How to name the URLs on a local business website

What a URL structure is

The URL is the address of a page, the part after your domain name. On a well-built site it reads like a short label: /furnace-repair/, /nampa/, /about/. The structure is how those labels are organized, whether every page sits at the top level or whether service pages live under a folder such as /services/.

Google reads the words in an address as a small clue about the page’s topic. It is not a strong signal, but the address also appears in the search result under the title, and a person deciding between two results will read it. An address that says /ac-repair-nampa/ tells them the page is exactly what they searched for. One that says /?p=847 tells them nothing.

Every time an address changes, every link to it breaks unless a redirect is set, so the goal is to get the addresses right once and then leave them alone. A good address is short, lowercase, uses hyphens between words, contains the same main phrase as the page’s heading, and has no dates, numbers or filler words in it.

What bad URLs look like on an HVAC company site

Owyhee Heating and Air in Nampa runs six trucks and has had the same website through two rebuilds and three different people managing it. Nobody ever decided what the addresses should be, so each page has whatever the software gave it at the time.

The furnace repair page is at /services-2/, because a page called Services already existed when it was created and WordPress added the number. The AC repair page is at /nampa-hvac-ac-repair-air-conditioning-repair-nampa-idaho-heating-cooling/, because a previous manager put every keyword he could think of in it. The maintenance plan page is at /page-id-47/ from a page builder that never had its permalinks set. The blog posts sit at addresses like /2021/03/15/why-is-my-furnace-blowing-cold-air/, which makes a post about a problem that recurs every winter look four years old before anyone opens it. The Caldwell location page is at /locations/idaho/canyon-county/caldwell/, four folders deep for a single page.

A customer searching furnace repair Nampa sees the competitor’s result with /furnace-repair/ under its title and the Owyhee result with /services-2/. The competitor gets the click. The long AC address is cut off in the result after the third word, and the visible part reads as spam.

A worked example: renaming the pages on an HVAC site in Nampa

Every page on the site was listed with its current address, the phrase the page is meant to rank for and the new address. The new address in each case uses the words of the page’s main heading and nothing else. Old addresses were kept alive with a redirect to the new one.

Two decisions in the table are worth explaining. The town was left out of the service addresses, because the site is for one company in one area and the town belongs on the location pages and in the page titles, not repeated in every service address. The other is the date removed from the blog address. The post is updated every fall, and the address no longer announces a year that makes it look stale.

The redirects were set the same day the addresses changed, one 301 for each old address to its new one, and the broken links and redirects page covers how those were checked. The menu and the links inside every page were then updated to point straight at the new addresses so that no visitor passes through a redirect at all.

The AC repair result in Google now shows a single clean address under the title instead of a cut-off string of repeated words.

How to check your own URL structure

1. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and read the address under each result. Any address with a number, a date, a ? or a word repeated is one to fix.
2. In WordPress, go to Settings, then Permalinks. The setting should be Post name. If it is Plain or Day and name, switch it to Post name and set redirects from the old form.
3. Open your pages list in WordPress and read the slug under each title. Compare it with the page’s main heading. If the heading says Furnace Repair and the slug says services-2, change the slug and set a redirect.
4. Count the folders in your deepest address. More than two levels below the domain is rarely needed on a local business site.
5. Paste each old address into httpstatus.io after a change to confirm it returns a single 301 to the new page.

If two addresses show the same page, the fix is a redirect or a canonical tag, not a rename. If a page is trying to cover two topics in one address, the one topic per page guide covers how to split it.

What we do about URL structure

You will get a list of every page address on your site beside the phrase the page should rank for, with a new address proposed for each one that does not match, and a redirect from every old address set the same day the new one goes live. Menu links and links inside pages are updated to the new addresses so nothing on the site passes through a redirect. Addresses that are already right are left alone, since a change without a reason only costs you. The address review is part of the audit that begins every engagement.

Questions people ask about SEO: how to name the URLs on a local business website