A top goal for your website is reaching the right audience, but it’s harder to do that when your URLs are a mess. Automatically generated URLs can become cluttered, confusing, and difficult for both your audience and search engines. Plus, SEO-friendly URLs are essential because they’re a ranking factor. That means poor URLs will negatively impact your organic search rankings in Google and Bing. So, how do we optimize them?

Use concise terms

A URL can turn out looking something crazy long like this if website owners aren’t careful:

https://example.com/static/Browse/1234567890/ c_1/1%7Category%7BlogPost%7C123456/0123456%7CSEO%7C123456.html

Hard to read, right? Let’s say this URL is for a blog post about the best beaches in Florida. How about changing it to something more concise: https://example.com/blog/best-florida-beach

Not only does this give the reader a better idea about what the page is about, but also makes it easier to find the page again since they’re more likely to recall something shorter and to the point. This will drive traffic to your content, and your SEO will benefit as well.

Have only one URL per page

A good rule of thumb to remember is that each page on your site should have only one URL. Sounds obvious? Well, sometimes duplicate pages or URLs get thrown into the mix and cause a little havoc on your SEO. Always double-check that your homepage has one URL, such as example.com. Variants of this (e.g. example.com/home) can be confusing while also making it harder for Google to know which URL to rank in search results.

Know your audience

This circles back to the “simple URL” tip from earlier, just with a few adjustments. When optimizing your URLs to be SEO-friendly, it’s important to know which keywords will be most relevant to your site and your brand, but also which terms people in your target audience may be searching for the most.

If you’re branching your business out to another key demographic, consider writing copy and blog posts on your site to reflect this. This way, you’re getting the right eyes on your website. Let’s say you’re in the travel industry and want to attract a new demographic, such as retired couples. When creating new content, make sure your URLs are short and include keywords that are relevant to that audience and content topic.

Consider the structure

How you structure URLs is just as important as the words you use. This is where the ‘permalink’ comes into play, which is what follows after the domain name. For example, the permalink for this blog post is /blog/seo-friendly-urls/

Having a clean permalink structure allows people and search engines to understand and navigate your site better. Do you have multiple products or services? A couple of basic structures to consider for your permalinks are /category/page/ or /category/subcategory/page/. For instance, a wellness brand that offers a variety of supplements could format its permalinks like:

In WordPress, you can change your permalink structure or create a custom structure under Settings. When creating pages or posts, you can also edit the last string of the permalink to be shorter and easier for people to remember.

How this benefits you

When you’re trying to optimize your site for SEO, take into consideration how these practices can also be applied to achieve SEO-friendly URLs. Are you maximizing the keywords being used? Is the language clear and concise? Are the extra bits of information helping, or hindering, the search terms? There are many things to take into account, but ensuring these things above will certainly help get on the right track.

By utilizing SEO-friendly URLs, your website will garner more reach and traction, by attracting the right audience to your content. It creates a better user experience and generates backlinks that are relevant to your site.