SEO Guide: Salesforce Commerce Cloud URL Structure Best Practices

What are SFCC URL Syntax Options?

When you’re setting up your online store on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), one of the first things you should get familiar with is how your URLs are going to look — because believe it or not, that small detail plays a big role in how search engines and your customers experience your site.

SFCC gives you two main types of URL structures: Standard URL syntax and SEO-friendly URL syntax.

Now, let’s say you don’t tweak anything — you’ll most likely be working with standard URLs, which are more technical and look something like this:

/on/demandware.store/Sites-Storefront-Site/en_US/Product-Show?pid=12345

Sure, it works — but imagine showing that to a customer or Google. Not exactly pretty or memorable, right?

That’s why you’ll want to switch to the SEO URL syntax, which turns that same product page into something cleaner and smarter, like:

/mens/shoes/leather-sneakers.html

This not only makes your URLs more human-readable but also gives your SEO a solid push.

SEO-Friendly URL Configuration in SFCC

Alright, now that you've got the basics in place, let’s walk through some of the best practices you should absolutely keep in mind while structuring URLs in Salesforce Commerce Cloud—these small tweaks can make a big difference in how users and search engines interact with your site.

1. Enable SEO URL Rules

Let’s talk about enabling SEO URL rules in Salesforce Commerce Cloud—this is one of those little things that quietly does a lot of heavy lifting for your website’s performance.

Here’s the deal: when you’re building an eCommerce store, you don’t just want your URLs to work—you want them to work for you. That means being clean, understandable, easy to read, and search engine-friendly. 

So where do you begin? Well, you start by heading into your dashboard. 

You need to follow the process:

• Log in to your Salesforce Commerce Cloud Business Manager.​
• On the left-hand side, you'll find the main navigation menu. Click on Merchant Tools to expand its options.
• Within the expanded Merchant Tools menu, locate and click on SEO.
• Under the SEO section, you'll see URL Rules. Click on it to proceed.
• Once in the URL Rules section, you'll find multiple tabs at the top. Click on the Settings tab to configure your SEO URL rules.

Now, let’s break down what you should be doing in this section.

First, make all URLs lowercase. Sounds small, but here’s why it matters—Google sees /Shoes/Running and /shoes/running as two different pages, even though they look the same to us. This can mess with your SEO rankings and create duplicate content issues. So lowercase is just the safe and smart choice.

Next, let’s talk about spaces and special characters. You’ve probably seen URLs with %20 or odd symbols, right? Not fun to read or share. To fix that, replace spaces with hyphens. It’s cleaner, easier to read, and search engines actually prefer it. Also, if you sell international products or use non-English terms, you’ll want to define how special characters are replaced—like changing “ü” to “ue” or “ç” to “c”. This avoids breaking URLs or ending up with weird character strings.

Another thing that helps? Adding trailing slashes at the end of category or folder URLs. You might wonder—why does a single slash matter? It actually tells Google, “Hey, this is a directory, not a file,” which helps avoid indexing errors or duplicate entries. For example, /men/shoes/ is cleaner and clearer than /men/shoes.

So in summary—when you're enabling these SEO rules, you're basically training your site to talk in a language both people and search engines understand.

You’re deciding: Do I want URLs that look like example.com/product123?ref=abc123 or do I want something like example.com/women/tops/summer-blouse?

2. Define URL Rules for Catalog and Content

When you’re setting up your online store on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, one of the most important decisions you’ll make for SEO and user experience is how your product and category URLs are structured.

But why? Because a clean, logical, and predictable URL structure not only helps search engines crawl your site more easily but also makes your visitors feel like they know where they are and where they’re going.

So here's what you need to know about defining URL rules for your catalog and content in a way that keeps things smart and streamlined.

Start by thinking about how your categories are laid out. You want your category URLs to reflect the actual hierarchy of your store. If you’re selling shoes, for example, and you have “Men > Casual Shoes,” your URL should look something like:

/men/casual-shoes/

This gives clarity to both Google and your users. Now, how do you set that up? Inside SFCC, you can define what’s called a category path using a rule like [category-path, [attribute, ID]]. What this means is you’re telling the system: “Hey, use the entire path of the category, and if needed, you can tag on some identifying info.”

