<b>"Put your exact keyword in the URL slug for a ranking boost."</b>

<b>"Put your exact keyword in the URL slug for a ranking boost."</b>

Barely.

Google has repeatedly called words in the URL a "very small" ranking factor, and Mueller has said he'd guess most of its value is psychological for the user, not algorithmic.

Here's what actually happens: the slug helps a human in the SERP and in a pasted link read what the page is about. That's a click signal, not a position signal. Stuffing /best-cheap-affordable-running-shoes-2026 doesn't out-rank /running-shoes; it just looks like a slug written by a robot.

The genuinely costly mistake is the opposite: changing a slug to chase keywords, breaking the URL, and eating a redirect (and the small equity loss and crawl churn that comes with it) for a factor Google itself calls tiny.

Short, stable, readable. Then leave it alone.