Breadcrumbs are a valuable tool for both search engine optimization (SEO) experts and web designers.
Breadcrumbs are even beneficial for search engine crawlers (which help to place your website on Google) and help users understand where they are on your website and explore it further.
Breadcrumb navigation is a type of internal link structure that helps users and search engines navigate a website. The breadcrumb trail displays a clear path of visited pages, either in chronological order of visit or according to the hierarchical structure of the website.
Breadcrumb navigation can therefore help improve the user-friendliness of a website and simplify navigation for visitors. By giving users a clear idea of where they are on the website and how they got there, breadcrumb navigation can also help increase the time spent on the website and reduce the bounce rate.
Use breadcrumb navigation for large websites and websites with hierarchically arranged pages. An excellent example is e-commerce websites where a large number of products are grouped into logical categories.
You shouldn't use breadcrumbs for single-level websites that lack a logical hierarchy or grouping. A great way to determine if a website would benefit from breadcrumb navigation is to create a sitemap or diagram illustrating the website's navigation architecture and then analyze whether breadcrumbs would improve users' ability to navigate within and between categories.
Breadcrumb navigation should be considered an additional feature and should not replace the effective primary navigation menu. It is a convenience feature, a secondary navigation scheme that helps users see where they are and offers an alternative way to navigate your website.
Let's look at the various advantages of breadcrumbs for your website in terms of SEO.
Nobody likes feeling lost, especially online. You need to keep visitors focused on the content, not confused about where to go next. What are the results of reducing this feeling?
Satisfied customers and more conversions! Breadcrumbs are a simple website element that users understand. They also help users get to where they want to go faster.
Thanks to organic search, users rarely enter your website via the homepage. Since every page on your website is a potential entry point for users, there needs to be a way to guide your visitors to other parts of your site, especially if the initial entry page encourages them to explore further. Breadcrumbs offer visitors an alternative way to navigate your website instead of simply clicking the "back" button.
The data shows that visitors like breadcrumbs, and this also applies to Google. Breadcrumbs help search engines decipher your website's hierarchy and decide which pages are most important.
One bonus of breadcrumbs is that they can appear in Google search results by either adding structured data or setting them up within Yoast SEO if you are using WordPress.
It's important to note that these steps only increase the likelihood of your breadcrumbs appearing. Adding structured data or installing Yoast SEO on WordPress doesn't guarantee that your breadcrumbs will appear in search results. It's up to Google.
Breadcrumbs are displayed in a small, simple font at the top of the page, meaning they take up very little space on your website. This advantage can be especially important when someone visits your website on a mobile device.
With more than 50% of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, you can be sure that your website's traffic also includes mobile users.
If you benefit from an element that takes up hardly any space, you can't ask for much more.
Here are just some of the advantages of using a breadcrumb trail.
Convenient for users: Breadcrumbs are primarily used to provide users with a secondary way to navigate a website. By offering a breadcrumb trail for all pages on a large, multi-level website, users can more easily navigate to higher categories.
Reduces clicks or actions to return to higher pages: Instead of using the browser's "back" button or the website's primary navigation to return to a higher page, users can now use the breadcrumb with fewer clicks.
Reduces bounce rates: Breadcrumbs can be a great way to entice first-time visitors to explore a website after viewing the landing page.
For example, if a user arrives at a page via a Google search, displaying a breadcrumb trail could encourage that user to click through to higher pages to see related topics of interest. This would reduce the overall bounce rate of the website.
There are many types of breadcrumbs, but the three most useful are:
This is the most common type of breadcrumb. Breadcrumbs like this tell you where you are in the website's structure. Location-based breadcrumbs often use the homepage as the starting point.
Let's take a look at an example of an HVAC contracting company and a retail store:
Location breadcrumbs are incredibly useful for users and crawlers.
Due to the rise of dynamic, database-driven websites, this type of breadcrumb is becoming increasingly common. A path breadcrumb shows the actual path the user has taken on the website to reach their current page, rather than displaying the hierarchy relative to the homepage as with location-based breadcrumbs.
Amazon, for example, shows the path users can take to find a dash camera.
However, users can also find other ways to locate dash cameras. For example, they can perform a search or find products without the "On-Dash Cameras" filter.
Users could reach a page in various ways, which can lead to numerous breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs of this type use a similar formula to location-based breadcrumbs. Attribute or keyword breadcrumbs use keywords and attributes that describe the page, rather than something like the page title or another unique identifier. E-commerce websites are the most common type of website to use this type of breadcrumb.
In the following example, Orvis uses breadcrumb navigation on its product pages. Even if users find the product via a site search like "dog," they can see how the product fits into the overall store. It's part of their "Dogs > Dog Beds" section.
It's important to note that the last two types of breadcrumbs can lead to duplicate breadcrumbs. Duplicate breadcrumbs can harm your website in the eyes of Google, Bing, and other search engines, as your website may appear "thin" in terms of original content. If you find that this is happening on your website using these methods, incorporate location-based breadcrumbs into your SEO strategy.
You need to be careful when optimizing your breadcrumbs for SEO. Over-optimization can lead to penalties from search engines. As long as your breadcrumb structure makes sense, there's no penalty for not optimizing it enough.
Play it safe by avoiding keyword stuffing. Keep in mind that breadcrumbs are meant to describe a hierarchy. For example, you should only use breadcrumbs if your pages only have two categories.
In this sense, you shouldn't feel the need to replace important elements of your website, such as your navigation, with breadcrumbs. You should use them as a supplement to other features like product categories or resource libraries, and not as the primary navigation for your website.
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