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WP Permalink Strategy
Posted by on October 4, 2025 at 12:25 pmWorking on a local business directory in WordPress. Plan is to have categories be business type and tags be city, and other business attributes. Trying to nail the best permalink strategy.
AI strategy talk with Claude insists that including location is essential for local SEO and gives me the chance to build location landing pages later. I sort of agree but don’t want the URLs too long.
If I were to include all relevant info into the permalink it would be a long URL. I could probably skip “State”.
Which URL structure do people think is best for humans and SEO:
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/personal-care/barber/business-name/
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/barber/business-name/
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/nh/manchester/barber/business- name/
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/manchester/barber/business- name/
5 /nh/manchester/personal-care/barber/business-name/
Could also use pages for hierarchy with a category and tags plugin and manage it there though not sure that helps other than I’ve already got a function written to skip pages via page template so if the URL came from page hierarchy I could organize it there and choose pages to skip.
Suggestions for best local SEO URL?
Thanks,
Mark -
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1 Reply
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A couple of things. The document name is critical to SEO but how and what’s optimal for your site depends on your site and your authority. What works on one domain may cause cannabalikization on another or later down the road.
It’s going to depend on your authority and your topical authority, what pages you have , and what word Google treats as synonyms and when it wants to treat them as separate and distinct.
Using the location can work alone in the title or it may be needed in both
And something like
Plumber-services-Texas can also be cannabalized by plumber-services on the same site
Claude isn’t going to a good place to get specific SEO advice because it’s just going to give what ever the highest ranked blog is 1 which could be accurate or could be out of context – Google doesn’t rank content because it’s right but because it’s popular …
You need to experiment and check to see how your pages rank and what for and how high high
Also, if a page already ranks for something it will be hard to move them – it’s best to try to find something distinct
Why not experiment – Google isn’t watching your evry edit – you’ll learn a lot
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