explaining a really simple thing. All right, so as I said, too long, didn't read. Google doesn't interpret underscores as spaces in URLs. That's what's really important to take away from this. So feel free to use parameters or subfolders. Whatever you use, just be consistent. So again, another example here, we've got men's shoes. Next, use the subfolder method, which I think is wonderful. I think it's probably my preference. But what I'd also recommend you have here is use some kind of... What's the word I'm looking for? Identifier for filters. So in this example that I've kind of built, you've got FTR as a filter parameter. And that just means that when you're looking in GA, when you're looking in Search Console, or doing any kind of analysis on filter URLs, you can just punch in the FTR and you know you're going to get all the information you need. It just makes it easier. So yeah, use subfolders. Use forward slashers if you want. Or use your parameter-driven ampersand question mark bits and pieces. It's up to you or up to the limitations of your text stack. But whatever you do, be consistent. All right. Now, here is the really, really important thing. And if there's one thing you listen to from this presentation, it's this. So are you ready? There's some ground rules on filter permutations. Now, trick it to explain, but once I've explained it, it's actually quite simple. But do not allow any more than one option from the same filter group to be applied because it creates more unnecessary bloat. It's a really, really important rule. So use an example here. Using the next example that we had from earlier. When someone selects a slim from, say, fit, and of course it's a filter that you want to index, a filter group you want to index, awesome, good news, green light. Index that all day long. But when someone selects a when you have a URL that combines both slim or skinny fit options, you don't want to index that because people aren't often going to be searching for slim and or skinny jeans. So it's just not going to happen. It makes a mess and it creates more URLs than you need to, right? Secondly, create an allow list of filter options that are indexable, right? So if the URL contains a filter option that's not on the allow list, it shouldn't be indexed. So it's using an example. We said earlier that fit is a really good option, slim, fit. We've said before that age is a perfect, a perfectly good example of a filterable attribute that you want to index. So that age is a thumbs up, but let's say that the card color isn't because not enough people search for red cards, right? If the URL contained both a filter option from the age and color, the whole URL should not be indexable because it contains a filter that's not on the allow list, right? And it's that simple. It's a bit tricky to kind of explain in that makes sense. Typically, it's recommended to allow a maximum of two parameters to be indexed. So again, if you had age as a filterable parameter and let's say, what else could we use? Age and occasion, for example. If age and occasion were both whitelisted and you had a third one which was whitelisted, the third one shouldn't be indexed because it's too granular. So very few people are going to be searching for, just rolling me for a second. 21st birthday card for dad in red. So the 21st birthday card for dad, cool. 21st birthday card, cool. 21st birthday card for dad in red. Slim pickings, right? So there's no point index in that third filter. I say typically because it depends on your vertical. You might be in a situation where actually the more granular queries are still worth converting. You might be in a business model where your category in your taxonomy structure isn't that great and it's most made up of filters. As a result, you might want that third option. So typically, but go away, take a look, do your own research, right? No follow all of your sort options, right? And the number of products per page option. No follow the shit out of those because Google and other search engines don't care and they create a lot of bloat, a lot of bloat. So just get rid of those. A really simple thing to get rid of. Now, do you canonical or do you no follow these URLs? Fight, let's find out. So don't remember this game. This is from a PS1 Tekken. Honestly, I lost so much of my life playing this game. It's brilliant. So canonical versus no follow is the point, not Tekken. Which one's right? Well, we're going to jump into it. Canonical really works best for if you want to preserve the equity from somewhere else, right? That's the kind of general rule of it. The dance, I mean, that's the positive because of course it allows you to recycle equity, allows you to recycle authority and links that you might have had on a page you don't want indexed to somewhere else. Great. The downside is it's not a hard and fast rule. It's not a directive. It's a suggestion. It's a mere suggestion which search engines can choose whether they want to pay attention to or not. Just like children, right? It's exactly what canonical tags are. They should listen. They probably won't. But in reality, most of the time, as long as the canonical suggestion is watertight and solid and makes sense, search engines