What Is Faceted Navigation & How Does It Impact SEO?

While shopping online, have you ever noticed that the website has a smart filter system that lets you filter through products? It is a lifesaver when you need to narrow down your desired products based on various facets like brand, price, color, size, and others. Rather than scrolling down endlessly, you can find what you need, depending on your necessities. The filtering results also update in real-time, so you get the latest product according to what you need.

This filtering system is faceted navigation, saving your time and effort, especially when you are shopping online. Sounds interesting, right? So, let’s go deep into it and explore how faceted navigation impacts SEO.

The first question is, “What is faceted navigation?” You already have a rough idea of faceted navigation from the introduction section. In simple terms, faceted navigation is a user-friendly navigation feature that helps your visitor narrow their preferred product list rather than scrolling through a long list of items. The filtering is based on several variables called “facets,” like product price, category, brand, etc. This feature allows visitors to find what they want quickly.

Let’s look at faceted navigation examples to make it easier to understand. Suppose you are looking for a monitor, and your budget is 20 - 30 thousand. If you go to any online shop, there will be hundreds of monitor options, ranging from 10 thousand to more than 100 thousand. Now, scrolling through hundreds of items is a hassle. If there is an option where you can filter the monitors based on their price range, you can narrow the options from hundreds to 5-6. It will make the selection process easier and save you time. And, this filtering option that makes your shopping easier is faceted navigation.

The fundamental functionality of faceted navigation allows the users to filter the search results based on multiple facets. It is used to let the user narrow down a large amount of options in a structured manner. Here is a step-by-step breakdown of how faceted navigation works.

1. Data Categorization

The products or items on the website are tagged using different and specific attributes or metadata. These attributes can contain different information about the item, like brand, color, prize, or publication date. These tags are the foundations of the facets.

2. Displaying the Facets

The website shows a set of filtering options as the visitor starts browsing or searching for anything. The options are based on the available facets for that particular set of items. For example, if you are looking for processors, you might see the price, brand, generation, core count, and other related filtering options.

3. User Selections

The visitors can select one or multiple filtering options in the offered facets. Continuing from the previous example, the visitor can select Ryzen, 5 series, and APU. It will show them the Ryzen 5 processors with built-in APUs like Ryzen 5 5600G. It helps the users to specify their search using multiple factors to get an accurate and minimal result.

4. Dynamic Updates

As the visitor applies the filtering options, the results automatically update in real-time without reloading the whole web page. It has a great visual impact as the user can see the filter option working, and it helps them refine or filter more specifically.

5. Handling Dependencies

Sometimes, the filtering option depends on each other, and if one changes, the other may also change. It’s getting too complicated, so let’s look at an example for better understanding. Suppose you are looking for a PC case. Now, depending on the brand, the case may or may not have a cooling fan. The color and size can also change depending on it. In these cases, the system automatically adapts to the changes and shows relevant filtering options to the visitors after the initial selection.

6. Managing Facet Hierarchies

Some facets have hierarchies in the main category, like Electronics, and in the sub-category, they may have PC, Laptop, PC parts, or PC accessories. It lets the visitors go to a deeper section of the product through the item category structure.

So, faceted navigation is a cool feature, but do you actually need this feature? You may also ask, “What type of websites are suited to use faceted navigation?”

To answer these questions, we have made a list of website types with examples that will give you a clear idea of what kind of websites use faceted navigation and whether you need it or not.

1. E-Commerce Websites like Amazon or eBay
2. Search Engines like Google or Bing
3. Real Estate Websites like Realtor
4. Job Portals like LinkedIn or Glassdoor
5. Travel Agencies or Booking Websites like  Booking.com or Airbnb
6. Library and Academic Websites like Google Scholar or JSTOR
7. News Websites like BBC or CNN
8. Online Marketplaces like Alibaba
9. Streaming Platforms like Netflix or Hulu
10. Fashion and Lifestyle Websites like Zalando or ASOS

Faceted navigation offers tons of benefits that will improve your website's overall user experience and make item discovery way easier. Here are some of the most impactful benefits of faceted navigation:

1.  Improved User Experience

You can already guess that the highest impact of faceted navigation is on the user experience of your website. Utilizing this feature, the users can quickly filter their desired product and get what they want. It is way more convenient than scrolling through an endless list of unwanted or irrelevant products.

