How to Optimize Your Website’s Permalinks for SEO

If you’re going to score a spot on Google’s coveted front page, your website needs to be readable by search engines. By optimizing your permalinks, you can get a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) boost — but there are some areas of your permalinks that you can’t tweak by default.

Fortunately, there are third-party WordPress plugins that let you edit your entire permalink. By opting for a permalink-optimizing plugin, you can ensure they’re contributing towards your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rather than working against it.

In this post, we’ll look at why permalinks are so important, before sharing three ways that you can craft more SEO-friendly URLs with Permalink Manager Pro. Let’s get started!

Why URLs Are Crucial for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In short, an optimized URL clearly communicates the page’s content to search engines and humans. Concise, keyword-rich, and relevant URLs can help dedicated ‘bots’ to find and crawl your content. They can also ensure that content scores highly in relevant search results.

By using a URL optimization plugin, you can craft URLs that closely align with the phrases your target audience is searching for. If your URLs are a perfect query-keyword match, studies suggest you could see a 45% increase in your Click-Through Rate (CTR).

If your website consistently scores high CTRs, you’ll climb Google’s search engine rankings and you should see a further increase in traffic. On average, moving just one spot in Google’s search results will increase your CTRs by over a quarter — and in some instances could even boost them by 53.2%.

Introducing Permalink Manager Pro

In a nutshell, Permalink Manager Pro is a URL editor for creating SEO-friendly URLs. In other words, ideal for the task at hand.

Using this plugin, you can add relevant keywords and remove unnecessary words, including those inserted by third-party plugins. For example, the popular WooCommerce plugin adds product to all your product pages. Long, complex URLs are difficult for visitors to comprehend, which can damage CTRs, so it’s important to remove unnecessary words wherever possible.

You can also use Permalink Manager Pro to define unique URL structures for different languages. The Internet is multilingual, so if you’re only optimizing for one language, you’re missing out on a huge potential audience.

You can download Permalink Manager Lite for free, or you can invest in Permalink Manager Pro which is priced at €45. By investing in Pro, you can edit the permalinks for all content types, including categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and all WooCommerce content.

How to Optimize Your Website’s Permalinks for SEO (Using Permalink Manager Pro)

Optimizing your URLs is an important part of any successful SEO strategy, so let’s look at three ways that you can create more SEO-friendly URLs using Permalink Manager Pro. Note that you’ll need to have the plugin installed and activated before continuing.

1. Remove WooCommerce’s Product, Product Category and Product Tags

By default, the popular WooCommerce plugin adds product, product-category and product-tags to all your product pages.

These additional words can inflate your URLs, without adding any real value. By removing them, you can reduce the length of your URLs, making them easier for humans and search engines to read. You can also replace these unnecessary words with more SEO-friendly keywords, while keeping the URL length to a minimum.

To remove WooCommerce’s product, product-category, and product-tags, select Tools > Permalink Manager from WordPress’ left-hand menu. You can then select the Permastructures tab.

Here, you’ll find a WooCommerce section, where you can edit the various permalink bases.

WooCommerce permalinks, as seen in the WordPress dashboard.

Permalink Manager Pro will apply these changes to all future products you add to your site. To apply these changes to your existing content, you’ll need to select the Tools tab, followed by the Regenerate/reset link.

Permalink Manager's "Regenerate" section.

You can now specify which URLs Permalink Manager should update, then click the Regenerate button.

2. Optimize Your URLs for Every Language

The international and multilingual market is huge. By limiting your SEO to one specific language, you’re severely limiting your audience.

You can use Permalink Manager Pro to define a unique permalink structure for multiple languages. Once you’ve defined this structure, Permalink Manager Pro will automatically translate the permalinks for your pages, posts, custom post types, categories, post tags, and custom taxonomies. Note that this method requires either the Polylang or WPML plugins too.

To translate your URLs, navigate to Permalink Manager Pro’s Permastructures tab. Next, find the permalinks that you want to update, and click Show additional settings.

You can now define a unique permalink structure for every language that your website supports, then click Save permastructures. By default, Permalink Manager Pro applies these changes to future content only, unless you regenerate your permalinks (Tools > Permalink Manager > Tools > Regenerate/reset > Regenerate).

3. Remove the Permalink Base From Custom Post Types

If you’re going to craft the perfect URL for a particular post, you may occasionally need to break the rules. Each custom post type and taxonomy has its own permalink base – by default WordPress doesn’t make it easy to change this structure.

Thankfully, Permalink Manager Pro gives you complete control. To remove this permalink base, open the page, post, product or any other item that you want to edit. Find the Permalink Manager section and click to expand.

You can now customize the permalink base. If a visitor enters the old URL, Permalink Manager Pro will redirect them automatically, so they won’t encounter a 404 error. Alternatively, you can use Permalink Manager Pro to setup custom redirects.

Conclusion

Permalinks are an important part of any effective SEO strategy, but there’s some slugs that you cannot edit by default. By using a WordPress plugin such as Permalink Manager, you can optimize every part of your website’s URLs, including: