URL structure for professional services across multiple industries
-
I am working with a company who does consulting work across multiple industries, but the services are essentially the same.
Example Services: They implement "Customer Relationship Management" systems and "Data Archiving" Solutions.
Example Industries: The services above can each apply to "Oil & Gas" or "Retail".
Example URL Structures:
- mysite.com/oil-gas <-- This page would also contain links to all of the services provided to the Oil & Gas industry.
- mysite.com/oil-gas/customer-relationship-management-system
- mysite.com/retail
- mysite.com/retail/customer-relationship-management-system
This seems like the best way to go, as long as i'm writing unique content, for each industry, for each service (i.e. I need to explain how a CRM solution solves specific problems in retail and OTHER specific problems in Oil & Gas). While there will certainly be some overlap, this approach seems logical to me. The URL length isn't too long either, which is nice.
The company currently solely focuses on services in URL structure (not a very deep site):
Since they have already worked with hundreds of clients in multiple industries, it seems smarter to start focusing more on individual customer segments.
Would anyone else do this differently?
Thanks, Alex
-
Kristina,
Those are excellent points. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
-Alex
-
Hey Alex,
It sounds like you've already got some assurance from Patrick, but I wanted to quickly throw in my 2 cents.
The answer to your question has more to do with the people looking for your services than it has to do with a right or wrong structure. It sounds like you're making this change because you think that it makes more sense for people to search by industry than by services. If that's true, you're right, you should center your site structure around industries like you suggested. You should definitely double check with keyword volume, and by asking your customers how they searched for your site, though.
Personally, if I were looking for CRM consulting, I wouldn't look for "sharing economy CRM" (because I work for a company that's a sharing economy). I'd just look for "customer relationship management consulting," then maybe ask them if they've ever worked with a sharing economy site before.
If you check with your clients and look into keyword volume and I'm right, I'd keep the site structure the way it is, and flesh out the services pages and link to pages that are dedicated to how well you do CRM in different industries, assuming there's enough data for that. The key here is to make sure that you're writing content that your potential clients are looking for, not just filling out pages to show that you have a robust site.
I hope this helps!
Kristina
-
No problem Alex! Good to know you have your bases covered!
Good luck!
-
Patrick,
Yes, everything will be unique. I actually went through that Whiteboard Friday you recommended prior to posting. It was helpful. In general, as long as the content is unique and is valuable for the target audience, I don't see any issues with the proposed strategy. Thanks for your input Patrick.
-Alex
-
Hi there
I like the set up you are looking at - especially if your content is unique and your on-site SEO is unique as well.
I would take a look at Rand's Information Architecture for SEO - Whiteboard Friday as well.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce URLs with numbers
Hi everybody! I have to optimize an ecommerce where somebody has previously done the SEO optimization, although the URLs have numbers before the product's name They have told me that these numbers are useful to find the products, so I think it shouldn't be really bad if I don't redirect them to "clear" ones. For example: /colesterol-sobrepeso/2217-hc-grass-capsulas-duras-15-capsulas.html > /colesterol-sobrepeso/hc-grass-capsulas-duras-15-capsulas.html Am I right? After all, they contain the keywords and the subfolders are also ok. Or it would be better if I redirect the whole site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Duplicate home page URL on crawl test
Hi i just recently made a crawl test but before doing that i made sure that i have no more duplicates on my site i am using joomla and as of now i only have 11 links on my site but when my crawl test is done i saw duplicate url of my homepage the duplicate url has a trailing backslash so basically i have all the 11 links + 1 duplicate URL http://mangthomas.com http://mangthomas.com/ can you guys give advise how i can remove the duplicate i dont even know which one to retain. THANKS A LOT, cris
On-Page Optimization | | crisbasma0 -
Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:
Website: www.gobol.in Although I have no indexed my search pages by adding /catalogsearch in robots.txt, still we are getting same error again and again Here's a list of sample URLs with potential problems. http://www.gobol.in/catalogsearch/result/index/?category=&mobile_feature=4575_4578&q=panasonic+NR-BU303LH1H+REFRIGERATOR+296+L+GREY&special_price=32%2C456&x=0&y=0 http://www.gobol.in/mobile-and-accessories/mobiles-and-brands.html?manufacturer=4753_3355_455_4435_4720_3407_2412_4728_4784_4790_2010_4789_4376_2469&operating_system_mobile=4612 Please help
On-Page Optimization | | Obbserv0 -
Long url links
Just wondering about creating links.