But when it comes to product URLs, you have a bit more choice and flexibility — and it’s worth using it wisely. Instead of just dumping the product ID at the end, you can build a rule like:

[category, [category-path, [attribute, ID], /], [productID]]

What this does is include the product’s category in the URL path — so instead of /product12345, you get something more intuitive like:

/men/casual-shoes/leather-slip-ons

This kind of URL is keyword-rich, human-readable, and gives context at a glance.

Now, here’s a practical tip — don’t go too deep with category nesting. Sure, structure is helpful, but if your URL starts looking like /shop/mens/footwear/casual/everyday/slip-ons/sale-leather-slip-ons, it becomes hard to manage, painful to remember, and clunky for Google to index. Ideally, try to keep it within 2 or 3 levels.

Another thing to keep in your back pocket is the pageURL attribute. This lets you manually override the default rule when you want a specific product to have a custom URL. So if you’re running a promo or launching a flagship item, you can tailor the link exactly how you want — maybe something like /bestsellers/black-leather-shoes.

The real goal here is to strike a balance between automation and control. You want a structure that scales with your growing catalog, but also gives you room to be intentional about the URLs that matter most.

So, think of your catalog and content URL rules like a blueprint — get them right early, and they’ll support everything from SEO to site navigation to future migrations without breaking a sweat.

3. Implement Locale Mapping for Internationalization

If you're running an online store that serves multiple countries or regions, you’ll need to think about more than just language—you have to tell search engines and users where they are and what version of your site is meant for them.

This is where locale mapping comes in, and it’s not just a backend setting—it directly affects how your URLs appear and how your content performs across markets.

Now the question is—how do you tell the system which content belongs to which region or language? In SFCC, you’ve got three main ways to do that—and picking the right one really depends on how your site is structured and how much control you want.

The first option is path-based locale mapping. It’s pretty straightforward: your locale appears right in the URL—like /en-us/shoes/sneakers for the U.S. English version, or /fr-fr/shoes/sneakers for the French version. This method is super SEO-friendly because it clearly signals to both users and search engines what region or language they're viewing. Plus, it helps you keep all versions of your site under one domain, which is great for authority and crawlability.

The second approach is using different hostnames for each locale—think us.yourstore.com or fr.yourstore.com. This one’s a bit more advanced and usually preferred by brands that want to give each country its own dedicated subdomain.

It works really well for managing completely separate experiences per market. But just remember—this means maintaining separate SEO authority per domain, so you'll need a stronger strategy to build backlinks and visibility for each one.

And then there’s the third method—query parameters like ?lang=es-mx. This one is the easiest to implement technically but the least ideal from an SEO perspective. Why? Because search engines don’t treat parameters as clearly as they treat folders or subdomains, which means content duplication or ranking issues can creep in fast.

So which one should you choose? If you’re just starting to go global, path-based is usually the best balance between ease and SEO benefits. But if you already have strong branding in specific markets, you might want to go the hostname route and make each region feel truly local.

No matter which method you pick, make sure you set it up consistently, apply hreflang tags properly, and avoid mixing methods unless you have a solid reason.

This way, users land on the right version of your site—and search engines index you correctly, without any confusion.

4. Configure Search Refinement URLs

Search refinement URLs are those links that change based on how users filter or sort products on your site—like by color, size, price, or brand. They’re essential for improving the shopping experience, but if you don’t configure them properly in the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, they can become messy, long, and SEO-unfriendly.

What you want is a clean and simple structure that still tells the search engines what’s going on. The idea is to make the refinements appear as a natural part of your category URL, not something that looks like an afterthought or a system-generated query string.

So instead of ending up with a URL like /shoes?color=blue&size=9, you want something much cleaner like /shoes/blue/size-9. This feels intuitive for both search engines and users and helps improve the click-through rate from search results.

