Why Your Website Needs Breadcrumbs

Every SEO knows what breadcrumbs are. However, not every business owner and/or website owner does. And, if they do or don’t, they’re also likely to not understand the importance of them, and why they are key for SEO.

So, what are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs, in layman’s terms, are a navigational element that (mainly) does two things:

1. Improves user experience on the website.
2. Improves the website’s crawlability for Google.

For an SEO or a website owner, these two things are absolutely paramount to everything you do.

And, in 2020 and beyond, there is still a bucket load of websites that have not implemented breadcrumbs. Which, doesn’t make a great deal of sense, because the benefits are pretty clear – and there’s also not too difficult to implement.

So, in short, when discussing breadcrumbs, we’re not talking in relation to the tasty breading you’ll get around your chicken fillets.

Here’s what you need to know:

Breadcrumbs and SEO

We’ve already established that breadcrumbs are a navigational feature – they are links that allow the user to see how far they are from the homepage.

Below is an example of a website that effectively uses breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs are most commonly found at the top of a website, underneath the navigation, as seen above.

Very similar to internal linking for SEO, it has benefits for user experience, too, by keeping a user on the website and allows them to move around easier – as well as make it easier for them to backtrack to a previous page if they need to.

Breadcumbs are more important now for SEO than they’ve ever been.

 With Google now displays breadcrumbs in search results and uses breadcrumbs to categorise information on a website.

There’s even a structured data report in Google Search Console, too.

Are there different types of breadcrumbs?

Absolutely. There are three main types:

1. Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs (a.k.a., Location-Based Breadcrumbs) – The most common type of breadcrumbs that tell users where they are on the website.
2. Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs – This is mainly used in the e-commerce sphere, to display what attributes the user has clicked.
3. History-Based Breadcrumbs – Displays what other pages on the site users have visited, similar to your search/browser history.

Summary

To summarise, if you don’t have breadcrumbs on your website, you’re a fool.

Not only are breadcrumbs easy to implement through WordPress plugins like Yoast, but, in just a few clicks, our website could become easier to navigate for the user and can positively affect your SEO.

What’s not to like?