What to ask your agency about URL structure

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on URL structure, these questions are worth asking early.

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.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

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
• Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.