How your Shopify product handle and URLs impact your rankings

A JSON-LD for SEO customer asked about product handles, how they work with their store’s SEO, and whether they should use concise or keyword-stuffed ones.

For example, if your URL is example.com/products/pencil. Then your product handle is "pencil". So the question is should a handle simply state the product name or include a bunch of keywords?

In short, product handles and URLs do not impact your rankings.

As such, I always recommend a descriptive handle. That’s partway between concise and keyword-stuffed. In general, anything you intentionally keyword stuff are usually ignored by Google to some extent.

Product handles are important because they are a major part of your URL which can help identify which product we're looking at. Product handles can be valuable from a user experience perspective, but I wouldn’t rank them very high up in the things to consider in regards to SEO.

Several years ago, Google stopped using URLs as part of their ranking systems when they realized website owners could easily create new URLs with whatever text they wanted with very little effort. Links and quality content on the other hand take effort and aren’t as gameable.

URLs are still useful, just not enough to swing rankings in your favor. Content and links play a much larger role in your overall SEO efforts.

Concise URLs help to ensure we're narrowing down the most important information for this product and making it really easy to understand.

It’s like Goldilocks, too much or too little is bad but in the middle is just right.

Let's run through a few examples:

• necklace - too general
• 24k-gold-necklace-for-men-with-tribal-design-and-pendant - too keyword stuffy
• tribal-design-gold-necklace - not bad
• mens-tribal-design-gold-necklace - just right

A quick five minute search in your keyword tool of choice will give you some ideas about what keywords could be useful.

Another thing to consider, will you ever be saying or printing product URLs? If you are, lean more towards the concise versions otherwise you’ll get a long URL that becomes difficult to say or print.

You can create a redirect to make a "pretty URL" but that’s extra work and a pain to maintain with more than a dozen products.

Whatever product handle you choose, JSON-LD for SEO will automatically include it in your structured data. This makes it even easier for search engines to understand more about the product and help you qualify for search enhancements.