What Makes a URL SEO-Friendly?

Okay, so URLs aren’t the most glamorous part of SEO… but they do matter. A clean, simple URL can help Google figure out what your page is about and also make people more likely to trust and click your link.

Let’s say you saw these two links that I’m about to display on the screen, this is the first one that ends in “/email-marketing-strategy” and then there’s another that looks like this “/page?id=28394&cat=blog&ref=xyz” which one would you click? Exactly. The first one looks like a trustworthy source, is more relevant, and less like a scam waiting to happen.

Plus, your URL doesn’t just sit in the background quietly. It shows up on Google, gets shared on socials, and pops up when someone hovers over a link. It might seem like a tiny detail, but it’s one of the first things people see… so it’s 100% worth making it look clean and trustworthy.

What Makes URLs Work

Keep your URLs short, simple, easy to read and of course, relevant to the contents of the page.

With this in mind, you should be using hyphens-between-words, and not underscores or spacing. And if your main keyword fits in the URL naturally, then great, pop it in there too! But don’t cram it in just for the sake of it.

You should avoid adding random numbers, weird codes, or 10 layers of folders. The goal is: if someone sees the link, they should know exactly what kind of content they’ll get by clicking it.

Stick to lowercase letters too. It’s cleaner, and it avoids any weird duplicate page issues further down the line.

Structure That Makes Sense

The idea is to create a URL format and stick to it. If your blog posts live under something like this “/blog/post-title”, then don’t randomly change the next one to something like this “/articles/2024/post-title”.

You should also keep your URLs as shallow as you can. Something like this “/services/seo/local-seo” is fine. But if your URL looks like this: “/services/digital-marketing/seo/local-seo/small-business/startups” ... as you can clearly see, it's just too much.