2. Increased Search Precision

Faceted navigation delivers a better and tailored search result by allowing the visitors to filter the items based on multiple values in a specific category. As we said earlier, they can use different variables, like brand, model, price, and other options, to get the exact items they need.

3. Faster Decision Making

Most faceted navigation system updates the search results in real time as the user inputs the filters. It saves a lot of time, where you do not need to go through a vast amount of items you don’t really need. Ultimately, it speeds up the decision-making process, especially in e-commerce or job websites where the amount of data set is enormous.

4. Enhanced Conversion Rate for E-Commerce Websites

Conversion rate indicates how many visitors are finally purchasing on your website. It is a significant value because you get no benefits if the visitor doesn’t buy anything. Without faceted navigation, the visitors will get bored and tired of scrolling through all the product listings and leave before making a purchase. From this perspective, faceted navigation also impacts your conversion rate, increasing revenue and profit.

5. Flexibility for Different User Requirements

Visitors come in various categories; they may be price-sensitive, loyal to a brand, or maybe they are interested in a specific feature in a product category. No matter what they need, using faceted navigation will allow them to filter no matter what category of visitors they fall in.

6. Scalability

This item-filtering system is an ideal solution to handle large scale data with high complexity. As you can manage the datasets based on multiple variables, the job becomes easier and more sorted. Especially for large e-commerce or academic libraries, this is an optimal solution.

7. Enhanced SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also enhanced using the faceted navigation system. The faceted navigation can create SEO-friendly URLs as the filters are applied. It allows search engines to index filtered content or product pages. It greatly increases visibility and website traffic, helping with long tail keyword ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

8. Product or Item Discovery

It is a technique that allows visitors to explore new products or content they didn't know about initially. If you have facets like “Latest Blogs” or “Discount Product.” Using this, the visitors can stumble upon unique or new products they didn’t know about and make a purchase. Suppose you are looking for an HP monitor, and you use the Discount facet out of curiosity. There, you find a better ASUS monitor that is currently on a discount and end up buying the ASUS monitor.

There are tons of advantages of faceted navigation, but it can also cause some complex issues regarding the SEO of your website. You must be careful about these issues and address them to keep your presence strong and dominating on the SERP. It happenes when you ignore the faceted navigation best practices.

• Duplicate Content: Using multiple filters, the website may generate URLs with the same or similar content on the web page, confusing the search engine and affecting the search rankings.
• Crawl Budget Wastage: Search engines like Google have a “crawl budget,” indicating the number of pages of a website that will be crawled and indexed. Since faceted navigation generates similar web pages with slightly different content based on the filters, you may run out of the crawl budget of the search engine. As a result, the search engine may index identical or less important pages, leaving behind important ones.
• Index Bloat: Even if all the combinations of the search filters are crawled, the index of the search engine can become bloated with less important web pages. It will reduce the quality of your indexed pages as they contain similar items or products, diluting the relevance and authority of your website.
• Thin or Low-Quality Pages: Some filter combinations may generate web pages with very few results or content that are not relevant. In that case, there are chances that the search engine will consider these pages with “Thin” content. Search engines normally prefer web pages with depth and substance, which these pages lack. It affects the SEO performance of the entire website.
• Canonicalization: As we mentioned earlier, faceted navigation can generate URLs with similar or the same web pages with different filter combinations. The search engine may consider these pages separate if you don’t use proper canonical tags. It will fragment the overall ranking potential of the website.
• Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Similar web pages generated by faceted navigation may sometimes have the same or similar title tags and meta descriptions. It will confuse the search engines, reducing the importance and visibility of important web pages. It can also have a negative effect on the CTR if the optimization is not up to the mark.

