How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations
-
We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations.
We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows:
www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}
Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes)
The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes".
To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this.
Option 1
Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path:
Option 2
Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path:
www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location}
(i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes)
Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!
-
Hi David,
Typically, your main landing pages are going to be those that represent the city of location, as in:
etc.
What I'm trying to understand is if you are saying you have more than one office within a single city (as in orlando office A, orlando office B, orlando office C) and are trying to hash out how to distinguish these same-city offices from one another. Is this the scenario, or am I not getting it? Please feel free to provide further details.
-
David -
It looks like there are two main options for you:
Keep the same URL structure (option 1), and create category pages that are state-based / area-based, that then have a short description of each location in that geographic area, with a link to their location page.
This is typically how it might be done with an eCommerce site, where you'd have a parent category (i.e. shoes) and then a sub-category (i.e. running shoes).
The downside to this is that you risk having duplicate content on these category pages.
Option #2 would be my recommendation, because you are including the area / state information into the URL.
One company that does not do this well is Noodles & Company. Their location URL looks like this:
http://www.noodles.com/locations/150/
... where "150" is a store ID in a database. Easy to pull out of a database table. Less helpful to the end user who doesn't know that store ID 150 = the one closest to them.
It would be much better to have it listed like:
http://www.noodles.com/locations/Colorado/Boulder/2602-Baseline/You don't want to go much beyond 4 layers, but it's a better way of indicating to Google and other search engines the location tree.
Also, I'd highly recommend using a rich-data format for displaying the location information.
For example, on the Customer Paradigm site, we use the RDFa system for tagging the location properly:
Customer Paradigm
5353 Manhattan Circle
Suite 103
Boulder CO, 80303
303.473.4400
... and then Google doesn't have to guess what the location's address and phone number actually are.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
What's the best way to host Videos on my Wordpress site? (SEO-wise)
I have a hard time choosing whether to stream my videos from certain platforms like vimeo, youtube, etc. or embedding the videos into my site, and I'm not quite sure which one Google would like to see more of? And which style will save my page speed from plummeting too much. Any ideas? Thanks guys
On-Page Optimization | | Benavest0 -
Thousands of 404's showing up from Wordpress Blog!?!?
Hey guys, Have recently seen thousands of 404 errors thrown up from my wordpress blog in Google Search Console. These are URL's trying to link (i'm not sure where from) to other parts of my site, but they are not relative to the site root... infact they are a mix of random folders/subfolders and pages on my site. E.g: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/st-martin-de-belleville/chalet-st-martin-de-belleville/ski-holidays/ski-holidays/summer/st-martin-de-belleville/summer/your-stay-st-martin-de-belleville.html This is a link to a picture on the blog: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/ And the rest of it is finding it's own way there! Any ideas? This is Wordpress by the way. Cheers, Paul. p.s. I got no help from the Wordpress community so am posting here! p.p.s I forgot to mention that MOZ is reporting these issues too, but running Screaming Frog does NOT show any 404's at all on my site...
On-Page Optimization | | SnowTrippin0 -
URL structure for professional services across multiple industries
I am working with a company who does consulting work across multiple industries, but the services are essentially the same. Example Services: They implement "Customer Relationship Management" systems and "Data Archiving" Solutions. Example Industries: The services above can each apply to "Oil & Gas" or "Retail". Example URL Structures: mysite.com/oil-gas <-- This page would also contain links to all of the services provided to the Oil & Gas industry. mysite.com/oil-gas/customer-relationship-management-system mysite.com/retail mysite.com/retail/customer-relationship-management-system This seems like the best way to go, as long as i'm writing unique content, for each industry, for each service (i.e. I need to explain how a CRM solution solves specific problems in retail and OTHER specific problems in Oil & Gas). While there will certainly be some overlap, this approach seems logical to me. The URL length isn't too long either, which is nice. The company currently solely focuses on services in URL structure (not a very deep site): mysite.com/customer-relationship-management-system mysite.com/data-archiving Since they have already worked with hundreds of clients in multiple industries, it seems smarter to start focusing more on individual customer segments. Would anyone else do this differently? Thanks, Alex
On-Page Optimization | | MeasureEverything0 -
URL Structure Category Pages -Current Moz Friday-
Hello,
On-Page Optimization | | _Heiko_
regarding #15 of the last moz friday I have a question: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls What would you prefer if the lenght of the URL will be still under 60 characters and you have an example like this: Let's call it a specific page in a category. As I like the old shoe examples: You have a page about red shoes in your shoe category. Which URL would you prefer: a) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red-shoe b) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe). c) would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder. What's your opinion on this?1 -
Better to hyphenate URL or no?
Sea Glass Jewelry or Sea-Glass-Jewelry My domain name does not have my keyword in it, so I have been using the category as a means to get the keyword in the URL. My site would say www.abcdefghijk.com/sea-glass-jewelry/sterling-starfish-necklace When I run the review, it tells me that I have too many parameters. Is it too long? Should I remove hyphens? Which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Will google put logo's in as author snippets?
Are they smart enough to tell it is not a mug shot and then not show it? Has anyone ever seen a logo as a snippet? What are some of the factors to with whether they show them or not?
On-Page Optimization | | Adsau0 -
Permalink structure and categories on Joomla
Hey all, I'm handling a website for a youth telecom brand. We're migrating our website from droople to joomla with a completely new design. The entire revamp has been outsourced and I'm responsible for overseeing it. As it stands, our URL structure is something like www.xyz.com/category/item I want to change to category/child-category format: www.xyz.com/category/child-vategory/item In terms of SEO, how would this change impact results, pros and cons? Cheers.
On-Page Optimization | | HasanPK0 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0