City, SEO friendly URL

Question

It is recommended to use city title in url.

For example

• example.com/london
• example.com/los-angeles

The problem is, that, for example, city with title "London" is presented in Canada, England, USA (2 times). Using a lot of "/" in url is not good for SEO optimization.

What is better solution to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Using a lot of "/" in url is not good for SEO optimization.

Not true. And, even if it was, you won't need a lot for this to be an issue.

You can solve this by putting differentiating information in the URLs of locations that occur in more than one country, or in the US, state.

You can put the differentiating information in the URL and appear as a subdirectory.

http://example.com/uk/london
http://example.com/oh/london
http://example.com/ky/london
http://example.com/us/oh/london
http://example.com/us/ky/london

Or you can just append it to the current location.

http://example.com/london-uk
http://example.com/london-oh
http://example.com/london-ky

In my subdirectory example I demonstrated using the country in the URL and without it. It's up to you to decide what you think is the best from a usability and organizational perspective.

Answer 2

Keywords in URL

Keywords in the URL have always been and will always be just one of many content indicators, therefor its not needed as Google has many other ways of establishing what the page is about. You should make urls that makes sense for both your business and your site visitors, don't simply create bloating URLS to satisfy Google, some companies uses ID's and they rank perfectly without SEF urls. I recommend taking a look at increasing rankings through on page and off page changes.

Physical locations

If your business has multiple physical locations then adding your business to Google with multiple locations is recommended as you will find it easier to gain traffic through local searches.

Google local search prefers to return results that are considered local, for example if your business is located in London and New York searching from these locations with the keyword will display local searches, and even more so if they use "product/service name + area".