What Are Vanity URLs And How to Create Them

How happy would you be if your sales and revenue increased by word of mouth? 

Here is a fact, “Word of mouth is directly responsible for 90% of all purchases”!

It’s confusing, isn’t it? Instead of discussing vanity URLs, I am sharing a fact about word of mouth.

Because both are interlinked.

Since a vanity URL makes your URL memorable and shareable, it helps build trust, enhance user experience, and retain clients.

When people trust your brand, they share positive words about you with their friends, family, and close ones. To be precise, they’ll become your promotor.

As a result, your customer base, brand recognition, and brand value increase.

Don’t you think those are tremendous benefits to your business growth?

That’s why vanity URL plays a massive role in the digital landscape.

This blog aims to educate you about everything related to Vanity URLs, from what they are to how to use them.

Let’s start!

What is a Vanity URL?

A vanity URL is a custom or branded URL, a shorter version of a standard URL.

Since the vanity URLs are unique and personalized, they are easy to remember and share among people.

Following the standard cluttered URL version with “-,  #, &, numbers, and special characters” makes it difficult for users to read and understand. Meanwhile, the vanity URL allows you to simplify the URL and make it readable and memorable.

Imagine the summer sale is on, and you created a dedicated page with products and offers. 

Now, your standard URL might look something like – https://yourcompanyname.com/summer-sale-buy-1-get-1-free-offers/

This URL looks clumsy and difficult to remember, right?

Take a look at this vanity URL – https://yourcompanyname.com/summersale.

It’s easy to read, remember, and share among people.

When you leverage this vanity URL in your online and offline advertising campaigns, it becomes easy for the user to read and remember.

So, when a friend asks for a summer sale recommendation, he might suggest your brand or, more likely, share your vanity URL.

Vanity URLs Vs. standard URLs 

Here are the differences between vanity URLs and standard URLs:

Vanity URL:

• Easy to read
• Easy to share
• Easy to remember
• Enhance trust
• Enhance SEO performance
• Used for marketing purposes like tracking results on analytics

Standard URL:

• Length is long
• Filled with letters, numbers, and symbols
• Can’t understand it easily
• Hard to remember and  share it with anyone
• It may confuse readers and make them hesitant to indulge
• Hard for the Google bot to crawl and index

Benefits of Vanity URLs

Vanity URLs are an incredible marketing asset. It provides tremendous benefits and enhances your brand’s efforts in different aspects. Here are its benefits:

Increased Trust

Imagine you’re walking with a barely known person who is taking you to a mysterious place. Whenever you ask him about the destination, he says something long and complex that you can’t understand or figure out. 

Now, you start feeling agitated, anxious, and hesitant, figuring out a way to escape, right?

But what if the opposite happens?

You know the person, and you know where he is taking you. You’ll trust him because he is transparent, and the destination is clear.

That’s what happens when you use a vanity URL.

When your URL is complex and challenging to understand, users hesitate to click on that link. 

Customizing and personalizing the URL can eliminate such hesitations. It’s because the URL explains what they can expect from that page.

Here is an example: www.example.com/index.php?blog/content/what-is-seo-and-how-to-learn-it/

This is complex. You can’t expect your reader to memorize it. 

Here is the revised version: www.example.com/how-to-learn-seo/

It’s concise, simple, and transparent, right?

This way, your audience will know what they can get from the specific page before clicking. This transparency will build trust and prove you’re a legitimate source.

Easy to Remember

The biggest benefit of vanity URLs is that they are memorable.

A short and catchy URL is easier to remember and recall. The user can type the URL in the browser and check that page anytime.

Whether running an online or offline advertising campaign, leveraging the shorter URL can bring loads of traffic to your website. 

Even if your audience doesn’t convert now, it doesn’t mean they won’t convert at all.

Whenever they plan to make a purchase, you are their first preference, as they remember your URL. 

This increases your brand recognition and traffic to your website.

Shareable

The vanity URL’s simplicity makes it easily shareable.

Remember the importance of word-of-mouth, which I explained at the start of this blog?

