What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?

[_nitman]

Hi Mozzers,

I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets.

Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers.

Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Business listing directory environments have a big challenge when it comes to URL structure / information architecture and content organization because:

1. Many businesses are searched for based on geo-location
2. Many of those require hyper-local referencing while many others can be "in the general vacinity"
3. Many other businesses are not as relevant to geo-location

So what is a site to do?

The best path is to recognize that as mobile becomes more and more critical to searcher needs, hyper-local optimization becomes more critical.  It becomes the most important focus for SEO.

As a result, URL structure needs to reflect hyper-local first and foremost. So:

• www.askme.com/delhi/
• www.askme.com/delhi/saket/
• www.askme.com/delhi/saket/pizza/
• www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/

This way, if someone searches for "Pizza Hut Dehli", all of the Dehli Pizza Huts will show up, regardless of neighborhood, while anyone searching for "Pizza Hut Saket" will get more micro-locally relevant results.

And for those businesses that serve a wider geo-area, even though they too will be assigned a hyper-local final destination page, they will still be related to their broader geo-area as well.  So someone searching "plumbers in Dehli" will get the right results and then they can choose any of the plumbers in Dehli regardless of what neighborhood they are in.

Note how I removed /search/ from the URL structure as well. It's an irrelevant level.

[seowoody]

Sorry for my ignorance here but does googl.in not show the local pack in its serps, with reviews and ratings?

if so, isn't the business model flawed, assuming you're going to be charging companies to be listed in your directory when they can get listed as a local business in Google right now for free?

perhaps I've overlooked something...

[AlanBleiweiss]

Local pack exists, yet is far from complete or consistently helpful.  Business directories thrive even in an age of local packs.  It's all about finding the best way to provide value, and the internet is large enough that many players can play in the game.

[_nitman]

Thank you so much once again Sir Alan.

Well, I'm just thinking aloud here. How about putting my primary keyword in the first level instead of having this well structured URL syntax? For instance:

• www.askme.com/pizza-huts-in-saket-delhi instead of www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/

Here,

• The complete primary keyword (or target search string) is closer to the domain. "Closer your keywords to the domain, better it is", I heard this somewhere. Is it still true and adds any additional value?
• We don't have deep URL directory structure and our primary keyword is together too. In the well structure URL (the one you suggested), the target keyword is broken into multiple pieces & the URL directories.
• But, I'm not exposing the hierarchy/navigation-flow via URL. I hope that's okay as far as I'm handling it cleanly from the breadcrumbs and rich snippets. What's your take on this?

I know there are chances of URL conflicts. For instance, if we have an area "foo" in the city "bar" vs a city "foo bar". I'll end up having the same URL for both the cases i.e /<search-query>-in-foo-bar. There are many such edge cases, I'm on it.</search-query>

[AlanBleiweiss]

Proximity to root is not a valid best practice, especially in this instance.

Here's why:

More people search based on geo-location than actual business name when looking for location based businesses.  So by putting "Pizza Hut" first, that contradicts this notion. It implies "more people look for Pizza Hut than the number of people looking for all the different businesses in this geo-location".

Also, by using the URL you suggest, that's blatant over-optimization - attempting to stuff exact match keywords into the URL. In reality, people use a very wide range of keyword variations, so that's another conflict that harms your overall focus needs.

All of the individual factors need to reinforce each other as much as is reasonable for human readability. So URL, breadcrumb both should match the sequence.  If one has one sequence, and the other has a different sequence, that confuses search algorithms.

[_nitman]

While thinking about the ideal URL structure, I did consider some of the blogs (including this one by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls, check point #11. Attaching a screenshot as well) and websites which were doing really good with their one level static URLs.

I actually did some keyword research on user's search pattern and google suggest data. Generally, our target search term comes before ("pizza huts" in this case) the geo location, may be people search things in a different way in India. Hence, I thought of keeping the URL structure that way.

A little confused about this point though "URL, breadcrumb both should match the sequence.  If one has one sequence, and the other has a different sequence, that confuses search algorithms". Because, have seen many website doing tremendously well who're not following these principles.

U2vC1Ua.png

[AlanBleiweiss]

In regard to shorter URLs:

The goal is to find a proper balance for your needs.  You want to group things into sub-groups based on proper hierarchy, however you also don't want to go too deep if you don't have enough pages/individual listings deep down the chain.

So the Moz post you point to refers to that - at a certain point, having too many layers can be a problem. However there is one one single correct answer.

The most important thing to be aware of and consider is your own research and evaluation process for your situation in your market.

However, as far as what you found most people search for, be aware that with location based search, many people don't actually type in a location when they are doing a search.  Except Google DOES factor in the location when deciding what to present in results.  So the location matters even though people don't always include it themselves.

The issue is not to become completely lost in making a decision either though - consider all the factors, make a business decision to move forward with what you come up with, and be consistent in applying that plan across the board.

What I mean in regard to URLs and Breadcrumbs:

If the URL is www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/  the breadcrumb should be:

Home > Dehli > Saket > Pizza > Pizza Hut

If the URL is www.askme.com/pizza-huts/saket-delhi/ the breadcrumb should be

Home > Pizza Hut > Saket-Delhi