Will changing URLs affect SEO?

tl;dr - should my company change its URL structure for the blog?

Hi /SEO, I recently got a job as part of the Marketing team for a company. My role is very content-focused so I'll be doing lots of writing and hopefully expanding their blog. I've been looking a lot recently at their website blog structure (or complete lack thereof) and have been checking online to see whether any ideas I have for changes would have a massively negative impact on SEO.

So basically their blog has no structure currently. All the blog posts are listed one after the other (rather than cards in a grid layout) with no functionality to filter by category. There's also no tagging structure or paging system - i.e. when you go to their blog it's just all the articles they've posted in date order on one massive page, rather than being split across pages (like page 1, page 2 etc.) As for their URL structure, it's also non-existant. Any article posted (regardless of content/context e.g. industry news, company announcements, blog-style "tips" articles etc.) has the following URL structure:

company-name/electric-car-news/article-title

Note that the blog is called "electric-car-news" rather than blog, I presume for SEO reasons. But this means every article posted has this category, even company-related announcements (like new partnerships or products). In my head (and limited SEO knowledge) it's a really bad setup, not just from a SERP perspective but also for users - there's no way to filter to specific content or structure to follow through. Just one long, long, long list.

So my proposal (again based on my limited knowledge/research) is to completely change/update their blog. Among other things (like a card/grid layout) I'm proposing making changes to the URL structure, and from what I've seen online it can be very dangerous from an SEO perspective to change a URL even a little bit. Hence why I'm posting here - I wanted to ask here to see if my ideas are going to help their SEO or fuck their website to the Moon and back again.

My ideas are:

  1. Start with a simple /blog/ page acting as the homepage for the articles, with them all laid out in a grid/with cards defaulting to date published (newest-oldest)
  2. Adding categories to this to filter out content (which would be added to the page as a menu/nav) e.g. /company-news, /industry-news etc.
  3. After this would be the article title, which would stay the exact same as they currently are (as in my mind they're ok - they're all static URLs excluding things like 'a' or 'an' or 'the' etc.)

My thoughts/hopes are that this creates a clearer URL structure a) for the user and b) for Google. I know that for the user it would be much better than a big unfiltered list on a single page, but I also know that making website changes for the user doesn't necessarily have an impact (positive or negative) on SEO. But in this case, I know my proposals include changing the URL structure which will have an impact.

My question, ultimately, is: would creating a more coherent URL structure (potentially) benefit their SEO? Or am I a lunatic who should be kept well clear of anything SEO-related now and forever more?

Note that I'm not asking for anything to tell me how to do it - I have researched that stuff like 301 redirects can be used so I'm vaguely aware of the process, and besides we have someone that does SEO here so I know it wouldn't actually be down to me to implement. I just want to know whether I'd be wasting my time/harming the company with these ideas.

submitted by /u/Tofuzzle
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