For most pages on your website, especially important ones in your nav menu, you should assign them parent pages.
For example, if describing a feature of your SaaS platform, ensure its parent is something like a general Solutions page.
This should be seen in the URL, meaning it has a subfolder with ‘name.com/solutions/feature’ instead of ‘name.com/feature.’
URL slugs alone don’t show users (and search engines) how pages organize into the site’s hierarchy, so this helps UX!
This parent-child relationship also has SEO advantages:
- It facilitates an on-page breadcrumb trail. This provides internal linking to key pages, so that search engines understand their value, while creating ideal anchor text. Further supported by structured data, this enhances your search engine listing to improve CTR.
- This increases dwell time on your site as content becomes more findable. Some visitors will visit the subfolder or explore additional pages via the breadcrumb trail.
- It helps you to quickly measure performance since analytics tools let you easily filter by subfolder.
So, is this vital enough to redirect basic URLs to a new structure? In my opinion, mostly yes. As the cost for 301 redirects has greatly decreased, the overall UX boost is worth it!