Service Keyword in URL - too much?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Unless there's only one company in each combination of service and industry, having the company name or another differentiator as the last element in the URL is vital for individual page topical relevance.  Company Names make the most sense from a user perspective.

[kdcomms]

The idea is that yes, they can all be landing pages. The pages as they're sitting now are driving some traffic from these long-tail keyword combinations -- we'd like not to lose that when we make the change.

Can the service keywords be variations? So, could it be retail-pest-control, restaurant-termite-control, athletic-ant-extermination? (samples again, of course)

[AlanBleiweiss]

whether you do retail-pest-control or retail/pest-control - either is acceptable and as long as the sequence ordering is consistent you will achieve the same results.

So they should all be industry-service  or service-industry.

[kdcomms]

Would it make any sense to you to group them by service? so...

cases/pest-control/industry-company

Less spammy, but wonder about the impact of too many directories.

[SteveOllington]

Yes definitely!

I assume if they're all landing pages then you wouldn't be targeting each page with the same keywords anyway, as that would be massive canibalization. You want to just assign 2 or 3 keywords to each page, then have one of them in the URL (the main one).

[SteveOllington]

How many is too many? I mean you don't want a directory per page or anything.

[kdcomms]

So when working with the directories, if we structure navigation so that you can get to a specific case study with two clicks, does that offset the depth of the directory structure? So, if it happened to be (hopefully not) cases/retail/pest-control/MI/Detroit/company-name, will the number of subfolders be an issue, as long as you could get to the page through two clicks from home?

[kdcomms]

I suppose I meant the depth of the directories... Finding the page three or four directories in (I asked the same in response to Alan).

Thanks for all the help!

[SteveOllington]

Alan, you've made me think of a question myself on that... you know the whole rule about not having too many hyphens in a domain, well how much of that extends to the rest of the URL/path after the initial domain?

Not sure I worded that very well. I mean, as we know, www.thing-blah-flip-flop.com is bad... and www.thing-blah.com is okay, but what about: www.thing-blah.com/flip-flop-give-a-dog-a-bone-is-this-too-many-hyphens-in-this-part-of-the-url-after-the-domain.html

I know there's tonnes of it about, but does it matter?

(Sorry to hijack the question lol, I assume it's still relevant though).

[SteveOllington]

Ah, now that's a question! As far as I WAS aware it was always best to go for a "flat as possible" structure (so minimal directories). BUT... I've recently been informed (on these very boards, and from a very experienced pro) that it no longer matters as long as the linking structure is good, so there's plenty of links from strong pages, such as the homepage pointing in... so it will get crawled no matter how deep.

[AlanBleiweiss]

the number of directories is pretty much illusionary - it's how many clicks to get to something that matters.

That's the key.  It ultimately depends on how many case studies you're dealing with as to how you link to them.

Here's an example

Cases is a top level site-wide link.

On the Cases page, there's a description of each service, and a link within that description to that service's page.

Then on that service page, there's a brief snippet for each case study, where you group them on that page by industry type.

That's three clicks down to the individual case study.  And in that scenario, you can go with the URL syntax I previously suggested.

So while the "folder structure" "appears" to be four layers deep

case-studies/pest-control/retail/company-name/

The linking methods above are only three deep.  So you're totally within SEO best practices.

[kdcomms]

That's what I needed to hear. I think maybe a cases/pest-control/industry-company or industry/company structure will work nicely then. I can fix a good link structure no problem. Thanks!

[AlanBleiweiss]

two or three layers into it, hyphens vs. slashes is not as critical as too many hyphens in the primary domain name.

Personally, I believe it's better user experience to go with slashes rather than hyphens to clearly visually split out services vs. industries vs. company names.  But that's just my preference and belief regarding usability.

[SteveOllington]

Awesome, thanks