How To Create SEO Friendly URLs For Your Small Business

Keeping your URLs clear and SEO friendly is an easy way to increase your rankings in search engines. It’s one of those quick wins that can make a difference for your business. In this article, we’ll discuss what an SEO friendly URL is, why it’s important for your SEO, how to create SEO friendly URLs for your small business and some additional optimization tips.

As an addition to this article, I’d recommend you to check out my article on the how to change URLs in WordPress without losing rankings. If you’d like to know more about the on-page SEO part of your website, check out my on-page SEO guide.

What are SEO friendly URLs

An SEO friendly URL is a short, descriptive web address with the primary keyword included that clearly tells users and search engines what your page is about.

Having clear, structured URLs help your website organize services, locations, and categories. This supports your entire website strategy. Over time, this structure will help you improve your rankings.

Why URLs are important for SEO

An SEO friendly URL signals relevance. It gives search engines more context about the content on your page. Additionally, it looks more professional.

Clean URLs also improve user experience. People are more likely to click on a link that looks trustworthy and easy to read/understand. When there are a lot of random letters or “%” in the URL, it seems less trustworthy. This will generate more clicks. This gives indirect signals to search engines that this page has valuable content as a lot of people click on it.

How to create an SEO friendly URL for your small business

Now, it’s time to create SEO friendly URLs, there are 5 key parts here

Keep it short
Use your primary keyword
Use lowercase letters
Avoid using dates
Use hyphens between words

Keep it short

Short URLs look better in search results, and they are easier to remember. Long, unclear URLs are filled with unnecessary words and symbols which confuse the users and search engines.

Keeping it short helps you manage your website’s structure easier as it grows. Only use the words that really describes the page.

A great example:

A few simple tips to help you:

Stick to 3-5 words.
Focus on words that help the audience understand the content.

Use your primary keyword

Including your main keyword in your URL helps search engines understand your content and the topic/keyword you’re targeting. But more importantly, it also tells the audience and search engines what your page is about.

Make sure your keyword is placed naturally in the URL. Don’t force it. This way, your URL will be easy to read and understand.

Don’t stuff your keyword in the URL. Just use your primary keyword once, that’s sufficient.

Here is a great example:

Use lowercase letters

Search engines see lowercase and uppercase characters as different. This may cause indexing or duplicate page issues.

For example: www.yourbusiness.com/LOCAL-SEO-TIPS & www.yourbusiness/local-seo-tips are viewed as two different URLs. Using lowercase characters make your URL cleaner as the first part of the URL are lowercase characters.

Avoid using dates

Using a date in your URL might seem like a good idea to show the freshness of your content. However, this might cause problems later. When you have an article you wrote in 2024 and added the date in the URL, in 2025 this content feels outdated. When the content is still relevant, you’re missing out on clicks.

Dates lock your pages in time, making it appear older than it really is.

Only use dates if you update the URLs from time to time. This way, your URL keeps being relevant. But my advice is keeping your dates out of the URL.

This makes your content evergreen and always relevant. Of course, update your content if it isn’t relevant anymore.

Use hyphens between words

Hyphens are the perfect way to separate words in URLs. Google and search engines in general treat hyphens as spaces. This makes your URLs better readable and more accurate.

Here are a few tips to use hyphens effectively:

Don’t use underscores.
Separate each word clearly and avoid doubling them.
Don’t add extra punctuation or symbols.

SEO-Friendly URL Optimization Tips

1. Use HTTPS protocol

HTTPS isn’t optional anymore. It’s a ranking factor. It builds user trust, encrypts data, and shows Google your site is secure.

Google Chrome literally marks HTTP sites as “Not Secure.” This may scare people to not visit your website. So If you’re still running on HTTP, it’s time to make the switch.

2. Hide the www. prefix

There’s no SEO benefit in using “www.” anymore. It just adds unnecessary characters to your URLs. Keeping URLs shorter and cleaner helps users remember and share them.

Redirect the “www.” version to the root domain to avoid duplicate content issues.

3. Eliminate stop words

Words like “and,” “the,” and “of” often clutter up URLs without adding value. Stripping them makes your URLs cleaner.

For example, use /guide-local-seo/ instead of /the-guide-to-local-seo/. Shorter URLs get indexed faster and are easier to share.

4. Spell out numbers (sometimes)

If the number is part of a brand or version (e.g., iPhone 15), keep it. Otherwise, spell it out. “/top-ten-seo-tools/” feels more evergreen than “/top-10-seo-tools/.”

It’s more readable and less likely to look outdated next year.