In SFCC, you get to choose how these refinement values appear. You can set the positioning so that the refinement paths come directly after the category. You also choose delimiters—those little characters like slashes or hyphens that separate each filter. The key is to be consistent, so you’re not confusing crawlers or people with too many combinations.

At the same time, don’t go overboard with refinements. Setting a limit—say, five refinements per URL—is a good way to keep things tidy. Anything more, and your URL starts looking like a string of gibberish.

Lastly, always monitor what these URLs look like. Creating snapshots periodically in SFCC lets you double-check if the structure still aligns with your site goals and whether it's getting too bulky or repetitive.

5. Manage URL Conflicts

One of the most underrated yet crucial parts of managing a website on Salesforce Commerce Cloud is making sure your URLs don’t clash with each other — that’s what we mean by managing URL conflicts.

Imagine you're trying to create clean, search-friendly URLs for different products or categories, but somewhere along the way, two of them end up with the exact same structure. Sounds minor? It’s not. Because SFCC needs every URL to be unique, it automatically appends suffixes like -1, -2, and so on, to resolve the conflict. This might seem like a quick fix, but over time it starts cluttering your site structure and weakens your SEO game.

You don’t want customers or search engines to land on weird-looking URLs that scream "auto-generated", right? That’s where the solution lies in planning smarter. You can begin by carefully choosing product IDs, category paths, and attributes that are truly unique and predictable. It’s like labeling your boxes before putting them into storage — a small effort upfront saves hours of headache later.

Make it a practice to regularly audit your URL mappings and look out for duplicates or auto-suffixes. This way, you’ll spot patterns early, fix the root cause, and maintain a polished, trustworthy link structure.

You can even build internal naming guidelines for your content team to follow while creating new products or categories, so the system never needs to resolve a clash for you.

By keeping your URL structure conflict-free, you’re not just being neat — you’re actively boosting your site's visibility, discoverability, and overall performance in the long run.

6. Utilize Aliases for Hostname and Path Mapping

If you're managing multiple storefronts, regional versions of your site, or different brand domains under one Salesforce Commerce Cloud instance, aliases can save you from a lot of confusion and duplication issues. Aliases allow you to cleanly map different hostnames or specific paths to the appropriate site or locale without needing to overhaul your main URL structure every time you introduce something new.

You might wonder why that's important. The truth is, without aliases, users might end up accessing the same content from multiple domains or URLs—something that search engines really don’t like. It leads to duplicate content penalties, lost SEO juice, and a scattered user experience.

So instead, you can go into the Merchant Tools > SEO > Aliases section and start defining hostname aliases that tell the system exactly what to do. For example, if you’re operating both shop.brand.com and brand.co.uk, you can route them both to the same backend logic while keeping front-end URLs consistent and region-appropriate.

You can also define path-based aliases, which means if a certain page should behave differently for UK users than US ones, you don’t need to create a new version of the site. Just map the URL path accordingly.

This kind of routing keeps your marketing teams happy because URLs remain clean and on-brand, and your tech team avoids the hassle of duplicate content or creating multiple data copies.

And let’s not forget—this also makes it easier to track and analyze traffic by region or device, since you have tighter control over which domain or path users are coming through.

7. Implement Redirects and Manage Legacy URLs

If your website has been around for a while or you’re making changes to your product URLs, categories, or structure, you’ll need to handle redirects and legacy URLs smartly so that users and search engines don’t end up on broken pages.

You’re essentially telling Google, “Hey, this page has moved, but here’s where you can find it now,” and you want to make sure that this message is clear and efficient.

The best way to do that is through 301 redirects, which are permanent and help transfer the SEO value from the old URL to the new one without losing rankings. You can set these up in Merchant Tools > SEO > URL Redirects, and use them for things like product retirements, category name changes, or even seasonal URLs.

But here’s the catch—don’t chain redirects one after another, because that slows things down and confuses both browsers and bots.

Always redirect straight to the final page in one clean step.

