Keyword Phrase in URL structure

[ErnieB]

Wondered the best URL structure, to include a major keyword phrase.  Our clients' case is that their domain name is not the main keyword.  So should we include the keyword phrase in the URL structure to list all their office locations:

A - www.website.com/anxiety-treatment/denver/1001
or
B - www.website.com/denver/1001

Would this be considered keyword stuffing?  We'd like "A" above to rank for keyword phrases related to "anxiety treatment denver", etc.

[ErnieB]

Hi Rebecca -

Thanks for the fast reply!  In my example, how would you structure the "find a business" URL's vs. the "specific business location page" URL:

website.com/anxiety-treatment/co/denver

• to browse a directory
• to allow users to work backwards to find a location in another city

website.com/johnson-anxiety-treatment-center-denver-co

• as the link to the one specific office in denver named "Johnson Anxiety Treatment Center"?

Do you feel that the specific office page needs to be in the same URL structure as the browse a directory? If so then it would be super long like this:
website.com/anxiety-treatment/co/denver/johnson1001

Appreciate your thoughts & reply.

[Toddfoster]

Hi Bernie,

Having just completed a silo-structure site for a client which featured exactly this problem, I can tell you that this is not going to help with rankings unless you are featuring multiple locations with similar keywords/services.

In our case, the client (a physiotherapy clinic) has 3 separate locations which all provide the same services. In this case, we instituted a keyword phrase for local SEO into the URL structure. Example:

www.brand.com/city1/city1-physiotherapy
www.brand.com/city2/city2-physiotherapy
www.brand.com/city3/city3-physiotherapy

This gives it a bit of extra relevancy for the keyphrase "city1 physiotherapy" or "physiotherapy city1", but that is where the URL structure-keyword benefits end. We did it because the client wanted to specifically target a single keyword phrase at the cost of targeting other phrases. If you are okay with that result, then this works great. In your case, the result could be a domain that reads:

www.website.com/denver-anxiety-treatment/1001

or, if you have multiple locations:

www.website.com/denver/anxiety-treatment/1001
www.website.com/boulder/anxiety-treatment/1001

I should point out that these are relatively minor ranking factors, and that you are probably better off focusing on major issues like your link profile, content marketing and website health rather than the URL structure. This is becoming less and less important to search engines and the benefits you gain from them generally aren't worth the time you invest.

Anyways, hope this helps and feel free to get in touch if you need help or clarifcation.

All the best,

Rob

[BradsDeals]

It wouldn't be considered keyword stuffing, but the benefit of adding the keyword may be lost by the fact that you've made your URL longer and buried the pages another level down in the subdirectory structure. It's a nice bit of readability, but my guess is it's not going to have much impact on ranking.

For me, the relative neutrality of it and the low risk means that I'd consider user experience the deciding factor. Google will display the URL in any SERPs you rank in, and having the keyword visible there is probably a good thing for the searcher.

Check out Rand's post about structuring URLs (particularly #3).