Mastering Digital Marketing: Your Questions Answered

Does URL structure affect SEO?

Written by solomon | Aug 10, 2023 10:15:54 PM

Among the many other aspects of a page that affect SEO is the URL itself. Apart from helping you rank for certain search terms, URLs can also provide Google with more information about the topic and influence relevancy.

Include Relevant Keywords

To help Google deem your page relevant, optimize your URLs with the same or similar keywords included in the title of your page. Ideally, you should also make sure that your URL omits unnecessary words, including small connecting words such as "from," "in," "is," "the," "to," "with," and other broad words that don't matter in the context of a URL. Google only needs to see relevant keywords in the domain.

For instance, if you want to rank a page titled "The Best Ways to Rank with SEO," the corresponding URL would look something like "www.yourwebsite.com/best-ways-rank-seo".

Consider Categories

The more context Google has for a webpage, the better chance you'll have at ranking for the terms you want. While Schema data is a popular way to give Google plenty of information about your website in the backend, an even easier way to give Google context is to include categories in the URL that indicate what type of topic your page specifically targets.

Categories appearing in the URL will correspond with the subpages on your website. An example for the aforementioned page might look like "www.yourwebsite.com/blog/seo-strategies/best-ways-rank-seo". This further indicates to Google that this is a page more about specific "SEO strategies" rather than simply vague ways to rank with SEO.

URLs may not have the final say in how well your page performs, as that's more dependent on the actual content on the page along with titles, meta descriptions, and headers. However, you should pay attention to how your URL is constructed like any other aspect of your SEO campaign, and it may help provide a subtle boost.