Changing any URLs will have an effect on your SEO. So, if you want zero effect on SEO, you cannot also change URLs from example.com/post to example.com/blog/post. You’ll want to look at how well-established your site is – if you have hundreds or thousands of posts that are ranking well, you likely should not change URLs at all. However, if you have a newer or smaller site, or your posts just aren’t ranking well for your desired keyphrases, then it may actually help your SEO to change the permalinks to add a relevant term (a category name, rather than /blog/) into your URLs.
Here are three options with their pros and cons:
- Use Categories
Since grouped posts will likely be of similar subjects, Core Categories might be an easy way to group posts. This will also give you a built-in landing page for each subject (the category archive) that you don’t have to manually edit, and you will end up with the desired URL structure /categoryname/individualpost/.
To do: change your permalink settings to /%category%/%postname%/
Pros: no coding, creates landing pages automatically
Cons: will change permalinks of all your blog posts
- Use a different post type
Since Posts are not hierarchical (they don’t support parent Posts), you could either use Core Pages or your own custom post type. You would then be more easily able to customize the landing pages (parent pages) and will still end up with the URL structure /parentpage/individualpost/.
To do: use Pages, or create a custom post type for every group
Pros: no coding, ability to control landing page content in the Editor
Cons: will change permalinks of all your blog posts; “Pages” are meant to be more static than Posts and thus may be a little less SEO-friendly for content if it is timing or news-related
- Change your Google Analytics setup
Try including your current Google Analytics tracking code by using Google Tag Manager. Instead of pasting in the UTM tracking code, it will give you a Tag Manager code to paste in. It’s just as fast as GA, but you will then get access to a dashboard where you can fine-tune what tracking code you’re including.
GA calls what you’re looking for “Content Groups.” There are several ways to create them. One option is to add a short line of code to each URL that identifies which content group that post belongs to. This snippet won’t make your site load any slower.
Pros: no need to change any permalinks
Cons: you’ll need to manually update content groupings every time you publish a post, since your current permalink structure does not provide an automated way to tell which Content Group a particular post should be in
I would suggest changing your GA setup (use GTM and Content Groupings) and your permalink structure (add the category), again unless you have a large, well-established site already. This will help not only search engines but also visitors to understand the context they’re in.