This presentation was delivered at the Ecommerce Marketing Show at Brighton SEO in 2023. In this practical talk, Sam demonstrated the crucial role of ecommerce filters on the user journey and the importance they play in maximising organic visibility. Backed by a case study of Dunelm, he underlines the strategic power of filters in bridging search demand with product relevancy and tackles the technical challenges faced by many ecommerce retailers.
9. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Dunelm’s online visibility was going
from strength to strength
Source: AHREFs
10. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Our filtering
system was
completely
blocked from
being crawled
With no way to
optimise filter
pages
11. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
TOP TIP:
Install “Robots
Exclusion Checker”
Chrome Extension
It visually show
whether your filter
system is allowing
Googlebot or not
Free Google Chrome Extension
12. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
“black coffee table”
12K searches/pm
Position 1
Despite this, our generic PLPs were ranking well
13. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
“grey tv unit”
7K searches/pm
Position 1
Despite this, our generic PLPs were ranking well
15. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Our generic PLPs were
ranking higher than
competitor “filter” pages
that provided a better
customer experience
16. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
TOP TIPS
Become obsessed with
Google’s results
Simulate the customer journey
Who has the best landing page
experience? How can you
improve yours?
18. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
45% of SEOs let Google
index all filters or no filters
at all
Not many sites have
granular control over their
filter indexation
20. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Opening all filters for indexation
Links
Negatives:
• Potentially thousands or millions of
URLs indexed
• Huge page cannibalisation issues
21. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Opening all filters for indexation
Links
Negatives:
• Google wasting time crawling low-
quality pages
• Negative overall impact on organic
visibility
23. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Blocking all filters
Links
Negatives:
• Inability to target medium-long tail
terms at scale
• Competition will outrank you
• Losing out on market share
24. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Other sites do something in between
Links
With some filters
being indexable..
26. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
But popular exclusion methods
for low-value filters are far from efficient
Robots.txt
Meta Robots
“Noindex”
Canonical tags
Rel =
“nofollow”
27. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Because URLs are presented to Google
that must be “managed”
Relying on Google to pick a Canonical
Index bloat
Wasted crawl budget
28. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
So, we set about trying to
implement a more efficient
filtering system
29. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Filters we DO want Google to discover & crawl we
server-side render crawlable links
30. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Crawlable <a href> links
Clear anchor text
Short, descriptive URL
What this looks like in practice
31. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
For filters we DON’T want Google to discover we use
client-side JavaScript for functionality
32. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
What this looks like in practice
Filters are JS buttons
No crawlable links
Hash URLs used
33. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Back-end: SEO Tool with new filter functionality
We wanted to
control exactly
which values
Google could
‘see’ and index
34. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
- H1s
- Copy snippet
- Page Title
- Meta Description
Customisable on-page elements
42. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
• SEO team advised trading team
on suggested category structures
• Factored in range expansion
• Needed to be scalable and avoid
future URL changes
Architecture Changes
43. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
2. Internal product
attribute data not
aligning with how
customers search
44. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Educating internal
teams to use
correct values, not
“internal” styles or
types
Keyword Research & Attribute Review
Mapping out
how customers
search for our
products
Breaking that
down to attribute
and value
granularity
46. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Working with suppliers
We had gaps
in our
product data
Getting suppliers to
classify products based
on styles or types from
keyword research
Working with
suppliers to fill
missing
information
47. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
Reattribution Project
• Dedicated project to clean up
and optimise our data
• Process involves SEO and 3
other internal teams
(+suppliers)
• This is an ongoing project
48. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
15 kickoff meetings
with commercial
directors
25 traders trained
in SEO
Internal PR and Training was critical
Development teams
trained in SEO
Regular reporting
to leadership team
51. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
“white wardrobes”
Before filters After filters
PLP: position 14
Filter: position 2
Ranking Results
52. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
“black coffee table”
Before filters After filters
PLP: position 8 Filter: position 2
Ranking Results
53. Dunelm (Soft Furnishings) Ltd
We’ve stopped traffic decline
as we offer customers a
better experience.
We now organically rank for
over 1.1m keywords.
Still a lot more work to be
done!