SEO A to Z - part 7 - "Faceted Navigation to Funnels"

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard, it's as usual. And today we're on to part seven of our SEO A to Z, where we're going to go from faceted navigation to funnels. So, starting off with faceted navigation Now, faceted navigation is one which allows users to narrow down, search through and sort content using filters. So an example would be, say, an e-commerce site selling dishwashers, allowing search by narrowing down by size, energy consumption, brand price, etc. You'll see these quite a lot on, say, affiliate sites quite often have them and lots of e-commerce sites have them. A good example might be an affiliate site which would say we're selling sim only deal contracts and allowing people to filter by the different networks that we're offering sim only deals, or sort by different prices, such as best selling, monthly costs, data allowances, that kind of thing. Now, faceted navigation is really useful for users because it allows them to sort through and search for a lot of data and find what kind of products or services they're looking for and narrow down to their main requirements without having to wade through page after page after page after page, and they can be really good link drivers. People will link to these kind of especially on the affiliate side a really good database of products and allowing people to use a faceted navigation to work through it to find what's useful for them. There can be issues you've got to be careful with, particularly around duplicate content. A lot of sites implement faceted navigation in a way where it will create different urls for, say, different sort types or different filters, so that you can people can share and save filtered results with somebody else via a url string and obviously, if you're doing that, you need to make sure you handle that duplicate content by using canonical tags on your fastest navigation to make sure that Google has one core canonical version that you want to be the main canonical version, which would usually be straight into the fastest navigation where all the filters are set at the defaults you want, rather than it being set to something different.

Okay, next up, we've got FAQs, or frequently asked questions. So a frequently asked questions, so a frequently asked questions, is a type of page content, you know, consisting of lists of questions frequently asked on a topic and their answers. Now this can be combined with FAQ schema, which is where you can actually mark up in the HTML for the FAQ page or the FAQ question so that Google can clearly see yeah, this is a question, this is an answer, and it's just a structured data markup that allows it to make use of it. Google used to make a lot more use of FAQ schema and put FAQs into the SERPs. That now happens a lot less frequently than it used to. There are some edge cases where they still do it. I think it might be around health or something. I can't quite remember. The cases where they do still use it because I think I think, for whatever reason they decided that they that they didn't like. I think maybe people were possibly overusing it and using it to sort of manipulate the search engine results. That's why they maybe delved it back.

But frequently asked questions themselves are really really good things to do. They're good things to put, particularly on things like products and e-commerce sites where people have frequent asked questions about products or reviews. You know frequent asked questions about a product you might be reviewing. Frequent asked questions about all sorts of things are really really powerful, for faqs are if you want to find what questions people are actually frequently asking about anything keywords people use. It's a self-promotional plug here, but it is a really good tool to use to find out what people are asking about any one thing. Had someone contact me the other day. They were looking to write faqs to put on amazon listings and I pointed them to. You know how to use qs people use to put. I think they were looking at weight loss and so they asked you know I said use qs people to use, put in weight loss. You'll get all the frequently asked questions people have around weight loss and you can dive down deeper into each one of those questions. And If you're looking to build FAQs, do take a look at keywords people use. You'll probably find it useful.

Next up, we have Featured Snippet Now. A Featured Snippet is a short section of text that appears at the top of the search engine result pages with a quick answer to a query. These snippets are pulled directly from third-party web pages. Google does provide a link to the website so the user can follow it if they wish to learn more. Now, feature snippets are considered to be position zero in the search results, as it appears, above the normal organic search rankings. Now these feature snippets they do answer the question very quickly and simply. They do actually give about 8% of the clicks off a page. Do go through the feature snippets so they can be worth optimizing for.

There are various types of feature snippets, like this text results, ordered lists, unordered lists and tables. So what you need to do is to find the result. A query which does have a feature snippet, say, for example, one could be what is a feature snippet and that itself launches when you search that does give a feature snippet result, so you can see that the site there that's done it backlink. How you know they have put a question in a h1 or h2 what are feature snippets and how to get them and then they've given a short answer below it. If you're getting a table result, then you need you know that you're probably going to have to try and put some kind of table data in your page under that question to try and trigger that result. So, yeah, some people chase them really, really successfully. It's not something I've ever particularly bothered with myself, but yeah, it can clearly be useful if you're going to get clicks from it.

Next up, we've got followed link. Now a followed link is also called a do follow link, also just called a link with no attributes to it. So these are links which will pass PageRank. So they're literally in HTML. They're not tagged as sponsored, they're not tagged as UGC, they're not tagged as no follow. They were tagged with nothing. They will follow the PageRank through. In the olden days they were just the original links days. They were just the original links. So, yeah, they're the kind of links that you want to achieve to your site if you are going to get page rank and see your the positive ranking results from them. Also, if you want to link out to a site, then you want to pass page rank to it, then you put a link on. Obviously, if you've got a commercial relationship such an affiliate, it's an affiliate link or someone's paid you for that link then you should be using no follow, sponsored, accordingly, or anything else. But if you are, you know, wanting to give an editorial link to another site organically, then you know a followed link is the right way to do it.

Next, we've got footer page footers. So a page footer is the bottom section of a web page, and it's often common to all or most pages on a website, and page foot is yet, obviously, you know, mostly used for adding navigational links to areas of the site that you want to make available easily on every page but which don't warrant enough importance to be in the main navigation in the page header section. It's also important to include things like about us pages and contact pages and privacy policy in terms of conditions, type pages, because they're the kind of things that are important for eeat, just as those basic kind of things that so that anybody can quickly and easily find out who's this site about, how do we get hold of them and are they, you know, covering all the proper privacy and terms of condition things that you'd expect a serious property site. And last up for today, we've got a funnel. A funnel is a marketing concept that's named after funnels that you use for pouring liquids into containers, and the concept involves aiming to acquire a wide pool of potential customers at the wide top part of the funnel and then aiming to have these people form subsequent steps down the funnel until they emerge as paying customers for the product or service at the bottom, and they don't have to be necessarily paying just as long as they take the action you desire from that funnel. Funnels will usually involve content marketing and or paid advertising to get people into the top of the funnel, then lead magnets to persuade them to share their email address, to which you can then further market to them and introduce them to paid products with follow-up marketing to convert them into customers below. That that's one type of funnel. There's other types of funnels can be a bit simpler. Our broadband at codeuk funnel was very much to get people to give us their email address because from their sorry, not not their email address their postcode. Because once we got their postcode we could then give them information about broadband specifically in their area, what types of broadband they could get and then also what providers and deals were available in their area. So it allowed us to personalize the site to them very quickly and that kind of funnel could then obviously help us promote the right deals to them and hopefully they will click off and go and visit those providers and you know. Hopefully some of them will buy. Each step of the way, you know you're going to lose some people. That's why the funnel narrows as it goes further down.

Yeah, funnels are really important when you're thinking about the information architecture of your website, how you're going to build it and how you want people to flow through it. Never think of a website as just a single page. Really, you you know that you're going to have actions that you want people to do and those actions will depend on where they land on your site and then how you're going to try and funnel them. So familiarize yourself with the concept of funnels. Look at example funnels. Whenever you're using any kind of website, think where am I being funneled in this website? Especially if it's a website that wants to get either personal details off you or to sell you something. They're all going to be employing funnels of some kind. Really important to start thinking in terms of funnels.

Okay, well, that's everything for today. We've gone from where did we start? We came from faceted navigation all the way down to funnel, and if there's any Fs that you think I've missed, do let me know so I can get them added to our glossary. We'll put links to anything we've mentioned in the show notes and we'll see you next time. Take care.

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