We're currently working on a major redesign for a retail brand here that has been struggling with declining traffic and SEO for a couple of years.

When we opened up the hood of their existing website, we found a key (and often hidden) issue that can make the difference between Google seeing your site as a disheveled mess or an organized authority.

If you have a large website with lots of products, services, or locations - this is for you.

What is URL Taxonomy?

A website is just a collection of individual webpages, all organized on a sitemap. You might have 20 pages or 20,000, and each one is competing individually in search results. However, the overall quality and organization of the website affects how every single one of those pages performs.

Imagine you have a website that offers two completely random services: accounting and sports coaching.

The overall relevance score of the website is going to suffer because Google is less likely to trust your site compared to one solely focused on accounting or one dedicated entirely to sports coaching. It creates a lack of focus and authority.

While that's an extreme example, the point is that you want to organize your website to increase its quality score and best enable all of your pages to compete. This is where URL taxonomy comes in.

The URL taxonomy is essentially how you organize all the pages on your site into logical groups and shelves using your URL structure. Many business owners and marketing leaders overlook this when a website is just getting started. The priority is just to get online, and long-term structure isn't top of mind.

But as you expand your locations, products, and services, what started as a small site can quickly become a pretty messy pile. This disorganization can seriously hold back your SEO performance.

A Real-World Example

Let's look at a retail company selling sofas, beds, bed bases, lounges, and stuff like that.

All of these products can be listed under one generic product category with an unclear URL string.

furnituresite.com/product/floatingbedbase846

To a search engine, this is just a random product. The URL doesn't provide any context!

Google doesn't know what category this belongs to or how it relates to other items on the site. It’s just another page in a massive, unorganized "product" folder.

We can make this significantly better by structuring the URLs into logical folders. A much better structure would be:

furnituresite.com/bed-bases/floating/recessed-leg

Now both the user and robots know exactly where they are. They're on the website, in the "bed bases" category, looking at the "floating" style, and specifically at the "recessed leg" model. The hierarchy is clear.

Why a Clean URL Structure Boosts Authority

By organizing your products this way, you're explicitly telling Google, "Hey, look at all these items I have inside my 'bed bases' folder."

This signals that you have depth and expertise in this specific category.

As a result, all the pages within the /bed-bases/ folder will compete more effectively for "bed base" related searches. The strength of the category as a whole lifts up every individual product page within it.

As AI Overviews become more prominent in search results, providing clear context is crucial. The structured URL gives AI models all the context they need about the product and its relationship to other items. This makes them far more confident in recommending your webpage to their audiences.

It’s Not Just for Products

While we've focused on an e-commerce example, this principle applies to all types of content groupings like services, locations etc.

The goal is to think about logical groupings for everything on your site. Even though users might not pay close attention to the URL in their browser bar, all of this adds up.

These structural signals are vital for helping Google and AI models better understand your website, interpret your content, and ultimately, put it in front of the right people.