3 valuable lessons about internal linking from a furniture and home decor giant - Wayfair πππ
I analyzed Wayfair and found out the exact things they do to strengthen their internal linking for the category pages and be so successful with their SEO.
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First things first
Generally, most search traffic in an online store is attracted by product categories. Thatβs why itβs so so so important to build specific product categories and optimize them.
Specific categories help you rank for long-tail transactional keywords.
Thatβs exactly what Wayfair is doing. According to ahrefs, the most popular pages that attract organic traffic are all categories.
So how does Wayfair use Internal linking for its category pages?
1. Breadcrumbs
Some might consider breadcrumbs to be old and boring. But in reality, they help a lot.
Breadcrumbs help you find your way in an online store. And they definitely help to interlink high-level categories with more specific ones:
There are 4 levels of categories on the screenshot. They go from a broader one to the most specific. If you multiply the number of such links by the number of categories Wayfair has, the amount of generated internal links is enormous.
They also use Breadcrumbs structured data:
Drilldown category links
Drilldown links help to get from a more general type of information to more specific by following a path.
Hereβs how it looks like on Wayfair:
Level 1: A general category links to more specific ones:
Level 2: These more specific categories link even deeper.
Note too that thereβs a link back to a higher level category at the top.
All these links donβt only help SEO, they make the user experience seamless too which is the best combo.
Related searches links
This is one of my favourite methods of internal linking: add related searches to the category page in a form of links that will point to other categories. This is how it looks on the Wayfair website:
These related searches links lead to the most specific pages, e.g. Grey cribs, so they donβt interfere with the drill-down links at the top of the category page, they complement them.
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If you're moving from hard-coded @googleanalytics code to Google Tag Manager, here are 3 steps that you need to make to ensure no data is lost in the transition.
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Step 1:
Create a Google Tag Manager Container and install it on your website.
Step 2: Use @screamingfrog to confirm that all the pages have the GTM snippet code.
π Go to Configuration > Custom > Search (screenshot 1)
π Configure the rule to find the GTM code you need in the page HTML (screenshot 2)
#Google ranks pages, not websites. In order to get your page indexed, it should have a separate URL that Google can discover and follow. Here are the main tips to make this happen:
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- Always use an HREF attribute so that Google can easily discover and follow a link
- Ideally, use HTML links. JS links are ok as long as they use an HREF attribute
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- Google wonβt follow and index URLs with fragments (containing #, e.g. store.com/catalog#gifts) as they are not created to lead to a new document/page. So if you want a fragmented URL to be indexed as a separate page, donβt use fragments, e.g. store.com/catalog/gifts
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