This is the first mini-blog in a, hopefully, daily series where I’ll be sharing small SEO and marketing tips that I’ve come across that day.
Today’s daily SEO Tip is all about keeping your URLs simple. I was working on a large UK fashion retailer, optimising their Google My Business and Bing Places listings. I choose to bulk upload these updates as they have hundreds of locations.
I was updating UTM tracking in Bing Places and noticed that some of the URLs had “%20” in them, this indicates that they’ve been published with a space in between words. Best practise is to use a dash (-) in between words in a URL.
URLs with spaces were causing issues in Bing Places as they were failing validation and not being approved.
Further investigating the URLs, there were versions indexed with a dash however Google seemed to favour the URLs with spaces in. We made further recommendations to canonicalise the URLs with spaces to the URLs with dashes, only indexing one and not cannibalising SERPs.
To sum it all up, keep it simple when it comes to URLs, use dashes, don’t use spaces, keep it short.