If your link is short, concise, and easy to remember, it can probably be shared easily.

You can share your URL with your people through radio, TV, social media ads, or other marketing channels.

Once your audience finds you’re genuine, they might share words about you on their social media feed or share with their friends, family, followers, and close ones. 

As a result, you can increase your sales and conversion through word of mouth.

Different social media platforms may have predefined character limits. Using these vanity URLs can help you create short, concise, and clear content along with the URL without exceeding the character limit.

Enhance User Experience

A simple and clear URL will enhance the user experience.

With the vanity URL, your user can quickly understand the URLs, the page’s context, and the destination. With that clarity in mind, your user won’t hesitate to click on the link and interact with that page, which will increase the engagement rate.

SEO Significance of Vanity URLs

Now that you know the overall benefits of the vanity URL. Here, you’ll find how vanity URLs will impact your SEO efforts:

Strategic Keyword Integration

Integrating relevant keywords into the URL will improve your SEO efforts.

When choosing the keyword for the URL, always ensure it is relevant to the page’s context. 

If you incorporate a wrong keyword, it will affect the user experience and engagement rate.

Just check this example: https://www.myntra.com/men-sneakers

Myntra has incorporated the keyword “men-sneakers.” 

That page is only dedicated to men’s sneakers. The strategic keyword integration has impacted their SEO efforts, and now they rank in the top position of the SERP.

Search engines consider URLs a ranking factor. A well-chosen URL can improve your web page’s visibility in the search engine results.

Impacts Click-Through Rate

Vanity URLs can potentially impact your CTR.

A clean, clear, and descriptive URL can attract more visitors to your site from search engines and social media. 

Because the vanity URL gives people an overview of what’s on that page, they click on that link and make a purchase only if it appears trustworthy and relevant to their needs.

Improved Online Sharing

The more people share your URL online and link your site on their web page, the more backlinks you acquire.

The more backlinks you have, the higher your web page ranks.

Since the vanity URL is short and descriptive, it’s easy to read and remember. This makes sharing your link easy and brings more referral traffic and visitors to your website.

Tracking and Analyzing Performance

Vanity URLs play a crucial role in assessing the performance of your ad campaigns.

Let’s assume you follow two ad campaigns with different strategies – social media ads and email campaigns.

To track and analyze the performance of each campaign separately, you create two different distinct vanity URLs.

Based on this, you can easily analyze the performance of your two different campaigns and track which one has resulted in high traffic and conversions. 

Vanity URLs Best Practices

Now you know the overall benefit and SEO significance of vanity URLs. Even though vanity URLs have many benefits, you can’t use them everywhere. Doing so will reduce the URL’s essence. You need to use them only in the essential place. 

Here are some of the best practices of Vanity URLs for higher SEO impact:

Keep it Short and Simple

The most significant benefit of vanity URLs is their simplicity and brevity. 

Aim for a short URL. Remove unnecessary words, typos, and symbols to keep it simple and straight.

Each platform has a different character or word limit for ad campaigns. So, based on that, you have to create your context and include your URL. 

So, always be conscious while choosing your vanity URL. It should be attractive, relevant, easy to read, and memorable.

Make URLs Relevant to Content

Relevancy is an essential ranking factor for all search engines.

If your URL promises something and the context is entirely different from the promise, people will bounce to other websites. If Google finds the bounce rate high, your website won’t rank at the top or first page of the SERP.

That’s why you should make URLs relevant to content.

Use relevant keywords or the primary keyword in the vanity URL.

For example, look at https://www.stanventures.com/blog/increase-website-traffic/. This webpage discusses “how to increase traffic to your website.” The keyword included in the URL is “increased website traffic.” Since both are on the same page, we deliver what we have promised in the URL.

So, choose the keyword wisely or use a short phrase to explain the content.

Maintain Consistency

The success of branding relies on consistency.

To increase brand awareness, your vanity URL should replicate your brand and be consistent across all channels. 

The name you choose can be your brand name, relevant keywords, or products associated with your brand. When you do that, ensure you use it consistently everywhere.

