What Are Website Breadcrumbs?

Why Are They So Important For Your Site?

Website breadcrumbs are little navigational aids which help people visualise where they are on your site, and they also help Google determine how your website is structured.

A website breadcrumb is a small text path, often located at the top of a page, which shows you where you are. Every part of that path is clickable, all the way to the homepage.

Website breadcrumbs also appear in Google. If you add the correct form of structured data to your site, search engines can pick up this data and can show your breadcrumbs in the search results. These provide users with an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site.

Google loves Website Breadcrumbs.

They give it another way of figuring out how your website is structured. In addition to that, Google might use your breadcrumbs to show these in the search results: your result would become much more interesting to users then. Check Google’s developer documentation on breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs play also an important role in this hierarchy of categories: each individual item should link back to the nearest category. This shows Google the structure of your site but it also enforces the authority of the category page for the topic.

Users love Website Breadcrumbs, too.

Website breadcrumbs enhance the user experience, lowering bounce rates. Hardly anyone comes in through the homepage anymore: it’s all organic search, nowadays. This means that every part of your site could be an entry point. Breadcrumbs lower bounce rates because you’re offering visitors an alternative means of browsing your site.

You can add breadcrumbs as structured data or, if you use a WordPress site, you can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins or Yoast SEO.

Give us a shout if you need any assistance with SEO enhancements for your website: it’d be much cheaper than you could imagine, even if it something as small as checking or implementing Structured Data and website breadcrumbs.