will normally preserve it. No follow is best to use when you are like, it's more of a directive. I mean, it's a bit wishy-washy nowadays. I mean, if we'd have done this presentation maybe a couple of years ago, no follow is 100% enforceable rule. But even Google is kind of like, we'll make the decision. But no follow typically doesn't allow you to recycle authority. See, if you've got links to a page that you've no followed, you can't really pass those links and equity bits and pieces to elsewhere that might benefit from them better. I feel like a weather person. I'm doing all this with my hands. I think it's just off camera. But you get my point. So the downside is you can't recycle equity. But the upside is it's more authoritative than canonical. So make your mind up. It's for you to decide. I'm trying my best not to say the famous two words in the world of SEO. And I think I've done so well so far. All right. Lastly, tips to tackle fasted navigation for enterprise. This is a biggie because not everyone has small sites. Not everyone has huge sites. But enterprise is by far the biggest challenge because there's so many URLs to manage. There's so many products to manage, categories to manage. There's tech stacks and people and sticky stuff in the middle. That is sticky is definitely the wrong word, but roll with it. You know what I mean? So when you're looking at enterprise sites and really big sites where you're talking like millions upon millions of URLs, take a look at what parameters are frequently excluded in Google Search Console if all of them are accessible at the moment because you'll often see patterns in behavior. So an example I've got here. This is a client of mine. 679,000 URLs have been excluded from the index. And there's a really strong pattern here, which I can't show you because of client confidentiality, of course. But there was a real strong pattern of a combination of facets and filters and URL combos that are just frequently getting excluded by Google. So that can kind of give you a really solid indicator as to what Google doesn't care about. And you can rectify that. If you're not already, use the Search Console API because, of course, the actual Google Search Console of the browser is limited in terms of what you can extract. But NOAA Learner has an incredible session on just this. How to do incredible things with Google Search Console's API. So if you haven't already gone and checked that out, go and check it out after this. Promise it'll be worth it. I personally am not a developer. I can't develop for shit, to be frank. But I still am able to get down with the call kids and get into the API data because I use Search Analytics for Google Sheets, which is a really cool add-on for Google Sheets, which allows you to access the Google Search Console API without writing a single loan of code. Wonderful, right? And if you want to take your... If you want to really automate this whole presentation, take a look at similar.ai. It's predominantly a really powerful tool that's for enterprise, so massive sites, whether that's listing sites or e-commerce sites. And it's incredible in terms of how it automates what facet should be indexed, what facet combination should be and shouldn't be. It automates the accessibility of whether... Look, I'm not going to do a sales pitch. I'm not affiliated with these guys. They're a great team. And the stuff that they do is incredible. Go and take a look if you're serious about automating your enterprise SEO facet navigation. All right, lastly, I have a newsletter. See if you've enjoyed this presentation. I do a newsletter where in every newsletter we do a walkthrough tutorial for 15 minutes talking about something in the world of e-commerce called Let's Talk Shop. So deep dives, tutorials, how-tos. It's many, of course, around the world of e-commerce. So go and subscribe to that if that sounds like something you'd like to take a look at. And of course, it's completely free, lucarthi.com forward slash L-T-S. And I also have a really comprehensive e-commerce course as well where I talk through everything e-commerce SEO from initial setups to choosing CMSs to, of course, faceted navigation site search. You name it, it's probably in that course. So go and check that out if you're interested in really advancing e-commerce SEO for you, your clients, or whoever. All right? So links and stuff about the things we've spoken about. So you've got a place, so I'll leave that there so you can screenshot that for a minute. And I promised you that Paul Sr. and Paul Jr. would be best mates by the end of this. And look at that. Best buddies all over again. It's like American Chopper finale never happened. Right? Still sad about it. And like I said before, guess what it's all about? Balance. Fucking love this image is brilliant. All right. I'm been Luke Carthy. This isn't a performance as a presentation, but I am Luke Carthy. You can reach me here at Twitter, LinkedIn, my website and other stuff. Thank you very much for tuning in. And I hope you had something useful to take away from this presentation. I'm going to go and practice. I'm all going to free my impersonation a little bit more and enjoy this really powerful white background. Take care.