Do Breadcrumbs Boost SEO?

Breadcrumbs have been around forever, and if you don’t treat them with respect they can look unsightly and date a website in seconds… However, Google’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of site architecture keeps making them more and more relevant for technical SEO.

The Hidden Benefits of Breadcrumbs

1️⃣  Enhanced Site Structure

Breadcrumbs help Google understand your site hierarchy by showing the relationships between pages. This means it makes crawling the website more efficient for the crawler. 

Let’s be frank – ANYTHING you can do to make Google’s job easier pays dividends in the long run. (Google’s own guidelines recommend them for site structure signals).

2️⃣  Improved User Experience

There’s loads of data about how breadcrumbs reduce bounce rates simply because users know where they are on a website and how to move up and down the content structure they’re interested in. It’s no surprise, then, that adding breadcrumbs also typically improves time-on-site statistics AND increases pageviews. 

Whilst on-page metrics such as these don’t necessarily lead to better search positions, conversion is the other side of the SEO coin (we’re going to cover that in another update). Making sure that those users you’ve worked so hard to get can make the informed choices they need is the second part of the battle – and little ol’ breadcrumbs can seriously help you in that respect. 

3️⃣  Opens up Rich Snippets 

Whilst they may only be small, properly structured breadcrumbs do show up in search results – and if you see the difference between a site that has them and a site that doesn’t, it’s fairly obvious. 

Advanced tip: Use schema markup to enhance breadcrumb display in search.

Breadcrumb Schema

As with a lot of SEO stuff, you have to dabble with some Schema to really turn up the breadcrumb benefits. A lot of SEO Plugins (like SEOPress) will do this for you if you master their Breadcrumbs settings – but in case you need it, here is the base Schema for a “BreadcrumbList” with the appropriate “ListItem” structures. 

You’d need to build this out on every page to match the breadcrumbs that are being displayed (obviously this is far easier to do programmatically, or through a plugin, but I wanted you to be able to see it). 

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 1,
      "name": "Home",
      "item": "https://www.example.com/"
    },
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 2,
      "name": "Services",
      "item": "https://www.example.com/services/"
    },
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 3,
      "name": "SEO",
      "item": "https://www.example.com/services/seo/"
    }
  ]
}
</script>

So the simple truth is this… Breadcrumbs alone won’t skyrocket your rankings, but they are a crucial part of technical SEO that’s often overlooked. For local SEO especially, they’re golden. 

Consider this checklist in your next web design or build (or optimisation):

✅ Use position-indicating breadcrumbs
✅ Keep them clickable
✅ Add schema markup
✅ Make them mobile-friendly
✅ Test in Search Console