My wife is one of the smartest people I know. However, she is not the most technologically sophisticated person (not a blogger, does not use RSS) and is not a marketing person either (she's an academic). So, when she told me that she never clicked on URLs in organic search results that were "really long or complicated" I thought she was crazy. I mean if you only clicked on the shorter URLs, you miss out on all these other great results that are deep links into a website and probably have just what you are looking for.
Well... now we have DATA (every marketers best friend) to prove that in fact, my wife is right. Again. (I have not been married too long, so I have not learned this lesson thoroughly yet.)
In any event, a new report from our friends at Marketing Sherpa shows that longer URLs in organic search results receive fewer clicks than short URLs. Here is a heatmap image showing the difference.
Two things to notice:
1) The eyetracking activity is actually pretty similar between the long and short URL listings, so they are both getting a lot of attention.
2) But the clicks (the good stuff!) were more focused on the listing with the shorter URL.
Takeaway: All things being equal, you want a short URL. So keep those keywords in the URL short, and try to eliminate anything unnecessary.
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Liam Delahunty 6:44 AM on September 15, 2007
Do you happen to know if a study been performed comparing short URLs with variables compared to longer URLs with keywords? www.domain.com/shop.php?cid=1&gid=2&pid=3 or www.domain.com/beauty/soap/ivory/lux/ More importantly, what does your wife think?
Anonymous 10:50 AM on September 15, 2007
Liam -
I don't know of a study that specifically looked at that, but I can tell you the following:
1) For click through rate, my wife says that she really doesn't like to click on URLs with variables and numbers in them, so she prefers the second option.
2) For SEO, I know for sure that the second URL is better. The search engines do look at keywords in the URL as a pretty important factor. Plus, you can run into duplicate content issues if you use a lot of variables in URLs.
So... the second example URL you list is much better in my opinion.
Scoot 12:11 PM on September 15, 2007
I always listen to my wife, for fear that she may be right. It has happened, and it scares me.
user 6:55 PM on September 15, 2007
Yeah I agree with your wife man, it's only intuitive to click on the short one . You actually get the chance to grasp the whole thing, and if the domain has meaning, and the user's get hooked - they're yours.
Adrian Buerki 4:54 AM on November 10, 2007
Check out: traceurl.com TraceURL shortens any URL plus it tracks traffic to the page through the TraceURL shortened web site address, showing where the traffic originated. This can be a useful tool for anyone trying to track which promotional tactics are working the best. Count accesses and have the origin of the visitor displayed on a Google Map.
Anonymous 4:46 PM on November 11, 2007
@Adrian - Unfortunately Trace URL is not relevant for SEO - SEO sends people to pages that are on your website, and because your service is a redirect, your URLs will not be indexed by search engines. What people need to do to improve thier SEO clickthrough rate as described in this article is to make sure the URLs on your own website are short, readable and have good keywords.