SEO Shop Up: The Choice Is Hard

Welcome to the first SEO Shop Up newsletter. I’m very excited and happy to see you here. In this post, you’ll get an answer to a very important question: Should You Have Separate URLs for Product Variations?

Before getting to today’s eCommerce SEO tip, I wanted to tell you a quick story. 

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I once came across a really nice notebook. It was sold in different colours. Do you know these mental pains when you need to make a choice? Oh, that was hard. That’s why instead of making the choice, I decided to buy all 5 colours that were available. 

Great, right? Well, not exactly. While I really loved the notebook, my excitement somehow disappeared when I got 5 of them in different colours. In the end, I used only one of the notebooks and the rest were collecting dust until I gifted them to my friends. 

I’m telling you this story not to show you that I can’t make a choice. I’m telling it because it illustrates pretty well how the value of a good thing diminishes for the user with each copy of this thing. 

The same happens when you have a product with different variations hanging out on different URLs in your online store. In this case, the user is Google and each product variation having its separate URL makes it confused and diminishes the overall value of each of the product pages.

Here are examples: 

The solution is creating separate URLs for product options only if both of these conditions are met:

• There’s a demand for that = people search for specific product colour, size or other variation 
• You have resources to support unique content on each URL. Because you will need unique content.

Here’s a scheme that will help you make the right decision when it comes to deciding whether you need your product variation on a separate URL:

Now, Google evaluates your website based on all pages which are allowed to be indexed. And trust me, you don’t want to have a huge part of your website consisting of almost identical content.

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Let’s summarize:
Create separate URLs for product options only if there is a demand for this product option and you can support unique variations of the product.

Kristina Azarenko

I cook digital marketing dishes. Take 3 tablespoons of on-page SEO, add 2 pinches of backlinks and sprinkle it all with paid advertising. Season to taste with actionable data from Analytics and bake until golden brown. Serve hot.