If you’re managing a bunch of legacy URLs, it also helps to use Static or Dynamic Mappings so you can bulk-map old URLs to new ones, especially after a major redesign or migration.

And yes, always test your redirects so users never hit a dead end. That’s how you keep your SEO intact and your user experience smooth.

8. Optimize Robots.txt and Sitemaps

One of the most underrated parts of getting your website found on Google is how you guide search engines through it—and that’s where the robots.txt file and your sitemap come in.

Think of the robots.txt file as a set of directions you give to search engines, telling them which pages they should visit and which ones they should skip.

You want them to focus on the good stuff—your product pages, your categories, your content hubs—and not waste time crawling internal search pages, checkout processes, or any duplicate content paths that exist only for functionality.

It’s not about hiding pages; it’s about focusing their attention where it matters most, so your best pages get indexed faster and more effectively.

Now pair that with a sitemap, which is basically a full, updated map of your website that helps search engines discover and organize all the important URLs you want to show up in search.

This isn’t just a list—it’s a structured, dynamic blueprint of your content that you can submit directly to Google Search Console.

And if you’re running multiple locales or languages on your site, your sitemap is also the place to include hreflang tags that tell Google which version of the page is meant for which audience.

It’s this one-two combo—robots.txt narrowing the focus and the sitemap expanding the view—that creates a cleaner, faster, and more search-friendly experience.

So if you're serious about ranking better without increasing content, fix these two quiet players in your SEO setup.

Additional Tips

Apart from the main setup, here are a few extra tips that can help improve your site’s SEO and make your URLs cleaner and easier to use.

1. URL Length (Keep it under 70 characters)

When you're setting up URLs on your site, one of the simplest yet most powerful things you can do is keep them short—ideally under 70 characters.

Why? Because long URLs don’t just look cluttered, they’re harder for users to read, remember, or even trust.

And let’s be honest—when was the last time you clicked on a weirdly long link without second-guessing it? From an SEO point of view too, shorter URLs tend to perform better, simply because they’re easier for search engines to crawl, index, and display properly in search results.

Plus, if your URL gets shared on social media or in an email, you don’t want it to break or get cut off halfway through.

So, what should you do? Just use a few meaningful words that describe the page—no unnecessary product codes, filters, or tracking junk.

Think of it this way: if your URL reads like a clean signpost, people are far more likely to follow it.

2. Descriptive URLs (Use meaningful words instead of IDs)

Descriptive URLs are basically clean, meaningful web addresses that instantly tell both users and search engines what the page is about. Instead of using random numbers, special characters, or vague IDs, you want your URLs to actually describe the content they’re linking to. This isn't just about looking neat—it's about being found more easily online.

Think about it: if you’re selling a black Nike running shoe, which one makes more sense—/product/983742 or /shoes/nike-black-running-shoe? The second one not only looks better but also adds SEO value because it includes real, searchable words.

A good descriptive URL follows a consistent structure, uses keywords smartly, and skips unnecessary clutter. No one wants to click on a string of gibberish. Plus, it helps build trust—people are more likely to click when they know what to expect.

So next time you’re building a product or category page, pause and ask: does the URL speak for itself? If it does, you’re on the right track.

3. Canonical Tags (Avoid duplicate content issues)

Let’s say you’re selling a pair of shoes, and it’s listed under both “Men’s Running” and “New Arrivals.” Technically, the same product now exists on two different URLs.

That’s a red flag for search engines. They see duplicate content and get confused about which page to rank. You don’t want that.

To fix this, you use a canonical tag, which is like saying, “Hey Google, this version of the page is the main one—please treat others as its copies.”

You still keep the product visible in multiple places for your users, but behind the scenes, you guide search engines to focus on just one primary version. This helps you preserve your SEO rankings, avoid getting penalized for duplication, and ensures all the page authority flows to the right URL.

So next time your product appears in more than one place, just set a canonical tag. It’s a small technical tweak, but it keeps your SEO clean and powerful.

