URL Slugs and Their Relationship to SEO

Maximizing your SEO opportunities is important for any business, but especially for local businesses. Getting your brand in front of the right customer base is essential to your success. 

While most local business owners know about SEO as it pertains to their website content, Google Business Profile listing, and paid ad campaigns, many don’t realize URL slugs can have a positive effect on your SEO, too. Done right, your URL slugs can really help your website climb the search engine rankings.   

And now you’re wondering what a URL slug actually is. That’s okay.  Though you may have heard it from time to time, it’s not the most common term in the digital marketing world. 

As you probably know, a URL is simply a web address, like www.-yourcompanyname-.com.  A URL slug is the portion of the URL that describes a specific webpage.  The slug is generally what’s included after the “.com/.” Here’s an example. 

URL slugs are important to SEO for a few reasons - one is Google indexing, and the other is end user experience.

Google Indexing 

When Google’s bots are crawling all over your site, collecting information for the search engine, your URL slugs are among the first things the bots look at. Is the slug relevant to what’s on the webpage? Is it short and clear?  Does it contain keywords? These are all bits of information Google’s bots will send back their server. 

If the answer is yes to those questions, your site will be considered more trustworthy and therefore, rank higher than sites with less effective slugs.

End User Experience

How often do you look at a web address and immediately decide whether or not you’re going to click on it? Probably all the time. We don’t always realize it, but we frequently check URL slugs to determine if a webpage is going to contain the information we’re seeking.  If you’re shopping for a wedding dress, for example, you won't click a link that reads “www.wedding.stuff.com/wedding-cakes.”  After all, you’re looking for a dress, not for cakes. 

Using clear, relevant slugs makes it easy for the end user to find what they need and enhances their experience with your website. 

Optimizing Your URL Slugs 

Creating strong, SEO-friendly slugs is easy.  All you need to do is apply the basics of SEO and follow these simple guidelines.   

Use Keywords in a Smart Way 

Including relevant keywords in your slug is perhaps the single most important thing when it comes to SEO. But don’t overdo it.   

When Google looks at a webpage, it wants to see helpful content with appropriately used keywords. It doesn’t want content that’s bloated with keywords just for the sake of ranking. Same goes for your slugs. Keep it simple and only include the keywords most relevant to the page. Remember, keyword stuffing often results in ranking lower, not higher. 

Create Slugs That Are Clear and Informative

URL slugs should give both Google and the end user a clear idea of what’s on the page. Depending on the interface you’re using to build your website, default slugs may simply be a number or some other generic text. These slugs won’t be helpful to your potential customers and they’ll have no positive effect on your ranking. 

Ensure Your Slugs are Evergreen 

You’ve likely heard of evergreen content. Evergreen is just another way of saying “fresh” or “continually relevant” content. This is important for SEO because evergreen content continues to rank in searches long after it’s published. Content that’s not evergreen – like news about a sporting event or a list of this year’s popular toys – will soon be outdated and will eventually stop ranking in searches.

The same concept applies to URL slugs. Including time-specific words or other strict details can cause problems down the line with both Google ranking and user experience. 

You may be tempted to include lots of detail and pack multiple keywords into your slug. But that's not a good idea. While there are no hard and fast rules about URL or slug length, most marketers say the ideal URL (the complete web address, including slug) is no more than 60 characters. Keep this in mind when you’re creating the slugs for your website.

As mentioned above, keep it simple and informative. Google favors shorter URL’s and so do your potential customers. 

It’s important to create URL slugs you plan on keeping for the long haul. Changing a slug means changing the URL as a whole, and that can have detrimental effects on your SEO. 

Follow these simple guidelines to create SEO-enhanced, user-friendly slugs for each of your website’s pages. 

Ready to learn more about how your local business website can rank higher in search results, get more online traffic, and attract more customers? Reach out to the Locallogy team—we're local digital marketing experts!