Use short, readable URLs made of words, separated by hyphens and kept in one consistent case, inside folders that group related pages the way a buyer would expect: services under one path, locations or industries under another, articles under a blog path. Decide the hierarchy before design starts, keep each URL stable once it is live, and redirect any you change.
URL structure feels like a technical detail, so it often gets decided by whatever the platform or template produces. The result can be a site where service pages sit at random depths, blog posts carry dates and ID numbers, and the same topic appears under three different paths. Those choices are harder to change after launch, because every change needs a redirect.
This page is for owners and marketing leads planning a new site or a rebuild. The guidance draws on Google Search Central documentation; the hierarchy itself should come from how your business and your buyers think.
What Google's documentation recommends for URLs
Google's URL structure guidance recommends using readable words rather than long ID numbers when possible, and using hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. It notes that Google Search treats URLs as case sensitive, and that if your server treats upper and lower case the same, you should convert all text to one case so it is easier to tell that URLs refer to the same page. It advises against using fragments (the part after a # sign) to change a page's content, and recommends trimming parameters that do not change the content.
Google's SEO Starter Guide adds a point about hierarchy. It says using directories, or folders, to group similar topics can help Google learn how often the URLs in each directory change, and that Google can crawl different directories at different frequencies. It also explains that search engines choose a single canonical URL to show for each piece of content, and that if you do not canonicalize your URLs yourself, Google will try to do it automatically.
Plan the hierarchy from the business outward
Start with a list of the pages the site needs, then group them by the question a buyer is asking when they arrive. A typical small business site might look like this.
| Section | Example path | What lives there |
|---|---|---|
| Services | /services/panel-upgrades | One page per service the business wants to be hired for |
| Service areas | /service-areas/apex | One page per area, only where there is something specific to say |
| Questions or resources | /questions/panel-upgrade-permits | Answer pages tied to a service |
| Blog | /blog/post-name | Articles, without dates in the URL |
| Company | /about, /contact | Pages about the business itself |
Keep the depth shallow and the names plain. A folder is not a menu, though. The menu can group pages differently for visitors, and Google's breadcrumb documentation recommends breadcrumbs that represent a typical user path to a page rather than mirroring the URL structure. The URL's job is to stay stable and descriptive; the menu and breadcrumbs can evolve.
Name folders and pages with the words your buyers use, not internal codes or department names. A page called /services/panel-upgrades says what it is; a page called /svc-04 does not. Keep each slug short, leave out filler words, and resist packing several search phrases into one address. A URL that reads like a plain label will still make sense years from now, when the marketing language around it has changed.
A fictional example: an electrical contractor's service areas
Consider a fictional electrical contractor in North Carolina planning a rebuild. The old site has service pages at the root, a handful at /our-services/, and a separate page for each of twenty towns, each with the same text and a different town name.
The new plan puts every service under /services/ and keeps service area pages only for the six towns where the company can say something specific: the permitting office it works with, the older housing stock it sees, the response area it covers. Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse, including having multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browsable hierarchy. Each location page needs something true about that place, and the writer should not have to invent it. If the business cannot supply it, the page probably should not exist.
Connect the hierarchy with links
A clean URL structure does not replace internal links. Google's link guidance says Google can generally crawl a link only when it is an HTML a element with an href attribute, that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Link each service page to its related question pages and back, and link service area pages to the services offered there.
Breadcrumbs help visitors see where they are. Google's breadcrumb documentation says a breadcrumb trail indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy, and supports structured data that describes it. Structured data is covered in more depth elsewhere in this section; the planning point is that a clear hierarchy makes breadcrumbs easy to define.
Changing URLs on a rebuild
Every URL that changes during a rebuild needs a redirect from the old address to the new one, and the full list should be checked after launch. Hudson South went through this on its own site: in October 2026 it moved hudsonsouth.ai from Squarespace to a hand-built site on Netlify, keeping existing addresses or redirecting them. Before deciding what to rename, ask your team, "Which of our current URLs are printed on trucks, cards or brochures, or linked from other sites and old emails?" Those are the ones to keep if you can. The full process is in how to move a website without losing search traffic, and sizing the site before planning its structure is covered in how many pages a small business website needs.
Hudson South builds websites around the same four steps as its content work: Authority Asset gathers approved business knowledge and evidence, Hudson Twenty-One records how the business communicates across 21 dimensions so the writing sounds like it, Market Intelligence researches the buyer questions and the market, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. As a practice, builds include an XML sitemap, structured data and redirects from old URLs when a site moves. The website builds overview explains the platforms and process.
Plan the structure before the design
On a free 30-minute call, Hudson South compares your site with the competitors your buyers also look at and talks through how your pages should be organized.
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- URL structure best practices for Google Search. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.
- SEO Starter Guide: The Basics. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.
- How to add breadcrumb (BreadcrumbList) markup. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.
- SEO link best practices for Google. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.
- Spam policies for Google web search. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.