Getting started with URL structure
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A short on-ramp to URL structure for teams who have not touched it before.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The reason this keeps coming up
Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect
- Change one thing and measure it
Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
How to tell if yours is fine
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about URL structure before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.