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
-
Separate URL vs iFrame
Hi Everyone, I'm not a designer/developer and am an not extremely knowledgeable in SEO, but I'll try to be as clear as I can. One of the designers here is creating a recipe section on our website. He created it so that it's a container (or iFrame?) on the page. Basically, no matter what you click (different sections and recipes) the URL stays the same. I was told to find out from an SEO perspective if it's better to do things this way or have a separate URL for each section and recipe. It's been brought up that from a social/sharing standpoint separate URLs would be better so people can send a link directly to the specific recipe they want to share. Any thoughts/comments are appreciated! Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | AliMac260 -
URL for a new website
Hi, I am creating a new website for a client. Is it best to include the keywords from the most common search in the domain name, they would like: forenamesurname.com but should I be recommending: weddingmakeupbyforename.com Does it make much difference to search rankings if the keyword is in the domain name? Thanks v much
On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn100 -
Tips on URL structure for a site re-design
Wanted to know what you would do with regards to urls – in an ideal world how would you structure them? Keen to know as me and dave are soon to have a meeting about this and were wondering about changing them from the current – http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/gatwick to something like - www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-parking We will soon have pages for the specific parking types that will be a lot more engaging to users with some really useful content on benefits, features, how a certain type of parking works, images, video etc. Currently going to a type of parking, such as meet and greet just brings up a dropdown modal – I was thinking of having the url structure looking like this – www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-meet-and-greet-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-on-site-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-park-and-ride We will then have specific pages for each parking product – in which this product will have unique content built around it – each will have an overview of the product, benefits, features, reviews, images, directions to the car park, find your route and eventually a video on each product So for example we currently have the product “Jet Parks 2” at Manchester airport – the current url is - http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/manchester/park-and-ride/jetparks-2 I would like to change this now we have the opportunity to refresh the whole system, to something along the lines of **domain/location/product title - **www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-2 or as we have some similar products at certain airports (mainly where the airport has multiple terminals) we would just change it to the following - www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-3 What are peoples thoughts/opinions on the above?
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
Can Your Site Get Penalized For Keyword Stuffing On An 'Untarged' Keyword?
My site has dropped since the EMD/Panda 20 roll out and I am looking for reasons why. I am looking at Keyword Stuffing as one potential problem. My web site is on the topic of WordPress Security with that being the main keyword I want to target. Now I can limit the number of occurrences of 'wordpress security' to below the recommended 15, but it is impossible to do this for 'wordpress' without severely compromising the user experience. I've got other content on topics such as WordPress Backup and WordPress Security Plugins etc, so obviously the word 'wordpress' is bound to appear frequently. Is there a risk that Google will penalize me for Keyword Stuffing on 'wordpress' and thus pull down the site or page for other keywords? Or would it simply mean I won't be able to rank for 'wordpress' (which I am quite happy about)? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | andersvin0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Site Structure
I'm confused about the best way for seo to set up the site structure . i understand the examples of the pyramid diagrams and how link juice flows, however does this mean that global navigation is not good? It appears the pyramid structure leads to the designated number of category pages (we'll use five) and they lead to the 5 content pages etc and some "superman pages" can be linked to from the home page but is this is global navigation or anchor text navigation and is gloval navigation acdeptable for content pages? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | JulB0 -
The URL Inside
Howdy SEO'ers, I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there. When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other? Example 1: http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name Example 2: http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones. Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking? Thanks! I'll hang-up and listen to your answer. 🙂 Jonathan
On-Page Optimization | | creativedepartment0 -
Value of PDF's in SEO
I have a client who has a lot of information in PDF form. They think they should move some of it over into HTML pages so it indexes better. Is there a benefit to converting these PDF's into HTML pages? It seems to me that HTML pages would be good, IF they are relevant pages that could be used online.
On-Page Optimization | | lvstrickland0