Changing URLs for SEO Reasons - When Is It OK

Any reputable digital marketing agency will tell you that your URL structure is vital to your SEO strategy. It’s also one of the easiest things to mess up and cause irreparable damage to your website’s search rankings. That’s why it’s essential to know when changing URLs is OK and when it isn’t. This article will walk you through when it’s OK to change your URLs, the strategies you can use to do so effectively, and why it’s always better to avoid URL changes.

How Changing URLs Can Damage Your SEO

You should decide to change your URL structure with careful consideration of the potential consequences. When you change your URLs, you risk losing SEO value and organic traffic from search engines, which means you may have to work twice as hard to make up for that lost progress. If you have much content on a site with many backlinks, changing URLs can also cause some severe problems.

How to Change URL Structure Without Affecting SEO

Hiring an expert marketing agency is your best bet to ensure your SEO is not affected by changes to your URL structure.

But you can also do some things on your own to mitigate the risk of losing SEO value:

Keep 90% of the Content

If you’re changing the URL structure of a site with a lot of content, it’s important to keep 90% of it. The reason is that search engines use the words on your pages to indicate what they should rank your site for. If you change most of the words—and change them in ways that don’t make sense from a user perspective—the search engine won’t know what to do with those pages anymore.

Conclusion:

While changing your URL structure can hurt your search engine visibility, it doesn’t have to. With the right strategy in place, you can easily redirect your old URLs to new ones and keep your rankings intact. You can also search for a “ digital marketing agency near me” to hire a company to help you with your SEO. Many things can affect your search engine rankings, and it’s always wise to work with a professional who knows what they’re doing.