The URL of a page plays an integral role in getting good search engine results for your website. When you tweak your site content to improve search results (SEO), it can be tempting to fiddle with your URL. Before you decide to change URLs to improve SEO, read on.
In TherapyEverywhere sites, you can set or change the URL by clicking Edit for the permalink. The address that you type into a browser to get to a site is called a URL.
What you should know before you change URLs to improve SEO
Changing your post’s URLs will not be a problem for other posts that link to the post from within your website. The link will update automatically and the content on your TherapyEverywhere site will also update automatically. However when you change the URL for any page or post:
- Any links to the page or post from a widget or footer need to be updated manually.
- Any third party links (a link from somebody else’s site) to your post or page will break. Remember — they have no way of knowing about a changed URL or automated way of updating the URL in the link).
- Any links from an advertising campaign, from your Facebook business page, or from Google My Business will break.
- Search engines will still direct people to the old (now non-existent URL) until the cache on the Google, Bing, and other search engines catch up with the changes — so you will lose search traffic.
- Analytic data is tied to the URL. What this means is changes to URLs make it more difficult to make sense of what pages are doing well or poorly in terms of engaging clients or in terms of search performance.
Bottom line: change URLs to improve SEO … cautiously and carefully
For all these reasons, it only makes sense to change the URL for a page or post when there is a strong reason! And, when needed, follow up with changes to internal links from widgets and footers, and ask external sites to update their links to your site.
Need to improve your search results? Feel free to reach out to TherapyEverywhere for help.