Should we change our URLs for SEO benefit?

[iescape]

Hi,

I'm currently covering a maternity marketing role at i-escape and one our main objectives is to increase organic traffic to the website.

i-escape has a selection of hand-picked boutique hotels, villas, lodges, guesthouses and apartments for people to discover and book. At the moment each hotel page URL follows this structure:

https://www.i-escape.com/**hotelname**

We'd like to change this to include some searchable words in the URL dependent on the type of hotel. For example:

https://www.i-escape.com/**boutique-hotels**/hotelname or https://www.i-escape.com/**boutique-apartments**/hotelname

If we do go ahead, we know we need to make sure all old style URLs canonically redirect to the new style.

Is having the keyword in the URL important enough for us to change over 1500 URLs on the website? We have quite a high quality links pointing to these hotel pages URLs. Also, will this help us with navigation/user journeys/crawls as there will be a /boutique-hotels/hotelname rather than just /hotelname?

Thanks so much all!

Clair

[Andy-Halliday]

I wouldn't recommend changing the url structures, however what you could do is create specific landing page about boutique apartments or flat and list all the relevant products.

Also you could use this space to really sell the experience, why you should pick a boutique hotel over a normal standardize hotel.

I am personally not a fan of changing url structures on websites once indexed by Google.

On all 1500 hotel pages, you would need a way of linking back to the main "category" page.

This is just from experience over the years of changing urls and expecting to get the same traffic etc. During a redirect you lose link juice so the hotels might not rank as highly etc.

Thanks

Andy

[Hurf]

Don't do it! A change of this magnitude is never going to pay back sufficient dividends; a keyword in your URL is considered a very small ranking factor -  you're also going to need a lot of things to remarkably well to pull this off without taking a hit.

The following articles may be of interest to you:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-keywords-in-urls-a-small-ranking-factor-21577.html

And see John Mueller (Google)'s comment here:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/x6EZskkV7bM/discussion

The idea of a landing page (as Andy suggests) makes much more sense.

If you were building this site from scratch then adding the keyword into the url is still a good idea but causing major upheaval (and taking not inconsiderable risks) to shoehorn it in is not.

Focus on a creative content experience and you'll find a better way. In many ways, knowing that the URL restructuring isn't the best way to proceed should make finding the right way [a little bit] easier.

Good Luck!