How to Build and Ensure the Correctness of the Link Structure of an E-commerce Website?

I. Introduction

Are you sure that the structure of your e-commerce website isn’t causing you to lose customers? Surprisingly, users can decide whether they like your website in just about 50 milliseconds, which means deciding whether to stay or leave. Although the saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” e-commerce websites are quickly judged, and this judgment affects credibility. Obviously, websites are subject to strict judgment. For visitors, a wealth of high-quality options will surely improve their evaluation of the website, while a poor website structure will lower it. In terms of conversion rate optimization, 77% of organizations consider poor website user experience to be a weakness of their customers, so you may be troubled by how to organize product pages. Because a well-designed website structure and optimized product pages are the keys to enriching the website user experience and retaining website visitors.

II. The Importance of E-commerce Website Structure for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The development structure of your fashion e-commerce website depends on how you organize website navigation, user flow, user experience, and how to help customers achieve conversions and goals based on business needs. That is to say, the best fashion website structure includes elements such as a simple navigation bar and internal links that set clear goals for website visitors. The rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 clicks to get from the homepage to a product. Let’s take a look at the difference between the flat architecture and the deep architecture in the figure below.

CRO Site Map for Fashion E-commerce: On the left is the flat architecture, including the homepage, 8 category pages, and each category page has 6 product pages. On the right is the deep architecture, including the homepage, 4 category pages, then two layers of subcategory pages, and each subcategory has only one or two product pages. In the above architectures, the flat architecture can be used as our rule of thumb for determining the ideal e-commerce website structure. Why? Because the flat architecture allows users to navigate seamlessly without the need for 6 – 7 clicks. Users can more easily and quickly find the relevant information of specific products and avoid the troubles brought by a poor user experience.

From the SEO perspective, because the page ranking dilution of the flat architecture is low, pages can gain more ranking weight from each other. The more clicks it takes for users to access lower-level pages, the more the link weight will be filtered, which means the remaining weight of the deep pages is less, and it is more difficult for Google crawlers to index. Key points: Overall, the ideal structure setting should ensure that: all products are only 2 clicks away from the homepage; every page of the website should be easy to crawl and navigate; customers must be able to easily and quickly find the exact information they are searching for.

III. Techniques for an Effective E-commerce Website Structure

Emphasize the Hierarchical Structure of Website Design

The actual management of the website has a huge impact on the conversion rate, website traffic, and product sales. A fashion website design that involves the proper organization of all category and subcategory pages is required. A positive top-down strategy must be followed during the website design and development process. As mentioned above, for the 3-click method, the following structure can be adopted:

This method is also beneficial for SEO, helping Google index your web pages more effectively and further assisting website visitors in finding the products they are looking for. It should be noted that the better the product pages are designed and optimized, the more likely they are to be displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPs), thus attracting more organic traffic from the search results.

Consider the Hierarchical Structure When Planning the URL Structure

After perfectly implementing the hierarchical structure, start planning the URL structure accordingly. Keep it simple. For example, the URL of a category page could look like this:

Similarly, the subcategory page should look like this:

For greater clarity, let’s take a look at an example of a well-known fashion brand, KiKi Love:

They use “Collections” as the category and “dresses” as the subcategory for easy navigation.

Effective and Strong Internal Links

A strong link architecture in an e-commerce store helps improve Google’s overall indexing effect and can also enhance the ranking of individual content pages. To enhance in-site visibility, a strong internal link architecture is a prerequisite, which can accelerate seamless navigation from one page to another. In addition, the strong connection between different pages of the website ensures that search engine crawlers effectively index all pages, thereby improving the website’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Link category and subcategory pages to each other and ensure there are no broken links in between to improve the effect.

Explanatory Homepage with a Strong Title

Setting up a menu on the homepage is crucial as it can effectively link to all the categories and subcategories of the website. The main reason for having a strong title and a detailed homepage is to provide concise navigation for new website visitors. Visitors should not be reliant on the back button to navigate to the previous menu. Let’s see how Pirouzi Official designs its homepage structure to enhance user navigation.

The menu lists categories such as “Men”, “Women” and “Footwear”, and when you hover your mouse over each category, you can see the subcategories as shown in the figure above.

Utilize Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is very useful because website developers can easily trace the steps of visitors from the homepage to a specific page or website location. For example, the well-known e-commerce platform Myntra is like this:

Breadcrumb navigation plays an important role in reflecting the e-commerce website structure and supervising search engine bots when indexing website content. Therefore, it helps determine the website’s SEO activities to achieve better online visibility and search engine rankings. In addition, it also helps enhance the internal link structure, enabling visitors to navigate more reliably in the e-commerce website.

IV. The Benefits of a Coherent E-commerce Website Structure

Increased Traffic

Since the website structure and SEO complement each other, this further helps the website gain a large amount of organic traffic. There are various related advantages to ranking first in the search engine results pages (SERPs), such as an increase in clicks. Therefore, optimized title tags and descriptions are contributing factors to the increase in click-through rate and high-quality traffic.

Increased Sales

As is known to all, sales are the very reason why anyone wants to optimize a website. Therefore, by having the correct website structure and a website optimized with the right SEO strategy, you can effectively guide website visitors to convert, and sales will continue to rise.

Enhanced Website Usability and Customer Satisfaction

You may have dreamed of making it easier and more enjoyable for customers to navigate your website and reach the points you want them to reach – an effective website structure is the answer to this dream. SEO compatibility jointly encourages users and search engines to browse your website easily.

V. Conclusion

Once you master all these techniques and apply them to your e-commerce website to build an effective structure, a good, high-ranking, and robust website can undoubtedly improve your conversion rate and product sales. The best website structure you can create for your e-commerce store is actually simpler than you think. For website visitors, there is nothing more attractive and satisfying than a simple and neat design with fewer pages. As long as visitors can immediately find what they are looking for, you will ultimately win the toughest battle in online business.