SEO advantages of having content in a WordPress subpage?

Question

I'm creating a WordPress-Website for a massage parlor. The website is in German (I'm from Switzerland).

I decided to not have a hub page for "services" but have the two main service "categories" directly as parent pages in the main menu:

• Massages
• Foot Care

Under Massage I have services in a sub-page. For example reflexology massage, so the URL looks like this:

example.com/massages/reflexology-massage/
example.com/massages/othermassageservice/

...

I would like to add a page for vouchers ("massage voucher" seems to be quite frequently searched in my area). I assume that it could be beneficial in terms of SEO if I put the vouchers as a sub -page under massages, too (since it is related to massages)?

Or would this be a bad idea since a voucher is not exactly a massage type service like the others? Also, I think (not sure) I should avoid including the word "massage" in the URL twice? (../massages/massage-voucher/). The other "problem" with using voucher as the (sub)page URL is that I can use this just one time. I can't use it under ../foot-care/voucher/ anymore since WordPress only allows it once. I would have to use a slightly different name in the URL.

 example.com/massages/reflexology-massage/
 example.com/massages/othermassageservice/
 example.com/massages/voucher/

So, what would you recommend? Is it better to have it as a sub-page like in the example above (in the h1 and title I would of course have the keyword "massage voucher" written, only in the URL it's divided because of the page and sub-page) or would you prefer

 example.com/massage-voucher/

as a completely new page (and then also ../footcare-voucher/ etc.)?

Answer 1

Whether or not you use the "subpage" feature in WordPress should have little impact on SEO. When you use that feature WordPress does two things:

• The URL of the subpage starts with the URL of the parent page.
• The subpage contains a link to the parent page.

URLs

URLs don't really matter for Google SEO right now. Google doesn't put much (if any) weight on keywords in the URL. Google doesn't rank pages better because of URL structure as related to other pages. See Well structured URLs vs. URLs optimized for SEO.

At best, URLs help SEO by making your site more usable. In general, you should choose URLs that are:

• Descriptive -- Accurately give users an impression of what to expect at that URL.
• Short -- Short URLs could possibly be remembered and easily typed.
• Have keywords -- See Are keywords in URLs good SEO or needlessly redundant?

Links

If you have related pages, they should absolutely link to each other. However, the automated link created by WordPress's subpage feature is not good enough. You should have some sort of navigation to all other pages in a group, not just the parent page.

You'll have to create links between your pages whether or not you create them as subpages.

My recommendation

I wouldn't use the WordPress subpage feature. I would create simpler URLs that are each easier to use on their own and don't have keyword redundancy in them.

I would create additional links between my pages above and beyond the ones that WordPress creates automatically.