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Thank you very much! I will look at those links.

I think your last line sums everything up! It might be best to leave things as is right now, since the site won't grow that much larger for the time being (not that I am aware of anyway).

Thank you for your responses!

It does help! The site has been around for ~1 year and within the last 6 months has been doing well but could do better.

So you would leave out "law" or "lawyer" in the folders (eg: /business/commercial-contracts instead of /business-law(yer)/commercial-contracts). This would require changing the category pages to remove "lawyer" (eg: /business-lawyer/ page would now become /business/); the 301 redirects are not a problem with Umbraco.

So it is a question of whether changing the /business-lawyer/ page to remove lawyer, and then organizing each page (some-content) inside the appropriate categories (i.e. /business/some-content) would help or hurt the site. Right now the /business-lawyer/ page is doing quite well, so changing the page to remove "lawyer" would need to be offset by adding more content referring to lawyers within the page, and this might not guarantee the same link juice. However, by organizing the some-content pages inside the various categories those pages might increase.

I guess there is no way of knowing without doing it, but the risk of losing the juice for /business-lawyer/ might outweigh any POTENTIAL benefit of adding the some-content to each category (/business/some-content), which based alone on the url path might not help SEO given the fact that "business" is just 1 of 3 keywords typed into google ("business lawyer [the target area]"). I think I might just leave it alone without adding some-content to each category, but instead keeping the url path short and some-content directly after the domain.

What are your thoughts based on this rationale? Again, I really do appreciate your help!

Hi, thank you so much for your help.

The site is actually just about one type of profession: lawyers in one city/geographic area. I was using dentists as an example of something I worked on in the past.

The site is: https://slclaw.ca. As you can see: there are main pages for various areas of law in the "Practice Areas" menu - "Business Law" (let's call this a main folder which has /business-lawyer/ as the folder). If you click that page you can see the various types of services offered. If you click on "Commercial Contracts" the url will NOT have the /business-lawyer/ folder...just the domain/commercial-contracts. Using "lawyer" in most of the main folders once is not a big deal, but if you look at the Technology item in the Practice Areas menu (/technology-lawyer/ url)  you will notice the use of lawyer again, but not with specific sub menu items under Technology.

Going back to what you wrote above: if I were to include folders in the url path it would be best to not include the word "lawyer", which would either just leave me with /business/commercial contracts instead of /business-lawyer/commercial-contracts or something like business-law/commercial-contracts (but using law is probably the same use as lawyer).

So...I left out the sub-folders because the whole website is about lawyers in one geographic area.

Thank you for your reply. That is very detailed.

Perhaps I didn't give the greatest example. Instead of Arizona-dentist being the folder, perhaps a specific 'city'-dentist as the main folder. The target audience is people looking for a dentist within that specific city.

I am worried about keyword stuffing...because the main folder pages would all have the word "dentist" in them...so for example: 'city'-dentist/somecontent would be one folder and page; another folder would be /cavity-dentist/somecontent2; another would be /root-canal-dentist/somecontent3; etc.

It's very complicated to weigh up the pros and cons, and actually arrive at a logical conclusion.

What's best for SEO: a folder or no folder?

For example: https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent.

The website has 100+ pages with "dentist" within the content of the somecontent pages, as well as specific pages for /arizona-dentist/. Also, the breadcrumb for the somecontent page would appear something like follows: Arizona Dentist > Some Content ... you can find the somecontent page from the Arizona Dentist page.

I didn't include folders in the path because I did not want the url to be too long. In terms of where it is showing up on google search results...it is within the top 3-4 on the first page when searching Arizona dentist come content.

The website is pretty organized even without subfolders because it was made using Umbraco.

I am wondering if using folders will increase the SEO ranking, or if it really doesn't and could hurt it if paths become too long; especially since it's not doing too bad in the search ranking right now.

-Thanks in advance for any help.