While URL structure isn’t the most interesting of topics, it is important. Your URL is the very first thing Google, and sometimes users, see. If it’s an incoherent mess of numbers, random letters, and irrelevant words, you’re going to confuse both search engines and users, and this won't provide a very good first impression.
If you’re new to URLs, then don’t worry. Here’s how you can structure them so they make sense to humans and rank well in search engines.
When it comes to URLs, being as concise as possible is best. Letting your CMS (such as WordPress or Shopify) automatically generate the URL based on the entire title of your blog post or product page can be fine sometimes, but it often leaves you with a bulky URL filled with unnecessary characters.
Shorter URLs are easier to read and share on social media, and they prevent search engines from shortening your links in the search results. Remove any ‘fluff’ and ‘stop words’ (i.e. and, or, but, the), and get straight to the point.
This was debated in the SEO world for a long time, but Google’s documentation does recommend hyphens over underscores.
Google’s crawlers are programmed to read a hyphen as a space between words. For example, if you write digital-marketing-leeds, Google reads ‘digital marketing leeds’. But if you use underscores instead (digital_marketing_leeds), the URL may be read differently, particularly as underscores are used for functions in many programming languages.
You should only be using lowercase letters in your URLs. It may seem like overkill, but it does matter for technical SEO.
Google and most other web systems are case-sensitive, meaning they treat uppercase and lowercase letters as different, even if some websites don’t. URLs that look the same could actually be treated as two entirely different pages. And if other websites link to different variations, or if users type them in differently, it could create duplicate content issues and weaken your SEO efforts. Keeping everything lowercase eliminates that risk entirely.
If you have a blog or any kind of content hub, don’t include dates in your URLs.
Including dates creates an instant expiration date on your content, plus it makes the overall URL longer. If you write a high-performing guide this year, you will want to update it next year to keep it fresh and relevant. But, if ‘2026’ is hardcoded into the URL, updating the post for 2027 becomes more challenging. You either have to keep the old URL, which looks outdated to users, or set up a redirect to a new URL, which risks losing some SEO juice. Keep the URL timeless and just update the content on the page itself.
Your URL should tell Google and the user exactly where they are on your website. You want a logical flow from the broad category down to the specific product or post they’re reading.
This structured approach, using subdirectories (the folders separated by slashes), helps Google, and likely LLMs too, understand the relationship between your pages.
Lastly, it’s important to include target keywords of the page in question. Previously, this was very important to Google, particularly for the domain URL, and while its importance has since lessened, it does still offer an opportunity to improve rankings.
A good URL should pass the human test. If you read the link out loud to someone who has never seen your website, they should be able to guess exactly what is on the page, and it should be short and logical enough that they could then write it down immediately after.
Don’t rely on auto-generated URLs with irrelevant or wasteful characters, and instead take the time to craft a clean, descriptive, and evergreen URL.
If you’re looking for expert guidance on URLs or your wider SEO strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
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