Maintaining SEO with Ecommerce Search Refinement

[BrandLabs]

Hey Everyone,

i have an interesting scenario I'd appreciate some feedback on.  I'm working on restructuring a client site for a store design, and he had previously built a bunch of landing pages mostly for SEO value- some of them aren't even accessible from the main nav and contain a lot of long-tail type targets. These pages are generating organic traffic but the whole thing is pretty not user-friendly because it's cumbersome to drill down into specific categories (that many of the landing pages fulfill) without going through 3 or 4 pages to get there. For example, if I want to buy orange shoes, i can see specific kinds of orange shoes, but not ALL the orange shoes, even though there is an SEO page for orange shoes that is otherwise inaccessible from the main navigation.

If that wasn't too confusing, essentially the usability solution to this is implementing some search refinement so that the specific sub categories can be drilled into easily with less steps.

My issue is that I'm hesitant to implement this even though I know it would be an overall benefit to the site, because the existence of these SEO pages and being wary of destroying the organic traffic they're already receiving.

My plan was to see to it that the specific category pages are built with the necessary keywords and content to attract those organic visits, but I'm still nervous it might not be enough.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this circumstance, but also just maximizing SEO efforts on a site with search refinement and how to minimize loss. From a usability standpoint, search refinement is great, but how do you counter the significant SEO risks that come with it?

Thanks for your help!

[kadesmith]

I'm a little confused as to what you are afraid of losing?  From your description it sounds like you are saying you are going to make the pages that are receiving organic traffic more easily accessible from your main navigation?

However, I'm also thinking that you are saying you are considering replacing the landing pages with sub-content pages that can be drilled down in to?

Please help me understand a little more clearly.

[BrandLabs]

I don't think I explained it very well, but yes, the second thing you said.  In implementing the search refinement I would be replacing the landing pages with sub-content pages that can be drilled into and my concern is that I will lose the working SEO on those pages. Even though they aren't very user friendly, they're generating some long-tail traffic.

This restructuring is happening in conjunction with a store redesign so it's not as if I'm just implementing it for the heck of it. This is step 1 in a large project, and I don't think tightening up the category structures will considerably improve user experience without search refinement- but in implementing search refinement I'm trying not to demolish the SEO too.

Hope that makes sense- thanks for helping.

[BrandLabs]

So part of it is that I'm a little wary of deleting those pages, but also that the search-refinement won't be SEO friendly either.

[kadesmith]

Makes much more sense now.

I went through something very similar about 9 months ago.  What we did is take the content from the landing pages and placed it on the sub-content pages with products right on that page.  We then created a 301 redirect from the old page to the new.  We then went and found all sites on the internet linking to the old pages and updated them if possible to the new URL.

We did see a little bit of a dance on the keywords, but over time we have actually climbed higher in the rankings for those organic terms we were afraid of losing.  Best part was that this has increased conversions because customers get to the products much faster and the overall experience is better for the customer.

[BrandLabs]

That's great- I was thinking of trying something similar.  One follow up though, were the sub content pages actually "pages" or were they accessible only through refinement.

For example, if we're talking about "Orange Shoes" - did you actually have a page for Orange Shoes, or is it accessible just by refining Orange shoes from the shoes category?

[kadesmith]

Actual pages reached through refinement.