A question about how to construct a good url structure for SEO

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Simon Fryer: Hi +John Pitcher ;
  
  I don't think that any of the approaches you've mentioned are going to raise 'spam' flags with Google. ;
  
  That said I wouldn't go down the directory route unless you're targeting a large number of locations and don't have a fixed address in each one.
  
  Ex.1 or ex.2 would both be fine. Some would say ex.2 is better but I believe that the impact is minimal, and prefer not to use locations in URLs. Instead I'd focus on other ways to establish the locale. ;
  
  The only real benefit of getting your locations in the URL is some very slightly bolded text in the SERPs.
  
  Search engines - well....Google - are beginning to understand businesses as a whole, rather than just evaluating results at a single webpage level. ;
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  William Gomes: +Simon Fryer what he said. ;-) 
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  Ranu Jain: Yes John, I too would suggest that don't include the geographic location in the URLs. You can always rank in those areas by doing local SEO. ;You can simply add the services name in the URLs.  ;
  
  If you really want to add the location then I would suggest to have different pages for different location under service 1and so on. As your main focus is on just two towns, it won't be a tedious job for you.
  
  For ex:  ;service1/town1.html (folder level structure)
  service1/town2.html
  
  It will definitely help you in ranking as you will have separate page with location specific keywords and content. ;
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  John Pitcher: Many thanks all; my instinct was to move away from the servicea-town1-town2.html type of url (in case it gets frowned upon at some stage in the future) but wasn't sure if I was "missing a trick" by doing this.
  +Simon Fryer ;Many thanks for your assessment that the impact is minimal; having just used the Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin (for another site) where it flags up when your keywords are not in the url, I thought I'd double-check.
  Thanks Ranu Jain for your suggestion of rearranging the directories; service/town is probably better that town/service.
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:48:01 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/a_question_about_how_to_construct_a_good_url_structure_for_seo