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik
Is it ok to have very long links?
Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?0 -
Changing URL Structure From Flat to Pyramid Theme
Hello Mozzers, I have an on-page SEO question regarding URL structure. A few months back we hired a full-time SEO person who is working on-page right now and she really wants us to completely re-due our URL restructure from a flat to pyramid style (example below). Current URL structure / page title is: Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
On-Page Optimization | | k9byron
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ Small Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/small-dog-training-collars/ Einstein ET-300TS Mini Dog Training Collar - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/einstein-et-300ts-mini-remote-dog-trainer.html Suggested URL structure / page title change: Quality Dog Training Collars - Lowest Price Guarantee - K9electronics
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ Dog Training Collars - Small Dog - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/ Einstein ET-300TS Mini - Dog Training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/einstein-et-300ts-mini I guess you could say we are the poster-boys for Google penalties and have received just about every penalty in the book. Panda, penguin algo penalties and a partial manual action for unnatural links. Several months ago we removed 1000's of in-bound links and had our manual action lifted a few months back and are now hovering around the top / mid 2nd page for all our big terms ...we used to be top 3 for everything. As we were removing bad links, we also completely redesigned the site and removed lots of categories and products and 95% of all our old, low quality content and replaced it with new, high quality content. The site was really slooooow, so we optimized it and moved it to a big dedicated server and tripled page load time. Added rich snippets, Google authorship, increased our FB and other social presences and much more ... I had also considered this URL structure change during the redesign because I had heard and read that it was good to do, but it required redirecting practically all our URL's which I know can hurt the site even more so then it already has been ... Our SEO says that as it sits now, our pages are competing with each other and really seems to think this is going to improve our rankings a lot ...after several weeks. My question is, at this stage in the game, is it really going to help a lot and give us more benefit compared to the 301 redirect link juice loss? Any comments and/or suggestions are very much appreciated!1 -
301 redirects, efficiency and dynamic URLs
Hi, I have 2 301 redirect questions. Question 1: I have am working with a designer on the redesign of a website that currently has over 5,000 indexed pages. The majority of these are dynamic URLs from the Stone Locator database. (see below) http://www.domain.com/storelocator.php?zipcode=91784&page=12 How can I efficiently deal with these pages from an SEO perspective when developing the new site? Is there a way to do a bulk 301 redirect to a store locator page, for instance? Question 2: If a rel=canonical tag has been established on a page (www....), is it necessary to add 301 redirects to all of the other versions on: the home page (domain.com , domain.com/index.html, domain.com/index.html, etc.) all other pages with those same extensions ? Thank you for your help! Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
Index.php + external site added to end of URL
Good day, I have a domain http://www.ecofriendlylink.com. I am trying to resolve the Crawl Diagnostic errors on it. I have several Duplicate Page Content errors. Example 1: (The domain happynewyou is not mine, some Comments from them have been placed on my site. Ecoshop.php is a page on my site). URL: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/www./happynewyou.com/ecoshop.php Referrer: None. Example 2: URL: http://ecofriendlylink.com/index.php Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/index.php http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/www./happynewyou.com/index.php Referrer: http://ecofriendlylink.com/ Example 3: is a different problem, but still a Dup Page Error. URL: http://ecofriendlylink.com/water.php Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/water.php Referrer: http://ecofriendlylink.com/ water.php is a page on my main domain. The www version and the non-www version, if this a problem and something I need to overcome? So please can you advise what I need to do to get rid of this strange external domain name + index.php (as per examples 1 + 2), and explain what I'm doing wrong with Ex 3. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | drkevinhogan0