"Put your keyword in the URL slug for a ranking boost."

"Put your keyword in the URL slug for a ranking boost."

Marginal at best.

A marketplace migrated 6,000 product URLs from /p/482910 to /p/482910/blue-running-shoes-mens-waterproof — keyword-rich slugs, one-to-one 301s. Clean migration, no other changes. They held back 600 products on numeric URLs as a control.

Result after 12 weeks: keyword-slug group up 3% in non-branded clicks. Control up 2%. Inside the margin.

Here's the part people skip. The 301 redirects on 6,000 URLs caused a two-week crawl-and-reindex dip that cost more traffic than the slugs ever returned. Net positive only by week 9.

Descriptive slugs are good hygiene and help users in shared links. They are not a ranking lever worth a risky mass migration. If your URLs are already live and indexed, the rewrite usually loses you more than the keyword gains. (Do it on new URLs, not old ones.)