Have you ever been working on an item but not really sure what category it really fits into? Breadcrumbs to the rescue.
What Are Breadcrumbs?
They are the tasty things you use in some recipes of course, but that’s not the type of breadcrumbs we are talking about today.
In the online world, breadcrumbs are navigation tools that many websites use to help people get around their online stores. BUT – they are incredibly useful in the content creation world because they can help us determine what category an item belongs in, or even what the item is.
Example:
Interior door? Exterior door? Who knows? How are we supposed to find accurate keywords and attributes with so little information?
Well from the picture it looks like an interior door, it’s made from hardboard which wouldn’t stand up to outside temperatures and weather so I think it’s an interior door but I’m not sure. Hmm what to do…….I know, let’s look at the breadcrumbs!
The breadcrumbs for this item are: Home / Products / doors and Windows / Interior Doors / PreHung Doors / Fast Fill Door and every single one is a clickable link.
Let’s break it down.
Home – If you clicked this it would take you to the main Rona page
Products – Takes you to a kind of directory page that lists all categories and therefore all products
Doors and Windows – Takes you to the doors and windows category
Interior Doors – This will take you to the interior doors category
PreHung Doors – Goes to the prehung doors subcategory inside the interior doors category
Fast Fit Door – A sub subcategory inside the prehung doors category which is inside the interior doors category.
Ok, now we know how to read breadcrumbs but how does it help with keyword research, attributes and content creation?
Let’s take a look
Look at them from right to left.
Fast Fit Door – Now we know that the door we are looking at is a Fast Fit door (might be useful for keywords, definitely useful when writing a description)
PreHung Doors -So now we know that this specific door is prehung (this is most definitely useful for keyword research, attributes, and writing the description)
Interior Doors – Wow, another piece of super useful information. Just from this we can determine that it’s used inside, so we should not use keywords such as exterior door (That doesn’t fit the product). We should not use Exterior in attributes. We should not mention using this door as a front or back door, or even a side door when writing the description. It is used inside a space.
Disclaimer
As with anything, breadcrumbs are not always accurate. They can be wrong if a client miscategorized an item. But, most of the time they are correct, and a lot of the time just the few words you find in the breadcrumbs can give you lots of information about the product.