So, when your target audience sees the link, they can easily recognize your brand.

It is the key to building trust and recognition of your brand.

Avoid Special Characters

A vanity URL aims to create a simple and easily memorable URL.

But, if the URL has special characters like dashes, hashtags, numbers, and others, it will add intricacies to your URL.

You can’t expect your users to remember the dash, hashtags, question marks, or other characters. 

By missing any characters, they can end up with a 404 error page.

So, avoid using special characters to keep a clean vanity URL and make it more user-friendly.

Track and Analyze Performance

As I said before, setting up different vanity URLs for a campaign will help you conduct A/B testing.

By using different vanity URLs and analyzing their performance, you can determine which technique drives good results. 

This lets you track traffic, user experience, conversion rate, and revenue. With all these details, you can tweak your marketing strategy to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

How to Create a Vanity URL

Now let’s explore the step-by-step process to create a vanity URL:

Choose a Unique Name

The first and foremost step in creating a vanity URL is choosing a unique name. 

As mentioned above, the name can be your business name, relevant keyword, or product or service name.

Avoid common, generic, or pre-used names. It can cause more confusion and trouble.

 If you can’t create a unique name, use phrases or words that match your brand’s value and objective.

So, for example, if your company sells bags as an alternative to plastic, you can use “eco bags” or “alternative to plastic bags.” Both could be perfect since they reflect the brand’s social responsibility and objective.

Check Availability

Once you choose the name, the next step is to check availability.

You need to ensure whether any other person is using this name.

As I said, consistency builds a brand. Your vanity metrics should also be consistent throughout.

Imagine you have selected a name, and most social media platforms except LinkedIn have availability for your selected vanity URL name. In that case, you can choose another name available across all platforms to maintain consistency or use a different vanity URL for LinkedIn alone.

While using different URLs for specific platforms, look for alternatives, such as adding your target region to the vanity URL or using different tactics.

You can find the availability by doing simple Google searches for different platforms.

Once you have found an available vanity URL, register it.

Register the Domain (For Custom Domains)

When you create a custom vanity URL, register the link with a reputable domain registrar. This will ensure the domain’s ownership and use for the desired purpose.

Likewise, once you have checked the availability of domain names on social media platforms, update them on your social media channels and websites.

Use A Link Shortener Tool

Once you have registered your domain, use a link shortener tool to shorten your URL. 

Some might offer URL-shortening tools as a feature if you’re using a no-code web development platform like WordPress. You can customize the URL to fit your needs. 

If not, you can use tools like Bitly and TinyURLs to shorten URLs. These two tools not only shorten the URLs but also have the feature to calculate the clicks of the URL.

Once the URL is ready, test it. Check for typo errors and ensure the link lands on your desired page.

Customize According to Platform Guidelines

Each platform has different guidelines for the vanity URL. 

It’s best to consider the vanity regulations for each platform before choosing or customizing a URL.

For example, Twitter sets a 15-character maximum for username length, whereas Instagram has a character limit 30.

Likewise, as the platform differs, the regulations also vary. So, you must ensure your vanity URL adheres to these standards and is easy to read and memorable to your target audience.

Promote Your Vanity URL

Once your vanity URL is ready, incorporate it into your marketing strategy and promote it.

Including your vanity URL in social media ads, email marketing, print media, and other relevant platforms will maximize its visibility and impact.

The more you show your brand to people, the more likely they will check your site once and become aware of your business. At any time, they can convert into customers.

Conclusion

Vanity URLs can increase word-of-mouth sales and revenue.

By keeping your URL short, readable, memorable, and shareable, you’ll improve the user experience and foster trust and engagement with your users.

The digital marketing landscape is evolving. You have all sorts of tools to measure and improve your performance. Likewise, this vanity URL is your marketing asset. You can use the vanity URL to monitor and measure the performance of different tactics. Based on the result, you can optimize your strategy and achieve your desired goal soon.

Following the above steps and best practices, you can build your vanity URLs, improve your SEO efforts, and outperform your competitors.

FAQ’s