Structuring URL's for better SEO

[shanky1]

Hello,

We were rolling our fresh urls for our new service website.

Currently we have our structure as www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/bangalore

We like to have it as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-bangalore

Can someone advice us better which one of the above structure would work out better and why?

Should this be a focus of attention while going ahead since this is like a search engine platform for patients looking out for actual doctors.

Thanks,

Aditya

[Hughescov]

Hi,

Firstly you have to figure out which search time you want to be found for. Having bangalore as a page name in the first instance would not be focused enough at all. You need to refine this keyword.

The second URL structure would present your search term as 'dental clinic bangalore' and would be much more focused and refined. There are local searches in India for that key term according to Google Keyword Tool so that would definitely be the way to go forward.

Make sure that you set up 301 redirects from the old URL structure to the new URL structure to maintain any link juice and you will be on your way. For a redirect I would typically give it a month until the 301 redirect starts passing through the old page authority.

Good luck.

[shanky1]

Thanks.

We would have specific urls for eg: www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-jayangar

So Jayanagar becomes our Locality specific to Bangalore and then a Dental Clinic becomes a widely searched key term on the SERP.

You are also suggesting to base urls on local key terms searches? Say dental clinic koramangala has a good key term search result from the keyword tool - so here we could base our urls as /dental-clinic-koramangala?

Why not practo.com/health/dental/clinic/koramangala - is this an un-appropriate way of going about url structuring?

[Hughescov]

Your next route would be to set up a Google Places for your location so that you return in the local searches for where you are based. So when the search term 'Dental Clinic Bangalore' is searched for your website will appear.

After that for specific regions, have different pages on your site such as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-jayangar.
This means that the page name is dental-clinic-jayangar as opposed to www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/jayangar where the site structure leads to a page name of just jayangar.

If the page name is the search term, you stand in a lot better for ranking in the SERP.