Mitchell Thanks for adding me to this awesome Search Engine Optimization (SEO) group. I'm trying to figure out the best way to structure my website for SEO purposes. Pardon me if this is a stupid question. I understand blog posts and categories, but how can someone create categories on pages? Is it just naming the pages with a category /name/ in front? For example, I provide multiple services, so I would think for SEO purposes Google would like it structured as follows: domainname .com/services/kitchen-remodel domainname .com/services/kitchen-remodel/service-city/atlanta domainname .com/services/bathroom-remodel domainname .com/services/bathroom-remodel/service-city/atlanta Should I have created a blog site if I wanted categories? 5 👍🏽5 20 💬🗨📰👈
Aaron We use to build urls that would read website.com/service/service-city/, etc Most of our urls look like this now. Website.com/bathroom-remodeling-city-state/ With an emphasis on the exact keyword we are targeting. We don't build links to service pages and we find that it's better to over optimize your urls than to build links to pages that people normally wouldn't link out to. I find that this helps close the gap without building links. I honestly don't think it's necessary to categorize your urls. We only do it for blogs so it reads website.com/blog/topic Hope that helps WEBSITE.COM Website.com
Mitchell ✍️ Aaron thanks you very much. Should I add the state abbreviation on the tail end? Aaron » Mitchell When we go through the initial keyword research process, we identify what would be the primary keyword for each page and we optimize the url accordingly. Some do some don't. However, in situations where the city name is used in other states, it's probably safer to add the state. I cant exactly pinpoint if this is the case, but I've seen so many people complain about indexing issues and we've seen the exact opposite. Our sites are getting picked up faster than ever Mitchell ✍️ Aaron when I begin typing my keyphrase "kitchen remodel atlanta" Google shows underneath the suggested search, "kitchen remodel atlanta ga Aaron » Mitchell Send me a pm, I'll take a look for you
Mike 🎩 From the way you are describing it, I'm assuming you are using WordPress. All you need to do is create "parent pages" as your "categories and then use the right permalink structure. Mew 👑🎩 Hey Jack, In our experience appending the entire keyword and location to the second hope allows for a more thorough crawl, and higher index positioning rates. root .com (should always be your highest keyword, probably "Home Remodeling +City") root .com/kitchen-remodeling+city/ root .com/bathroom-remodeling-city/ We have tested alternate and opposing ways, and the above works the quickest and most efficiently, without causing canibalization in sub directories. Hope this helps!
Mitchell ✍️ Mew yes, it helps a lot, thank you.
Joseph Similar question…any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We're getting ready to launch the first group of location pages for real estate agents (directory, seed keyword "top real estate agents"). The goal is to go nationwide. Here's the question…which setup is better? Something like root .com/find-top-real-estate-agents-in-your-area/ (links to all state pages) > root. com/California (links to all city pages) > root .com/top-real-estate-agents-los-angeles-ca/ Or… Skip the state pages and just have root .com/find-top-real-estate-agents-in-your-area/ and link to all cities from this page? There isn't any real value in the state pages, meaning users who search for these are most likely not the ideal user we want.
Mew 👑🎩 » Joseph Hey Joseph, In this case, I would copy the top aggregators of real estate in the nation. I believe they use a /state/real-estate-agent-+city/ and then create an index of all states and cities that real estate agents are in. I would have to do further research but it would look something like: /al/real-estate-agents-+city/ /ak/real-estate-agents-+city/ /az/real-estate-agents-+city/ This will keep your hops right around 3 as well with, root, state, city which is steal easily crawled. I would put a anchored URL somewhere at the bottom of the page that says "See All Our Real Estate Agents in +State" that links to a directory for just that state @ /real-estate-agents-state/, and then on that directory page another URL that says "See All Our Real Estate Agents In The Country" @ /real-estate-agents-in-the-usa/ This will help a continuous crawl of all pages via loop, but also create indexable categorical pages for searches that have to do with real estate agents in the "State" as a whole. Just my 0.02 and someone else may have a better way Joseph » Mew Thank you, much appreciated! The 2 top competitors do this… root /los-angeles-ca/top-real-estate-agents and root/agents/california/los-angeles They did these ~10 years ago. Is there a drawback to not having the state in its own folder? e.g. if we did something like root/top-real-estate-agents-los-angeles-ca…we'd still have the main u.s. and state pages and link on the pages as you suggested. I've used a page to test and the root keyword for "top" is "top real estate agents in los angeles ca" but without "top" it's "los angeles real estate agent" Mew 👑🎩 » Joseph The only draw back I see is you won't have states as sub directories. Google crawls index pages much quicker when you have bulk scenarios like this. If silos the website a bit easier for their crawlers. Otherwise I don't think either will make or break the strategy. As long as Google understands the page it shouldn't be a problem Joseph » Mew Thank you
