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What Are Breadcrumbs? Why Are They Important for SEO?

What Are Breadcrumbs? Why Are They Important for SEO?
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What Are Breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are an essential part of nearly every good website. These navigation aids tell people where they are on your site and also help Google understand how your site is structured. Therefore, adding breadcrumb structures to your site makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a closer look at how the Breadcrumb system works:

Breadcrumbs are a series of links, usually located at the top of the page, displaying the user’s current location and providing a quick way to trace the path back to the homepage. This feature becomes a great contextual source of information for navigating the content map, answering the following questions for users:

Where am I?

Breadcrumbs provide information about the user’s location in relation to the entire site hierarchy.

Where can I go?

Breadcrumbs increase the discoverability of site sections and pages, making the structure of the site easier to understand compared to when it’s merely listed in a menu.

Should I go there?

Breadcrumbs show the value of content and encourage visiting it (e.g., a visitor on an e-commerce site might land on a product page; if the product isn’t a good match, they might want to see other products in the same category), which in turn reduces the site’s bounce rate.

The term “breadcrumbs” comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel drops pieces of bread to mark their trail in the forest to find their way back home. This concept has inspired the use of the term breadcrumbs for the navigation aids we see on websites today.

What are the Benefits of Breadcrumbs?

There are several advantages to using these helpful navigators on your site. Let’s quickly review them:

Reduces the number of actions. From a usability perspective, breadcrumbs reduce the number of actions a site visitor needs to take to reach a higher-level page. Instead of using the browser’s “back” button or the site’s navigation links, visitors can use breadcrumbs. They provide a way to tell Google how your site is structured, but Google can also use them in the actual search results, making your result much more appealing to users. Breadcrumbs occupy minimal space. Being links in a horizontal line, they are a compact mechanism that doesn’t take up much page space, avoiding negative effects in terms of content overload.

Impact of Breadcrumbs on User Experience: They improve user experience. People hate getting lost on websites. When faced with a new location, humans typically look for familiar places or landmarks, and the same applies to websites. Breadcrumbs, being a common interface element that shows an instant way out, can help with your user experience without needing to click the back button.

Why Are Breadcrumbs Important for SEO?

Breadcrumbs are important for SEO for several reasons. As mentioned, they make navigating a website easier for users and encourage them to explore other sections of the site.

For instance, suppose you want to learn more about a company. You visit their website and after some browsing, decide to check the company’s past posts. Using breadcrumbs, you can easily navigate back to the about us page, past pages, and even the homepage.

They are a handy way to help users find what they are looking for and draw them deeper into your website.

Breadcrumbs improve site ranking. According to Google, breadcrumbs are used to categorize content and gather it under a context. In 2018, Google added breadcrumbs to its result pages, making them more significant. Google supports the implementation of breadcrumbs as a way to provide support to users.

In search results, breadcrumbs also help users understand where the page is located on your site, making it a double win for SEO.

Recent studies show that using breadcrumbs is one of the top 10 factors affecting search results on Google.

They aim to keep people on your site longer. While the bounce rate may not be a direct ranking factor, it can still help with SEO.

How to Implement Breadcrumbs for SEO?

Implementing breadcrumbs is an important step in improving your website’s position. It can be done using schema.org markup, as recognized by Google, offering three different options. Let’s take a closer look at these options:

Location Breadcrumb: Location-based breadcrumbs help a user navigate from their current page to a broader category (higher page). A hierarchy-based breadcrumb allows users to easily see where they are within the site’s architecture and navigate to a higher page.

Attribute-based breadcrumbs: Show the attributes a user has selected on a page. This type of breadcrumb is found in e-commerce category pages where users can select attributes to filter search results.

Path-based breadcrumbs: Serve the same purpose as the browser back button, allowing a user to return to one of the pages they have visited. This is useful when a user reaches a product page after applying multiple filters on a category page. With path-based breadcrumbs, a user can quickly jump back to one of their navigational choices without disrupting their selections.

Google has also prepared a video on the subject.

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