Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you very much! I will look at those links.

I think your last line sums everything up! It might be best to leave things as is right now, since the site won't grow that much larger for the time being (not that I am aware of anyway).

Thank you for your responses!

It does help! The site has been around for ~1 year and within the last 6 months has been doing well but could do better.

So you would leave out "law" or "lawyer" in the folders (eg: /business/commercial-contracts instead of /business-law(yer)/commercial-contracts). This would require changing the category pages to remove "lawyer" (eg: /business-lawyer/ page would now become /business/); the 301 redirects are not a problem with Umbraco.

So it is a question of whether changing the /business-lawyer/ page to remove lawyer, and then organizing each page (some-content) inside the appropriate categories (i.e. /business/some-content) would help or hurt the site. Right now the /business-lawyer/ page is doing quite well, so changing the page to remove "lawyer" would need to be offset by adding more content referring to lawyers within the page, and this might not guarantee the same link juice. However, by organizing the some-content pages inside the various categories those pages might increase.

I guess there is no way of knowing without doing it, but the risk of losing the juice for /business-lawyer/ might outweigh any POTENTIAL benefit of adding the some-content to each category (/business/some-content), which based alone on the url path might not help SEO given the fact that "business" is just 1 of 3 keywords typed into google ("business lawyer [the target area]"). I think I might just leave it alone without adding some-content to each category, but instead keeping the url path short and some-content directly after the domain.

What are your thoughts based on this rationale? Again, I really do appreciate your help!

Thank you for your reply. That is very detailed.

Perhaps I didn't give the greatest example. Instead of Arizona-dentist being the folder, perhaps a specific 'city'-dentist as the main folder. The target audience is people looking for a dentist within that specific city.

I am worried about keyword stuffing...because the main folder pages would all have the word "dentist" in them...so for example: 'city'-dentist/somecontent would be one folder and page; another folder would be /cavity-dentist/somecontent2; another would be /root-canal-dentist/somecontent3; etc.

It's very complicated to weigh up the pros and cons, and actually arrive at a logical conclusion.

What's best for SEO: a folder or no folder?

For example: https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent.

The website has 100+ pages with "dentist" within the content of the somecontent pages, as well as specific pages for /arizona-dentist/. Also, the breadcrumb for the somecontent page would appear something like follows: Arizona Dentist > Some Content ... you can find the somecontent page from the Arizona Dentist page.

I didn't include folders in the path because I did not want the url to be too long. In terms of where it is showing up on google search results...it is within the top 3-4 on the first page when searching Arizona dentist come content.

The website is pretty organized even without subfolders because it was made using Umbraco.

I am wondering if using folders will increase the SEO ranking, or if it really doesn't and could hurt it if paths become too long; especially since it's not doing too bad in the search ranking right now.

-Thanks in advance for any help.