Is SEO pagination on your website audit and technical SEO checklist?
If you’re publishing a decent amount of content and/or have a specific type of site, like an ecommerce store, it probably should be.
Pagination straddles the boundary, or thin membrane, between user experience and SEO. The strategic use of pagination, therefore, stands out as a key aspect within technical SEO. It’s a process that has the potential to have a significant impact on your search engine visibility and bounce rate.
In this short guide, we give a concise overview of pagination SEO. Our comparisons between the 3 main UX patterns – Pagination, Load More, and Infinite Scroll – and explanations of the pagination SEO best practices should be of value to web designers, marketers, and online entrepreneurs.
Let’s get into it.
Jump to:
- What is Pagination SEO?
- Pagination vs. Load More vs. Infinite Scroll
- Is pagination good or bad for SEO?
- Pagination SEO: the current best practice
- Conclusion
What is Pagination SEO?
Pagination is the process of splitting information across multiple pages and sub-categories. If you think of your business’s website as a large data set, pagination allows you to dedicate certain parts and pages of your website to specific topics.
Pagination involves taking a highly structured approach to your website’s UX design that divides content across multiple component pages. Pagination improves user experience by breaking information down into more manageable or focused chunks. This can be particularly beneficial for content-heavy websites or ecommerce sites with bulk product listings.
SEO Pagination
Pagination brings obvious web design and UX benefits. However, as with other aspects of technical SEO, you’ll need to follow certain SEO best practices to maximise the benefits.
Before we dig deeper into pagination SEO and how it fits into Google, let’s quickly compare pagination against the other most commonly used UX designs or patterns.
Pagination vs. Load More vs. Infinite Scroll
When choosing a UX pattern, web designers essentially have a choice between two approaches: pagination and ‘incremental page loading’.
Although you might not have heard the term incremental page loading before, you’ll already be familiar with the ‘load more’ and ‘infinite scroll’ UX patterns.
What do each of these UX patterns offer, and what contexts are they best suited to?
1. Pagination
Perhaps the most well known example of the use of pagination is Google Search’s results pages (SERPs).
Pagination pros
- Users can see the total number of pages and their current position within the set of results.
- Unambiguous navigation controls, e.g. ‘next’, ‘previous’.
- Users have more control over how they navigate through paginated content.
- Faster page load times.
- Powerful SEO benefits.
Pagination cons
- Splitting content across multiple pages adds extra steps, potentially disrupting user flows.
- Requires new page loads, potentially encouraging the use of multiple tabs.
Pagination is best suited to websites that contain large volumes of content, and users that are looking for a clear structure and increased control over how they navigate through the content.
2. Load More
The first style of incremental page loading is the load more UX pattern. Load more offers a continuous flow that keeps the user on the same page, but limits the size of the results per click of the ‘load more’ button.
Load More pros
- Uses a single page to present content, providing a continuous scrolling experience.
- Offers users more control than infinite scroll.
- Simplifies navigation by loading more content without changing the page.
- A nod towards sustainable web design.
Load More cons
- Complicates crawling/indexing of content.
- The user might need to click the ‘see more’ or ‘load more’ button multiple times to reach older results.
Load more is best suited to ecommerce websites (think eBay) that feature multiple product categories or product variants.
3. Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll has become a popular choice amongst designers these days. Social media feeds are prime examples of infinite scroll, where an endless stream of content is used to keep users engaged.
Infinite Scroll pros
- Uses a single page for all content, providing an intuitive scrolling experience.
- Eliminates the need for additional clicks.
- Suitable for mobile and touch-based devices.
Infinite Scroll cons
- May lead to ‘scrolling fatigue’ due to an unclear result size.
- Slower page load speeds.
- Not ideal for handling very large numbers of results, as it loads all content continuously.
- Not the best from an SEO perspective.
Infinite scroll works best with visually oriented websites where users are likely to prefer a seamless, uninterrupted browsing experience.
Is Pagination good or bad for SEO?
When implemented correctly, pagination brings a number of SEO benefits, especially when compared to other UX patterns.
The key SEO benefits of pagination include:
Target more keywords
By dividing your content across focused pages, pagination allows you to target more keywords and better optimise pages around certain keywords. This can lead to more opportunities to rank in the SERPs.
Improved crawlability
Paginating your content makes it easier for web crawlers to index your website. Pages that are focussed on one topic, rather than many are also much less ambiguous making it easier for search engines like Google to know when to serve your content to searchers.
Faster page load speeds
Paginated content tends to load quicker than infinite scroll and load more pages. This can lead to a reduced bounce rate and better overall UX.
We should also mention some of the potential SEO challenges of pagination. All of these challenges can be mitigated by following pagination SEO best practices.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content issues can harm the ranking potential of your paginated pages. SEO-friendly pagination involves creating original content and giving each page a unique URL.
Thin content
Utilising pagination for the wrong reasons (e.g. to inflate total page views) will likely result in thin content. When you put user experience first and continue to optimise the content on your pages, thin content shouldn’t be an issue.
Pagination SEO best practices
To implement SEO-friendly pagination effectively, you’ll need to embrace some technical SEO. You can give your paginated pages a great chance of ranking by following these 6 pagination SEO best practices.
1. Add canonical tags
Canonical tags let Google know which paginated pages you’d like to rank in the SERPs. and can also be used to avoid duplicate content. You should add a self-referencing canonical tag to each page within a paginated series.
2. Ensure anchor links are crawlable
Remember that web crawlers discover new pages through links. It’s therefore crucial that the links to other paginated pages are crawlable. To ensure your anchor links are crawlable, add href attributes and/or anchor and closing tags.
3. Optimise internal links
You can help Google crawl your site more effectively and improve the experience for users by optimising your internal links. To optimise your internal linking:
- Use appropriate keywords in the anchor text. This not only gives more information to Google about the target page, it also gives more context to users.
- Avoid generic CTAs such as ‘learn more’ or ‘see more’.
4. Proper use of URLs
The proper use of URLs is essential to effective SEO pagination. We’ve already mentioned adding a canonical tag to each of your paginated pages, but you also should create unique URLs for each page. The top CMS for SEO, like WordPress or Shopify, make it easy to manage your URL structure and URLs for each page.
5. Optimise and update your content
Keeping your content up to date and optimising it for SEO is an ongoing task. Paginated pages also require ongoing optimisation. You can find a detailed breakdown of how to optimise on-page SEO in our website SEO checklist.
Some quick on-page optimisation wins include:
- Strategic use of keywords (use in headings, subheadings, meta descriptions and in the body of the content).
- If you embed images within your pages, be sure to add descriptive alt-text.
- Use a responsive design that displays well on desktop and mobile.
6. Measure the SEO impact of your paginated pages
There are various ways you can measure the SEO impact of your paginated pages. The easiest way to gauge the impact of your paginated pages is with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
- Search Console’s ‘search analytics report’ can be used to see how many impressions your paginated pages are getting.
- Google Analytics can be used to build an understanding of user flows and on-site behaviour.
Conclusion: Getting started with pagination and technical SEO
If you’re a small business that’s just getting started on your SEO journey, consider reviewing the beefound.agency refresher on SEO for Small Businesses. The short guide gives straightforward explanations and practical tips on different aspects of SEO strategy, such as keyword research, content creation and local SEO.
Pagination SEO involves optimising technical aspects, such as website URLs and code. Do as much as you can, but consider approaching a web design and SEO expert for guidance or to review your proposed changes. This is especially important for businesses that have larger websites with multiple pages.
Here at beefound.agency, we offer a full and expanding range of SEO services, including content marketing and local SEO.
