Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
-
Hi Mozzers,
My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad
My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc.
I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like:
example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-vaOR
example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lightingIn both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it.
Thoughts?
Thank you!!
-
No website in particular that springs to mind, I'm afraid. But it's not uncommon practice, and I'm sure you'll find plenty within your industry from a little competitor research.
Good luck!
-
This is great stuff. Thank you! Would you happen to have an example of a site that does this well? I think you're spot on in your suggestions and would love to see it in practice.
-
(I had posted my response, but Moz didn't fancy saving it for some reason and it's just gone. So I'll try and remember what I typed and repost it...)
I wouldn't dilute the site authority by using subdomains for your locations.
As a user, I would recommend your main site navigation lists the different event types (weddings, parties, corporate, etc) and branch your locations from there.
e.g.
-
Weddings - /weddings/ (Weddings)
-
Miami - /weddings/miami/ (Weddings in Miami)
-
Planners - /weddings/miami/planners/ (Wedding Planners in Miami)
-
DJs - /weddings/miami/djs/ (Wedding DJs in Miami)
-
Ballroom Lighting - /weddings/miami/ballroom-lighting/ (Ballroom Lighting for Weddings in Miami)
That structure seems the most logical to me, but you should do your own research to back this up. Conduct thorough keyword research for each service in each location and structure your landing page content accordingly. For example, main category pages broadly targeting root keyword, but display "cards" or sections that link to each location without optimising those main category pages for the locations - save this for the location-based landing pages. So this sub-navigation is in the body, rather than in the main navigation, for user-friendliness.
I think with something like events, you don't want to shove the locations in the user's face first thing. Let them see what you offer (the different event types), then delve down into the locations, and the specific services within those locations.
People are free to disagree with me, and I welcome critique on these thoughts. I do think with SEO, it gets to a point after "best practices" that it comes down to more of personal preferences.
-
-
Excellent advice Ria. I'll likely give that advice to the client.
Another question that brewed from this: how then should main navigation be handled as we expand? obviously we can't have D.C. centric keywords in the main navigation as the business expands. I think we could create unique content and landing pages for each individual service and location, but how would that be incorporate into the overall user flow and URL structure?
Would it be more of a sitemap play? If someone goes to www.example.com, should they be given an option to choose their location then be routed to that specific city's subdomain and yhenbrowse from there?
I guess my main question is, how exactly should we structure the site navigation for users from multiple cities to both please UX and the big G?
Thank you!
-
For a handful of different locations, it's quite common to structure them as different subdirectories, as you said. site.com/weddings/miami/planners or /miami/weddings/planners - whichever makes the most sense for your customer base and how you're targeting the content.
Just ensure that these are not considered doorway pages or appear to be too templated. Make each landing page for each location unique, and tailored specifically to your customers in each location. If you have nothing unique to say, then you don't need separate pages. It would be best to target the different locations on the same landing pages. But you being the expert in the industry, I can imagine it'll be easy enough to cater toward each audience specifically. Especially when you're not dealing with tens if not hundreds or thousands of different towns.
If you are certain on expanding to different cities soon, then it might be best to begin the URL structuring with /washington-dc/ subdirectory somewhere, so you don't have to change this later.
-
Thank you, Ria. That's very helpful.
Im curious, when the business expands to different cities in the coming months (for example, Miami and Chicago are being considered, not yet finalized), then in that case I would assume we need to have location in the URL path for the sake of designation and differentiation. This may be a sub folder in and of itself though. Thoughts?
-
I'd avoid adding the location in the URL if you only work with those services for a single location. It looks messy to the user, and can look spammy to Google. And it would save you from having to change the URL and set up redirects, if you need to remove the location keywords from the URL at a later date in order to please the Big G. Optimising for location within the content, title and meta can be easily tweaked with time. Tweaking URLs can be a lot messier.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php. Has anyone else experienced such a thing? I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
How to prevent 404's from a job board ?
I have a new client with a job listing board on their site. I am getting a bunch of 404 errors as they delete the filled jobs. Question: Should we leave the the jobs pages up for extra content and entry points to the site and put a notice like this job has been filled, please search our other job listings ? Or should I no index - no follow these pages ? Or any other suggestions - it is an employment agency site. Overall what would be the best practice going forward - we are looking at probably 20 jobs / pages per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0