Case Study: Do Keywords in URLs Help SEO Rankings?

TL;DR:
Yes, keywords in URLs can help SEO rankings. In my test, I changed 27 service and skills URLs to include relevant consultant or consultancy terms, while leaving the titles, headings, content and schema unchanged. The result was a significant increase in impressions and improved average rankings for consultancy-related searches. URLs aren’t the only ranking factor, but the impact here is clear: relevant keywords in URLs can reinforce a page’s relevance and contribute to better organic visibility.

Do Keywords in URLs Affect SEO Rankings?

One of the long-standing questions asked of SEO consultants is whether including relevant keywords in a URL can actually influence rankings.

You’ll often hear that keywords in URLs are only a minor ranking factor. That’s probably fair in isolation, but URLs are still another signal Google can use to understand what a page is about, particularly when the wording aligns closely with how users actually search.

Rather than debating how much that signal might be worth, I decided to test it on my own website.

I changed the URLs of 27 existing service and skills pages to include terms such as consultant and consultancy, while deliberately leaving the other major on-page elements unchanged.

Here’s what happened.

The Setup

When I rebranded and launched my new site, the structure and content were built around my consultancy-led services and skills.

The original URLs were relatively generic:

/services/

/services/website-migrations/

/skills/

/skills/google-tag-manager/

At the end of November, I changed the URLs of 27 service and skills pages to better reflect the searches those pages were actually targeting.

In particular, I added consultant or consultancy where relevant:

/services-and-consultancy/

/services-and-consultancy/website-migrations-consultant/

/skills/google-tag-manager-consultant/

The important part of the test wasn’t simply that the URLs changed. The new URLs contained terms that closely matched the consultancy-related queries I wanted those pages to rank for.

What Changed (and What Didn’t)

To make the impact of the URL changes as clear as possible, I deliberately left the other major on-page SEO elements alone.

Across all 27 pages:

• The updated URLs were redirected using 301s
  
• Internal links were updated to point directly to the new URLs
  
• Page titles and headings were unchanged
  
• Page content was unchanged
  
• Schema was unchanged
  
• No additional on-page optimisation was carried out

The primary change was the URL itself, with the new URLs including consultant or consultancy terms relevant to the searches those pages were targeting.

Of course, this wasn’t a controlled laboratory experiment and other external ranking factors still exist. But by leaving the pages themselves unchanged, I had a reasonably clean way to see what happened after introducing more keyword-relevant URLs.

The Impact

To measure the impact, I used Google Search Console to compare 1 December to 31 March against the previous comparable period, filtering the data for queries containing consult.

That filter matters because these were the searches most directly related to the keywords I’d added to the URLs.

The result was pretty clear:

• Clicks increased
  
• Impressions increased significantly
  
• Average ranking position improved

The strongest gains were across consultancy-related queries, where the new URLs more closely matched the language people were actually using to search.

With the page content and other major on-page elements unchanged, I think this is strong evidence that the more relevant URLs contributed to the improvement, rather than treating URL keywords as something too insignificant to matter.

Which Keywords Gained the Most Impressions?

The increase wasn’t limited to one or two queries. A range of consultancy-related keywords gained additional visibility after the URL changes.

These were the queries with the largest increases in impressions:

Which Keywords Gained the Most Clicks?

The improvement in visibility also translated into additional organic clicks.

These were the queries with the largest increases in clicks:

Do Keywords in URLs Help SEO?

Based on this test, yes. Relevant keywords in URLs can help SEO rankings.

URLs clearly aren’t the only factor Google uses to understand and rank a page, and I wouldn’t expect adding a keyword to a URL to transform rankings on its own.

But that’s different from saying URL keywords don’t matter.

In this case, I changed the URLs across 27 pages to include terms that more closely matched the searches those pages were targeting. The titles, headings, content and schema remained unchanged, and the pages subsequently gained substantially more impressions and improved average positions for those consultancy-related queries.

I can’t attribute every ranking movement solely to the URL changes, but the pattern across multiple pages and queries is strong enough for me to consider keyword relevance in URLs one of the factors contributing to their improved visibility.

The takeaway isn’t to start changing established URLs simply to squeeze keywords into them. But when you’re creating a new page or deciding on a URL structure, I see no reason to ignore relevant keywords when they naturally describe the page.

URLs are only one part of how Google understands a page, alongside elements such as titles, meta descriptions and structured data.

But when you’re creating a new page or restructuring a site, there’s little reason not to make the URL clean, descriptive and relevant to the searches you’re targeting.

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