Why remove /product and /product-category from your WooCommerce urls?

If you use WordPress and WooCommerce for selling your online products you probably are always looking for better SEO results! Better SEO results will most likely result in more traffic and higher sales numbers.

WooCommerce is one the most widely used e-commerce plugins. Over 30% of all e-commerce sites run on WooCommerce. Its fancy, easy to use and easy to extend with all kinds of extensions and modules.

So you already did all your SEO magic?

You probably know that you should create unique SEO title and descriptions. And you also know that the internal link structure is as important as your incoming links. And probably you also tried Google Ads, offering your XML-sitemap to the Google Search Console and much other important SEO stuff.

But then you realize that the creating the perfect url structure, isn’t possible with WooCommerce. No worries. You’re just a few steps away from the ultimate SEO upgrade that is even possible for WooCommerce. We will make it happen!

What is the ultimate SEO permalink structure?

There are two very popular and ultimate possibilities for the ultimate SEO permalink structure in all webshops/ websites:

domain.com / product (option 1)
domain.com/ category / sub-category / product (option 2)

domain.com/audiofanatic-128gb (option 1)
domain.com/electronics/mp3-player/audiofanatic-128gb (option 2)

Search engines would love it! Why? Because all products can be reached within 3 clicks. You even tell the ‘search engine’ that your product is url-related to lower category and sub-category with option 2. The only hick-up is that the basic WooCommerce installation doesn’t allow you to create this structure.

The basic WooCommerce installation will constantly flip and switch between /product-category and /product in your url structure. So search engines will never know that your product is url-related to the lower category or sub-category.

You need to tell the search engine that the ‘AudioFanatic-2gb’ is a MP3 player, because it is in the category ‘mp3-player’ and ‘electronics’. This way your linkjuice can’t get any better!

Always consider if you would add the word ‘mp3-player’ to all levels because search engines might record this as ‘spam’.

What does Google say?

The Google product taxonomy lists all possible values for the ‘google product category’ attribute. The taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families. At the highest level, it is arranged into verticals, which refer to broad categories of products. For example, Electronics is a vertical.

The subcategories of these verticals are more specific. Each layer breaks the vertical into a smaller product family. So the string for a category like MP3 Players would look like this: Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players.

Remove "/product" and "/product-category" now...

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WooCommerce shops using Perfect SEO Url

Since we started with the development of the Perfect SEO Url plugin in 2014, many of our clients are hooked. The plugin works out of the box. These are some of our clients that are using or have been using this WooCommerce plugin. You can also check out our demo shop.