Will I loose from SEO if I rename my urls to be more keyword friendly?

[Spiros.im]

As a good practice of SEO is to have your keywords in the links. I am thinking of doing some optimization and change my urls to more effective keywords. I am using shopify and there is an option (a tick) that you can check while changing the url (ex. for a category, for a product, for a blog post). This will give a redirection to the old post to the new.

Is it good practice? Is it risky for losing SEO or it will help to rank higher because I will have better keywords in my links?

[ClaytonJ]

HI

If it is not broken - you do not fix it. So the first question is, how is the site ranking today for the customer query/ies you are targetting?  If you are ranking well, then likely do not touch urls.

Regards

[Spiros.im]

Obviously, I want to change the URL in order to optimize for a better keyword and not fix broken links. So you are saying that it will hurt SEO? I am using moz tools because SEO in not 100% optimized for my site. So I don't think my pages are ranking well. And ranking well is related to the specific keyword you want to rank for a page.  An "expert" from MOZ told me that it can take like 5-10 months to see results from SEO actions. Then this is not measurable...I can't fix something today "ex a URL" and wait 10 months! I will need a more specific answer!

[ClaytonJ]

Spiros

The first rule of seo - is to do no harm.   Sometimes when you optimise a site as per "best practice" - then you lose rankings.  It is important to protect the keywords that matter that you already rank for.

So an initial step is an audit.

Perhaps I will reframe. - is the page you want to change the URL for ranking in the top 20 positions for the keyword you are targeting for?

Regards

[Spiros.im]

If my pages were ranking top 20 keywords I would use tools like MOZ! So no they are not ranking top 20 and I want to achieve this....

[ClaytonJ]

Hi Spiros

Below are two guides that may assist in your URL structure. It appears the site is not ranking for target keywords so a re-structure is maybe beneficial.  It is an ideal practice to have the target customer query in the URL structure. Shopify though has limitations so may need to work within them.

https://www.hostgator.com/blog/best-url-structure-seo/

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

The next step will 301'ing the old page to the new page.

Hope that helps.

[Spiros.im]

I will check those guides and see how I can work on optimizations. Thank you.