URLs. They’re one of the most basic elements of SEO. Yet they’re vitally important. In fact, Backlinko reports that URLs are a significant ranking factor. More specifically:

• URL length is listed as #46 in Google’s top 200 ranking factors
• URL path is listed as #47
• Keyword in the URL is #51
• URL string is #52

So when you put it all together, URL optimization is kind of a big deal.

So where should we add folders to our URLs? I always ask the following two questions:

• Will I need to group the pages in this template together? If a set of pages needs grouping I need to put them in the same folder, so we can identify this by URL.
• Are there crucial sub-groupings for this set of pages? If there are, are they mutually exclusive and how often might they change? If there are common groupings I may want to make, then I should consider putting this in the URL, unless those data groupings are liable to change.