In a recent Benchmark Report on Search Marketing, Marketing Sherpa asked business professionals to perform searches in Google and found that shorter URLs appearing directly below longer URLs had 250% more click-through in organic search. Marketing Sherpa suggests that short URLs can be a competitive advantage as long URLs are difficult to decipher and distract searchers from reading your listing title. You can read the excerpt of the report free here.

The observation that searchers do pay attention to URLs and that URLs influence click-through supports the argument for search engine friendly ecommerce software. Relevant keywords in a URL matching a search query will be bolded in search results, reinforcing the relevance of a page to the searcher while giving the page a relevance boost in the eyes of the search engine.

But for ecommerce marketers, URL length is really not the only thing you should be concerned about when it comes to attracting organic search clicks, especially for “long tail” search queries. Searchers are also influenced by:

• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description
• Branding in Title, Description and URL
• Indented Results
• Pricing in Results
• Marketing Messages in Results
• Google Product Result Listings

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