How to optimize filtered navigation for online store
What can filters do for an online store
Filters allow you to create a new landing page with your own URL. Its content corresponds to the user's request as much as possible. Well-optimized and open filter pages for indexing are an additional source of high-quality targeted traffic.
The presence of filter landing pages affects the behavioral factors of website visitors. A potential client goes to the page from the search results by his request, finds the desired product or group of products; this has a minimized bounce rate in this case. Let's dive deeper into the main advantages of using filter pages in SEO promotion.
Increased website visibility
How does it work? Imagine that two users are choosing a bike:
User А — with 26mm wheel size.
User В — with hydraulic brakes.
User A enters the high-frequency query "buy a bike", while user B enters the mid-frequency query "buy a bike with hydraulic brakes".
If the website does not have the appropriate subcategories and the filter pages are not optimized, both queries will most likely show the results of the entire "Bicycles" category. And users must manually apply filters to find the right product on the page.

If user A makes his request "buy a bicycle" more specific, like "buy a bicycle with 26mm wheel size", he will probably get to the filter landing page, where he will see the specific result he searched for.
High-quality website optimization for queries with low frequency is an opportunity to win a share of high ranking in a competitive niche. A low-frequency query gives less traffic than a high-frequency one. But if you use a large coverage of mid-frequency and low-frequency queries when setting up the filter pages, this can give a tangible positive effect on the website visibility in the search results.
Increase in quality organic traffic
An optimized filter page attracts a flow of potential customers to the website, and it has more conversion traffic.
Who should use the filter page setup
How to optimize filter pages on a website
Filter page optimization for search robots
The first step is to determine which filter pages will be most demanded. Find out how users search for products of the selected niche in the search engine. Targeted search queries can be found in the semantic core or assembled manually using analytics tools.
To get as many ideas for the filter pages as possible, use the "Site Search" in Google Analytics: go to Behavior section -> Site Search -> Search Pages. Here you can see the statistics of requests from the internal search of the online store: what request the user searched for and how many times.
Another set of filters that should be added to optimization is price-related filters. As practice shows, most buyers are looking for "inexpensive", "budget", "cheap" products. This makes the use of commercial queries the most effective in optimization.
Select the filter pages you want to optimize. Before setting up pages that use one filter or the intersection of two different thematic blocks, make a list of combinations just like in the scheme below:
- category + filter parameter 1;
- category + filter parameter 1 + filter parameter 2, etc.
In order to optimize each filter page using relevant keywords, we will distribute the selected mid- and low-frequency queries into clusters. You can do this using the Clustering tool in Serpstat. Please, pay attention to which clusters are already used in the categories of the website and which are not. Those that are not used are moved to the filter.
It's important that the link is search engine friendly when optimizing filter pages. This makes it easier for a search engine to recognize and rank it higher in the search results. Each human-friendly URL should be generated in the following way:
Site Name / Categories / filters
http://myshop.com/bikes/2019/
For example, the user sets the second criterion besides the year of manufacture: the bike suspension. Despite the fact that the "Year" filter was set before the "Suspension" filter, crossed filters take place in the URL according to the sequence in the filter column:
http://myshop.com/bikes/hardtail/2019/

Filter optimization at this stage is similar to the SEO setting of any other landing page. You must include content with relevant keys in the meta tags into the page content: Title, Description, title <h1>.
The filter page should contain the rel = "canonical" attribute, referenced to itself, and not to the category page.
You should allow the robot to index useful pages. Add filter pages to sitemap.xml.
Conclusion
Filter landing pages can be a source of high-quality conversion traffic by attracting potential buyers to the online store.
This article is a part of Serpstat's Checklist tool

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