Product or Shop in URL

[MasonBaker]

What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website.

websitename.com/product/keyword

OR

websitename.com/shop/keyword

[LesleyPaone]

How many products are you going to have? Depending on your url structure, you might think about using the word buy instead of product or shop, so your urls could be buy/fancy-health-product.

[David-Kley]

I think it comes down to a few things:

1. How many products are you going to offer?
2. How do people search for this product or service?

Personally, I like the "websitename.com/shop/keyword" format because it flows better. This is the same type of URL structure we use on a client that just joined. This also allows us to separate the normal site content from the store, as you can see from the top links. These do not include "shop" in the URL structure.

http://www.grandsierragloves.com/shop/mens.html

[Kingof5]

You're getting too bogged down in things that will make no difference to your customer.

[MasonBaker]

Hi Lesley, I am targeting above 50 products.

I am using woo-eCommerce in wordpress, It provide default option for product and Shop. (So i need to select out of 2)

I don't know If we can change the url to 'buy'

[alecfwilson]

For SEO purposes, either structure will work so long as it's clear where in the site navigation the page is, since it will just be making it easier for the site to be crawled. For optimizing for sales, the other commenters are right in that you are getting bogged down in things that aren't going to substantially impact customer behavior. Really the only thing you should be worried about with your URL in terms of conversion is whether you are using SHA-2 (people trying to come to an https:// version of your site will get a warning and no green reassurance in the address bar, and a red warning in the address bar if you aren't using SSL at all) and whether a visitor could look at the URL and have a good idea of what the content of that page is. Beyond that, you're optimizing at the extreme margins.

However, if you really do want to attempt to optimize your URLs to an extreme, it really depends on your site structure. If the entirety of the website is a store, then the /shop/ subdirectory is unnecessary. If you have a store as a part of your website, a subdirectory of /shop/ or /store/ or something like that would be helpful in indicating where in the site the URL is pointing. Similarly, having a product subdirectory makes sense if you have multiple categories of products (in your case, say you had both vitamins and paleo cooking ingredients, each with multiple SKUs within the product category). However, if your store only has 9 SKUs, all of which are vitamins, /products/vitamins is unnecessary for indicating where in the site you are (or, you could use /products/ to direct to a page listing all 9 SKUs, in which case the /products/keyword would ultimately turn into products/nameOfProduct).

If you have a site that has a store with multiple product categories all with multiple SKUs, you could consider /store/products/keyword as a format, although that starts to get a bit long. Have you considered using a store.website.com subdomain?

My URL process is: Is it the best indicator of where in the site navigation the visitor is? In most cases, this should mean it indicates that they are in a store, where in the stores navigation they are, and what item they are looking at (keyword). If that's true, then it's a good URL. Secondary concern is keeping the URL from being too long, aim for the most concise but clear indication of where in your sites navigation the user is. The final piece of the URL string (that indicates the specific page the visitor is on) is where you can add the keyword you care about.

[justin-brock]

I agree with alecfwilson, especially the part about superfluous directories.

One thing I'd add, since it's probably a wash whether you use "products" or "shop". See if either word gets used in searches for the products your selling. This won't be the case in everything you sell online, but sometimes the words "product, shop, store" get used in the searches.

If everything else is equal, I'd pick the url structure that includes the words most used in searches ... ONLY if you can also do that while maintaining a natural, semantic, streamlined url path.

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