SEO-Friendly URL Structure (Website Hierarchy)

[Gsmithmike]

So i have noticed in some Service area websites, there is a landing page for services, however sometimes that refers to best practice or services area, so the URL that i usually see is maindomain.com/service-area/service-A or maindomain.com/practice-areas/practice-area-A/ question that comes in my mind is Isn't it better to shorten the URL, remove the "Practice Area" or Main Category from it, and have it in Site Breadcrumb, so still there is a relation.

Link will look like maindomain.com/service-a/ but we will see the service area still in site breadcrumb.

Wouldn't be this a better overal practice? Or we should include the main category - however i feel like the main category page do not get that much of clicks, people usually check home page, and then visit the particular service page. Is this different from eCommerce website? where you would try to remove the main category and make the link shorter?

Any suggestions or comments?

 

[Ryanl]

I'm working on re-structuring a website now and they use "mydomain.com/service-area/repair-city

I'm thinking of doing "mydomain.com/repair-city but that will give me 50+ level two urls and not sure what the response will be in the ranking.

 

[Gsmithmike]

I'm working on re-structuring a website now and they use "mydomain.com/service-area/repair-city

I'm thinking of doing "mydomain.com/repair-city but that will give me 50+ level two urls and not sure what the response will be in the ranking.

Ryanl so your example is a little bit different from mine, for this it is actually better to have shorter URL, and in the pas i have tried it for location pages, and worked.

 

[Zhivko]

I always use mydomain.com/category/service/ where "category" could be anything that the services have in common.

- It is much more user-friendly;
- It makes it very easy to monitor the traffic to all pages within a category in Google Analytics;
- It allows me to add one more relevant search term to the URL;
- It just looks much more organized. If I ever need to crawl the site and export it in a spreadsheet it is really easy to understand what I am looking at, filter out what I need or don't need, etc.

I don't believe that in this case shortening the URL will have any positive effect on rankings. But maybe someone has a case study that shows the opposite.

 

[Adufar]

So i have noticed in some Service area websites, there is a landing page for services, however sometimes that refers to best practice or services area, so the URL that i usually see is maindomain.com/service-area/service-A or maindomain.com/practice-areas/practice-area-A/ question that comes in my mind is Isn't it better to shorten the URL, remove the "Practice Area" or Main Category from it, and have it in Site Breadcrumb, so still there is a relation.

Link will look like maindomain.com/service-a/ but we will see the service area still in site breadcrumb.

Wouldn't be this a better overal practice? Or we should include the main category - however i feel like the main category page do not get that much of clicks, people usually check home page, and then visit the particular service page. Is this different from eCommerce website? where you would try to remove the main category and make the link shorter?

Any suggestions or comments?

base on my experience best practice for website structure would be

domain/service/repair-city

so on the later part if the business goes well managing it will be easy. So if you want to expand and add more pages(repair city) it would look like this

domain/AC-repair/repair-city
domain/AC-repair/repair-city2

domain/shoe-repair/shoe-repair-city1
domain/shoe-repair/shoe-repair-city2

I have also encountered a different scenario lately this time it's on a different thread Site structure for network of locations - Local Search Forum

the issue was that the client had a brandname+keyword+location and want to expand to other states




also this is easier to migrate/redirect if you have handled old websites that needs to be redirected to a new domain. So mapping the pages and matching them would be easy since you will know what old page goes to the new page.