4. Consistent Structure (Follow same format everywhere)

Think of your website’s URLs like signboards in a city—if every street had a different naming style, you’d be lost in minutes. That’s why having a consistent structure matters so much. It gives both your users and search engines a predictable pattern to follow, which builds trust and boosts discoverability.

Start by deciding a uniform format for categories, products, and pages. For example, if you're listing products under categories, always go with something like /category/product-name instead of switching between /shop/product or /products?id=123.

Once you've locked that structure, stick to it everywhere—don’t let different teams or tools generate random variations.

This also helps when you expand your site or introduce new content, as every new URL will fall into the same familiar framework.

Imagine a shopper seeing a new product—if the URL layout feels familiar, they’ll know they’re in the right place. That kind of consistency creates a smoother experience and silently signals professionalism.

5. Avoid Dynamic Parameters in Main URLs

When you’re setting up your site structure, think about how the URLs appear not just to search engines, but to your customers too. If your main product or category pages include dynamic parameters like ?type=, &sort=, or =value, they immediately start to look messy, robotic, and honestly—confusing.

You don’t want users second-guessing where they’ve landed, right? And search engines? They get suspicious when they see the same content under different parameter-loaded URLs.

So the smart move is this: keep your core URLs clean and static—short, readable, and keyword-rich.

Let the filters, sorting, and pagination stay behind the scenes or work with canonical tags if you really need them.

Instead of /shop?cat=men&sort=top, just go with something like /mens/t-shirts and let it breathe.

You’re not just making your SEO better—you’re giving every user a clearer path to what they came for.

6. Use Keywords Strategically in URLs

Think of your URL as a mini summary of the page — now wouldn’t you want it to speak the language your customers actually search for?

When you're naming a product or category page, try to include the words people would type on Google to find it.

It’s not just about stuffing in terms like “best” or “cheap” randomly, but really thinking — what would you type if you were looking for this product? That’s the keyword you want in your URL.

This makes your link look clear and intentional to both users and search engines. And bonus? It helps your page show up higher in search results.

So instead of something like /p/7821, go with /home-appliances/air-purifier-hepa. You're giving context, value, and clarity in just one line — and that’s SEO gold.

Summary

Your URL structure isn't just a technical detail—it's a direct line to how search engines and real people understand your site.

So, what’s the right approach?

Start by thinking from your customer’s perspective. If the link looks clean, makes sense, and uses real words, you’re already ahead.

Now combine that with a little structure—consistent patterns, short readable paths, and smart use of tags like canonical URLs—and you're setting your site up for better visibility and less confusion.

Avoid IDs, trim the clutter, and don’t overthink every character. Just aim for clarity, simplicity, and logic in every link you publish.

Because at the end of the day, a well-structured URL does more than look nice—it quietly boosts everything else you’re trying to achieve.

FAQs

1. Why does URL structure matter for SEO in SFCC?

A clean and simple URL helps search engines understand what the page is about. In SFCC, good URL structure improves search rankings and user trust. If URLs are long, messy, or unclear, it can confuse users and reduce traffic to your online store.

2. Can I customize product URLs in SFCC to include keywords?

Yes! SFCC allows you to add product names or keywords in URLs using SEO URL rules. This helps your pages rank better in search results. For example, instead of /p12345, use /men-sneakers-nike-airmax to make it more readable and search-friendly.

3. What happens if two products have the same name in URLs?

SFCC automatically adds numbers like -1, -2 at the end to avoid URL conflicts. But it’s better to ensure each product has a unique name or ID in the URL. This keeps your site clean and avoids duplicate content problems that can affect SEO.

4. Should I use categories in my URLs or just product names?

Including category paths like /men/shoes/nike-airmax gives more context to both users and search engines. It’s good for SEO and helps users know where they are. But keep it short—2 or 3 levels max—to avoid making URLs too long or complicated.

5. How can I handle old URLs after making changes?

Use 301 redirects in SFCC to guide users from old URLs to new ones. This keeps your SEO ranking and prevents broken links. You can set these redirects in the SEO tools so that customers don’t land on error pages when you change product or category names.