Now you know what issues you may face using faceted navigation. But how would you know that the issues exist on your website? Or how can you identify which issue you are facing?

To answer these questions, here are some of the most significant issues and how to find them.

Audit URLs for Dacet Combination

Gather the URLs that are generated by faceted navigation using tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or DeepCrawl. Your target will be to find long and complex URLs with multiple parameters and identify if the contents on these pages are the same or similar. You can also use a filter in the crawling tool you use to identify URLs with specific parameters to make the task easier.

Analyze Crawl Budget

Use crawl analytic software like Screaming Frog’s “Crawl Stats” or Google Search Console to check how much of your crawl budget is spent on the faceted navigation generated URLs. Remember to reduce the crawling of less important URLs and prioritize more important pages for crawling.

Look for Duplicate Content

You can utilize software like Siteliner, Copyscape, or the duplicate content checker offered by Screaming Frog to identify faceted navigation generated web pages with similar content. Identify these URLs and parameters to get a list of web pages with duplicate content.

Inspect Canonical Tags

Since the problems are with facet-generated web pages, you can inspect them manually or use Screaming Frog across them. You need to make sure that the web pages with similar or the same content are using proper canonical tags that point to the main version of the page.

Analyze Sitemap and Robots.txt

Explore the XML sitemap of your website and ensure that only the important web pages are included in it. Properly use Robots.txt to guide the search engine crawler through only the important web pages and block any irrelevant URLs.

Find Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Use Screaming Frog or anything similar to the tool to crawl through your website and look for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. You have to ensure that the pages are different with unique content.

URL Parameter Handling in Google Search Console

Log into Google Search Console and go to URL Parameters. You can find the option right under Legacy Tools. Here, you must define how Google treats the URL parameters while crawling your website.

The issues look really serious, and you may wonder, “How can I solve these problems?” Don’t worry; we have prepared a list of actions you can take to solve such SEO issues caused by using faceted navigation.

1. Use Canonical Tags Properly.
2. Use noindex and follow tags on pages that do not need indexing.
3. Prevent unnecessary URLs, parameters, or facet combinations from being crawled by properly utilizing the Robots.txt file.
4. Configure Google Search Console to specify how URL parameters will be handled. You need to indicate which ones change content and which are not necessary to crawl.
5. Sitemap optimization is another vital task to do to get rid of faceted navigation related issues where you need to ensure that only the valuable, content rich, and unique web pages are included.

Overall, the best way to do faceted navigation is to combine it with a technical SEO process.

The bottom line is faceted navigation is a powerful feature that greatly impacts the user experience. Especially if you own a website with a large set of data, like e-commerce or real estate, this feature can be a lifesaver. 

So, are you planning on using faceted navigation on your website? Then, you need an experienced SEO team; otherwise, your online presence will be in danger. To save you from all these issues, you can rely on VISER X, the ultimate SEO agency with almost a decade of experience. Contact us if you need any help, advice, or service regarding SEO.

Which SEO aspect is connected to faceted navigation?

Technical SEO is connected to the faceted navigation. The problems that arise from this filtering process, like crawling issues or duplicate content, and the solutions are all part of technical SEO.

Which tools are most useful to find out faceted navigation related issues?

You can identify almost all the issues in your website caused by faceted navigation using 2 major tools, Screaming Frog and Google Search Console. You can always use any other similar tool you are comfortable with, but in general, these two should be enough.

What is the biggest impact of faceted navigation on a website?

The biggest impact of faceted navigation is on the user experience. This one feature can significantly increase user satisfaction, especially if you have a large dataset of items and visitors have to search through them. It will also increase your conversion rate as the visitors can get anything they want fast and easily.