URL structure: the questions we get asked most

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. The questions about URL structure that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Do we need to care about this?

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How do we know it is working?

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about URL structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.