The best way to change and improve SEO URL's

[Lazar]

Hi,
We have more than 4000 products on website with just a SKU in url like "www.mywebsite.com/RSK-XXXX
So as you know this is not good for SEO, because our SKU does not mean anything to customer so my question is is there any application I can change URL for all products in the same time? For example match url with title. Example:
www.mywebsite.com/products/2019-2020-nissan-altima-versa-5-button-smart-key-kr5txn4-bundle-of-3

Any suggestion on how to improve SEO?
Thank you

[JonWright]

If you do an export of all your products, all your URLs are in the ‘handle’ column. You could change them there and do an upload.
You’ll then need to delete your ‘old’ products. And please note this will not create re-directs.

[JonWright]

Forgot to add. Don’t forget to format your handles correctly (lower case, - for spaces, no special characters etc.)

[Lazar]

Any easier way because that would take a long time to do... Applications can not help?

[JonWright]

Not aware of any but sure others will chip in with suggestions. The spreadsheet route would only take about 30 mins though if all you need to do is pull your product title in to the handle field, make it lower case and replace spaces with -. You can do that with excel formulas.

[grupolecer]

Hi, I have changed all my urls from a python script. The problem is that every time a product is updated, the url is reset, and returns to the handle-xxx format.

Is there a way to avoid this ? 

Thanks

[chrismlong63]

So a best practice when forming your URLs is to structure them so their categorized using folders. A good method is www.website.com/category/product/

For instance, if you had a page on a Nissan Versa the URL could be www.website.com/nissan/2019-versa/. You can see CarMax does this in this URL: https://www.carmax.com/cars/nissan/versa

The benefits of this are that it:

• Keyword optimizes your URLs
• Gives users a clear understanding of the landing page and categorization 
• Allows you analyze URLs at the folder-level in Google Analytics

Hopefully that's helpful. I wrote a full guide to Shopify SEO if you want to read more general SEO information: https://moz.com/blog/shopify-seo

[Rockpapercopy]

Just a suggestion - the shorter URLs are better for the SEO, so instead of the URL as in example: www.mywebsite.com/products/2019-2020-nissan-altima-versa-5-button-smart-key-kr5txn4-bundle-of-3

I recommend using URL like: www.mywebsite.com/products/nissan-altima-button-smart-key

the fewer characters, numbers and words, the better. Google can read it much easier, and it will be easier for the search engines to understand this kind of URL and rank it in the most relevant search results

[Josh_Uebergang]

I have had good success with Google Sheets and using Vlookup functionality. For this to work, you need some consistency between the old URL and the new URL. Ideally, each would be unique as well. You can match up a new and old URL this way in bulk. Otherwise, if the URL has no detectable similarity, you need a human to think and match. Software like cart 2 cart can manage redirects from your old platform to new.

[flareAI]

I am adding to @JonWright's  excellent comments. When creating URLs optimize the product id by avoiding stop word like "and", "the" and such. You also want to avoid duplicate words.

Hope this was helpful.

Asha