Author: Ryan Christopher Walsh
Date: 11.12.2025

What are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are simply allow an additional way for a shopper to navigate a website. Breadcrumb navigation is especially used on large e-commerce websites, where many products might be viewed, allowing the customer to simply go back to previously viewed pages without having to re-enter the websites main navigation.

Why do breadcrumbs matter for SEO?

Breadcrumbs wont make a huge difference to where your website ranks on Google by themselves. So, therefore you might be wondering, well if breadcrumbs don’t affect rankings, why bother implementing this work?

Well, it can be said that breadcrumbs when implemented correctly can help your website in two main ways: those are improving the U.X but also helping Googlebot.

Googlebot

Googlebot can crawl and index the links, meaning that the page can get found more easily by Google.

U.X

If you have ever been on an e-commerce website for a very long period, well, you most likely have viewed a huge number of products. Perhaps hundreds, its too easy for a shopper to get tired, then want to leave the website because they cant get to the product they want.

However, breadcrumb navigation makes it that much more simpler, that much better to simply get back to a product you once viewed. For example, it could have been a handbag you really like it. Yet, you wanted to browse some more items before committing to that purchase, well by using breadcrumb navigation, it makes it simpler to go back and to simply take another look at an item you had wanted to purchase.

Internal links and Googlebot

For those that truly know how Google’s algorithm works, they will simply know that Google uses a automated bot, called simply “Googlebot”.

Its Googlebot’s job to crawl and index pages. However Google does this depends on the crawl budget that has been assigned to your company website. However, the more important websites they are assigned a higher crawl budget, which just simply means that Google checks for changes, edits, website design alterations that may have occurred. If the content marketing, that’s the text, if that changes then Googlebot will crawl and indexed it, then replicated the new page into its index.

Now, with breadcrumbs, what these allow is for you to add more internal links onto your website.

Not only is the customer able to better know where they are on your e-commerce website, but also the search engines, such as Google will know where that page is on your e-commerce website.

For example, you might sell luxury cars, if the breadcrumb navigation, says “Rolls Royce” then the next breadcrumb navigation says “phantom” – then it will be apparent that your on that particular model of luxury car. The internals links can therefore be followed by Googlebot and it helps them to know the structure of the website, for example, that you sell luxury and sports cars, that might be clear from the homepage. Then the sub pages, it clear you sell a range of Rolls Royce luxury cars and you also stock the Phantom range of Rolls Royce’s as well.

Its all about improving the U.X

You know you walk into a luxury hotel, well the hotel makes it a piece of cake to enjoy your stay and it’s a very nice place to be.
Well, you should apply this logic when building your e-commerce website, make it a great place for shoppers to purchase goods from you. Make it easy to navigate, make it a great place for shoppers to select the right products, with well written content marketing such as product descriptions to help the shopper to make a decision on whether that item is for them.

Bounce rates

If you help a shopper to locate the product they want, perhaps through the main navigation being well designed, and going the extra mile by adding breadcrumb navigation, then you can help keep shoppers on your website for longer.

No matter what type of business you run, if you want to improve your businesses search engine optimisation, then the SEO company should be looking to improve dwell times, plus working really hard to decrease bounce rates. Our agency writes and creates some of the very best content marketing, which has an extremely high dwell times, low bounce rates, and always is written with Google EEAT in mind.

Sticky

It used by the case that marketing agencies used to refer to making their websites, or their clients websites “sticky”.

What they actually meant by this is what is important, whats crucial to really improve that dwell time. Google uses “RankBrain” and this powered by AI, what it is doing is monitoring, how long are shoppers are spending on the website.

Are there different types of breadcrumb navigation?

Yes, there is, there is, there’s “hierarchy-based breadcrumbs”- there is also “attribute based breadcrumbs” as well. Both are a type of breadcrumbs that are widely used on a number of e-commerce type websites. When you talk to any really good web designer, that understands how to improve the U.X of a company website, they will you that the design of navigation, such as the main menus and the breadcrumbs are very important.

There are also path based breadcrumbs as well. So therefore the large online retailers, they often use these breadcrumbs and they be very useful.

How should breadcrumbs be added to a website?

Make them clearly visible, its important in terms of bread crumb navigation, that the navigation can be clearly seen by the shopper. This way when there browsing products, if they did want to go back and visit a previous item they have looked at, the breadcrumb navigation makes that really simple to do.

Also do consider your other ways that you could improve the on-page SEO such as

Product schema

We are an SEO agency that can add schema to your website. There is also the possibility of adding breadcrumb schema as something your digital marketing agency can do. In terms of schema, our business also works with a lot of companies that want improve their local search engine optimisation. Its important to think about improving the U.X factors, such as adding breadcrumbs, but also its important to think about adding schema as well.

Well designed main menu

There’s no point in investing into adding breadcrumbs, unless the main menu is really well designed. Therefore when we work with clients, we choose WordPress websites that offer good breadcrumb navigation, but also good main menu design as well.

How our company can help

Who are Ryan C Walsh Marketing?

We are a marketing company based in the city of Cardiff. We have been helping businesses to improve their local search engine optimisation for over 11 years.

We are one of the best, if the best set of SEO consultants.

For a no obligation quote, do call us today.