Pagination & SEO for Ecommerce

A popular UX design pattern utilised by many eCommerce sites is Pagination. It arranges your content into pages, which users can navigate through links found on the bottom part of most web designs.

Understanding the concept of Pagination and optimising it can significantly boost a site's internal linking and UX. That makes it a well-known design pattern for eCommerce.

In this article, we have put together various tips and advice from Red Search's SEO specialists in Sydney. We dive into the advantages, disadvantages and best SEO practices around implementing pagination for your website.

Without further ado, let's dive into it!

Advantages of Using Pagination

Knowing how to optimise Pagination and where to best use it will help you leverage its benefits for your eCommerce site. The following are some of the advantages of using Pagination in eCommerce:

Increased Pageviews

Since you're dividing your content into several pages, consumers need to comb through each page throughout their buying journey. As a result, pageviews per visit significantly increases with Pagination.

Maximise Ad Revenue

If you're earning from ad revenue, optimising Pagination for ad placement will further maximise your resources. Once a customer scrolls past a digital ad with infinite scrolling, you already lost your one chance of monetising that content.

But with Pagination, you have multiple opportunities to have your users engage with adverts. Having them navigate through pages to navigate through your content means they'll get a second or third choice whether or not they'll want to check ad content.

Makes Long-Form Content More Engaging to Read

We all knew how massive chunks of text and infinitely long reads bore users right off the bat. The slower your side scroll bar moves when reading through content, the less likely you'll convert your readers.

With Pagination, you can effectively break down your content into separate pages, making it more appealing to your consumers. Besides, you can also present strong points and best-selling products on every page, making the shopping journey much more enjoyable.

Skip to the Content that Users Want

One way of optimising Pagination is to separate your content according to its subheadings. By doing so, users can quickly navigate to their desired subtopic by clicking on your paginated headings.

Disadvantages of using Pagination in Ecommerce

Poor execution and optimisation of Pagination can result in minor to severe problems, especially for eCommerce sites.

Most brands rely on UX and an effective web design strategy to drive sales. Hence, failing to deal with pagination issues can lead to lost revenue and potential leads.

Orphaned Pages

Without keeping an eye on your internal link structure, you might miss a few product pages that don't have internal links. In other words, improper Pagination may produce a few orphaned pages that won't get any traffic.

Unusually Deep Site Hierarchy

While you can optimise your site to have as much balanced hierarchy as possible, leaving a few points unchecked can result in deep site structures that are completely unnecessary.

Moreover, adding too many pages will further decrease your link juice as more paginated sequences will share with your limited crawl budget.

Common Problems When Using Pagination

Enormous Amounts of Indexable URLs

Having tons of paginated content will significantly broaden your ranking potential. While that sounds great, it's grim, even for competitive eCommerce sites.

Too many indexable URLs will dilute your site's link equity, thereby reducing your chances to rank against equally competitive brands.

Crawlability Issues

If you go haywire on Pagination, Google won't provide enough crawl budget to index all your internal links. In other words, pagination size harms crawlability, so focus on building the right number of URLs to prevent compromising your crawl budget.

Duplicate Content

When paginating product pages or long-form content, you'll most likely have pages with nearly similar or duplicated content. When that happens, Googlebot could have trouble determining which page it should index in SERPs.

Best Practices for SEO

Here are a few Pagination best practices you can streamline on your SEO strategy. Many of these practices will discuss page series, a set of parameters you can add to URLs whenever a reader engages with specific pages.

To better grasp this concept, say you're an eCommerce Jeweller site that sells rings and other jewellery. When users browse on your first product page and want to shop for more, they would navigate your second page.

By doing so, your page URL should change from:

• www.websitename.com/jewelleries/

To:

• www.websitename.com/jewelleries/page-2/

The added string is a parameter of the second page's URL. Without proper optimisation, these parameters could cause common issues that can impact your overall digital marketing strategy.

Canonicalisation and' View All' Page for Page Series

Using Pagination as your primary UX design pattern, Google recommends including a View All page that displays all products in a particular category. Across your paginated and view all pages, you can also introduce a rel= "canonical" tag to reinforce your internal linking structure even better.

• rel="canonical" href="https://www.websitename.com/jewelleries/view-all"

Google interprets this such that each page in your Pagination is a part of a page series. Hence, Google SERPs will display your View All page on relevant search queries. However, this isn't ideal for websites with larger product categories.

Additionally, you can use canonical tags to solve pagination issues such as duplicate content, orphaned pages, and passing link value and authority. By using rel= "canonical" tags on product or category pages, you are signalling Google that you want your original page to get indexed and rank on SERPs rather than their page series or paginated subheads.

Keep in mind that you can use canonical tags differently depending on your site structure. For eCommerce sites, your canonical tags need to point on the first page of a page series to avoid duplicate content errors for a similar page or those that are exactly the same.

Eliminate Unnecessary Pages from Google Index

If you can't find any benefits from indexing a specific page, you can remove it from the Google index. The same applies to eCommerce sites with massive product categories, as it could only dilute your ranking power.

The best practice of doing so is by implementing a "noindex, follow" tag for each page, excluding the pages you need to rank.

• meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

We recommend including the follow tag on the first pages in your categories so that they benefit from link authority that passes across the indexed pages and back to the initial page.

Use "Next" and "Previous" Link Elements for Paginated Page Series

Aside from canonicalisation, you can also streamline HTML link elements such as rel=" next" and rel=" prev" to signal search crawlers that each consecutive page is related to one another.

By doing so, you're eliminating the need for a View All page, which has a slight impact on page speed and UX, especially for huge category pages.

For an in-depth discussion on how we can help your website, find out more about Red Search and our SEO services here.

Jennifer Lee is a Content Strategist based in Sydney, Australia. She has over 5 years experience in creating engaging content for the home improvement, sustainability and eco-friendly sector.