URL Slug SEO Checker

The URL slug is the part of an address that describes the specific page, and it is one of the few pieces of on-page SEO a visitor sees before they even click. This checker pulls the last path segment out of a URL, or reads a slug typed in directly, and scores it against the practices Google and most SEO practitioners recommend: short, lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive and free of filler words.

What this checker looks at

It flags a slug that runs long, uses uppercase letters or underscores instead of hyphens, contains raw spaces or unencoded special characters, starts or ends with a stray hyphen, is only a number with no descriptive text, or is either too short to be meaningful or long enough to look keyword-stuffed. It also counts common filler stop words like "the," "of," and "and," since trimming most of these usually makes a slug both shorter and easier to read.

Why slug quality is worth fixing

A clean, descriptive slug helps in three separate ways: it is a small on-page relevance signal search engines can read directly, it gives a searcher scanning a results page a preview of what the page covers before they click, and it makes the URL easier to remember, share and paste without breaking. None of these effects is large on its own, but together they make a URL worth getting right the first time, since changing a live slug later means setting up a redirect.

Fixing a slug this tool flags

Rewrite the slug in lowercase, join words with single hyphens, drop most filler stop words, and keep the core keyword phrase near the front. If the page is already live and indexed, do not just change the slug: set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so links and rankings carry over instead of resetting.