Advice on URL structure for competing against EMDs of a hot keyword
-
Here is the question, illustrated with an example:
A law client focuses on personal injury. Their domain is nondescript.
The question comes into the URL structure for an article section of the site (I think I know what most people here will say, but want to raise this anyway). This section will have several hundred 'personal injury' articles at launch, with 100+ added each month by writers. Most articles do not mention 'personal injury' in the titles or in the content, but focus on the many areas in which people can hurt themselves :-).
Spreading a single keyword emphasis across many pages/posts is considered poor form by many, but the counter-argument is that hundreds of articles, all with 'personal injury' in the URL, could increase the overall authority of the site for that term (and may compete more strongly with EMD competitors).
For instance, let's say Competitor A has this article:
www.acmepersonalinjury.com/articles/tips-if-in-car-accident
And we had the following options:
Option A: www.baddomain.com/articles/tips-if-in-car-accident
Option B: www.baddomain.com/personal-injury-articles/tips-if-in-car-accident
Of course, for the term "car accident", Option A seems on equal footing with the ACME competitor. But, what about the overall performance of the "personal injury" keyword (a HOT keyword in this space)? Would ACME always have an advantage (however slight) due to its domain? Would Option B help in this regard?
The downside of course is that this pushes "car accident" further down in the URL string, making all articles perhaps less competitive on their individual keywords.
-
yes, of course, and thank you again for the reply. In this case it is hundreds of lawyers and paralegals specializing in personal injury. This is just a very technical question on which structure (longer or shorter, Option A or B in the above example) would lead to any possible, even if minute, advantages.
-
My URL structure would be based upon the composition of my potential content library.... and the composition of my content library would be determined by my expertise and the topics that I believe provide value to my business.
-
Thank you very much for the reply. The hundred articles is a bit misleading, most of this is user-generated content, although there are a few articles by paid writers (and not at $5/each, not those type of articles). The community is already very active, we are just relocating it.
And yes, URL keyword structure is a very minor thing in the overall scope of things - that being said, if one style is even slightly better then another style, certainly a one-minute WordPress permalink definition now for even a <1% gain is worth the time. Just curious, all things being equal, which URL structure would seem to do better, even if very slightly.
-
I think that you might be giving way way too much credit to the importance of keywords in a URL and the influence that a lot of pages might have in improving your rankings.
I think that URL keywords and pagecount are tiny tiny factors.
...This section will have several hundred 'personal injury' articles at launch, with 100+ added each month by writers.).
If you are launching a content development program based upon these assumptions you might be really wasting your money. And when I hear you are going to be adding hundreds of articles per month I think that you are either paying an awful lot of money if you are buying quality or you are buying a lot of BS articles.
Rather than blather out a hundred BS articles a month, I would rather have three kickass articles per month that will be shared, emailed and linked to. Depending upon the market you are attacking I might raise the number to something higher than three... but I use three to contrast quality with the quantity you propose.
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 to do with parameter urls?
We have a ton of ugly parameter urls that are coming up in google, in semrush, etc. What do we do with them? I know they can cause issues. EX https://www.hibbshomes.com/wp-content/themes/highstand/assets/js/cubeportfolio/js/jquery.cubeportfolio.min.js?ver=6.3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stldanni0 -
Website URL Structure - keyword targeting on homepage vs internal pages
I have developed a few websites before where the homepage contains the content for the keywords I was targeting. This has been reasonably successful as I have found it easy enough to get links to the homepage. I am considering a new site in a totally different industry that I am thinking about structuring like this: mybrand.com (not necessarily targeting any keywords) mybrand.com/important-keyword-1/ (definitely want to target) mybrand.com/important-keyword-2 (equally important as 1st keyword) There will be several (30-ish) other pages targeting keywords but they are not as significant as the two mentioned above, more so they are about publishing informative information. The two important keywords are quite different but industry related. My questions are: should I be careful targeting keywords away from the homepage when the homepage gets the most links? Would I be better off building 2 different websites where the keyword content is captured in the homepage? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGu0 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Keyword stuffing
Hi all. I'm working on this page - http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses - for the term 'dolls houses'. It's not doing great at the minute (23rd in GUK) and I was wondering if it might be down to the volume of exact match keywords on the page (32). If not, does anyone have any other pointers? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Internal structure update
How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to do a 301 redirect for url's with this structure?
In an effort to clean up my url's I'm trying to shorten them by using a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file. How would I set up a rule to grab all urls with a specific structure to a new shorter url examples: http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/article-title http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/article-title So in the example above dynamically redirect all url's with /articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/ in it to /reviews/ so http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/boat-reviews/item/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/other-reviews/item/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/articles/reviews/fishing-gear-reviews/item/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail would be... http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1550-review-nucanoe-frontier http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1551-review-spyderco-salt http://www.yakangler.com/reviews/1524-slayer-inc-sinister-swim-tail with one 301 redirect rule in my .htaccess file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mr_w0