You know that your website is the backbone of your business, but how much do you really understand about its structure? Website structure and SEO go hand in hand. The structure of your site can impact your user experience and search engine optimization (SEO) in several ways. If you want to optimize both aspects of your site, it’s important to understand how they work together and how they’re affected by different parts of the architecture. We’ll dive into why website structure matters for SEO and how to improve yours.
How website structure and SEO work together
In order to rank well in the search results, you need to have a clear website structure. This is important for both your users and the search engines that crawl your site. This is a crucial part of website structure and SEO. A good internal linking strategy will help with improving your user experience and assist with optimizing your pages for search engines.
- For users: People want to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily on any given website; if they can’t, they will move onto another site that does provide this convenience for them.
- For search engines: If a particular page doesn’t have enough links pointing towards it from other parts of the website, then it won’t be able to rank as high as it deserves (or should). The more backlinks pointing at different pages within your domain name, the better off those pages will be when ranking in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
What is website structure?
Website structure is the way your website is organized. It’s important for SEO, user experience and search engines to crawl your site effectively.
- Your site’s URL structure is a foundation for all other website structures.
- The URL structure defines how the content will be displayed in search engines and how users navigate through your site.
Why website structure is important for search engine optimization
So, if you’ve got a website and you want it to rank well in search engines, you need to think about how search engines work. When someone searches for “yoga pants” on Google, they are looking for a specific product or service. They don’t want to see a bunch of websites that have nothing to do with yoga pants. This is why website structure and SEO is so important.
That’s where your website structure comes into play: by optimizing your site’s HTML code, you can tell Google what content should be shown when people search for particular keywords—the words that make up their queries (e.g., “yoga pants”). Search engine algorithms use this information to decide which pages belong near the top of search results and which ones don’t deserve so much attention from users or clicks from advertisers.
3 ways to improve your website structure
We now know why website structure and SEO go hand in hand. So, what are the best ways to improve your website structure?
- Use a sitemap. A sitemap is a document that shows all of the pages on your website and how they’re linked together. It can make it easier for search engines to crawl through your site and find what they’re looking for, which helps increase organic traffic from search engines.
- Use a content management system (CMS). A CMS makes updating and creating new pages on your website much simpler than working with plain HTML code would be—and it also lets you keep track of how those changes affect how well search engines index your site! The most common is WordPress, but depending on your situation, services such as Shopify and Squarespace may be sufficient.
- Create a dedicated guide or checklist for yourself or anyone else who will be making changes to the website in future months/years/decades…you get the idea! This way there aren’t any unexpected gaps when someone adds something new without realizing where it should go—or if they accidentally remove something important while trying out something new instead (which happens more often than we’d like).
READ: THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF WEBSITE DESIGN
How to Improve Your Website Structure and SEO: Example Architecture
Now that you understand the importance of a solid website architecture, here’s an example of how a good one might look:
- The homepage is the first page users see when they land on your site and has the highest level of visibility. It should be designed to give users an overview of what your company does, including its mission statement, address and contact information (if relevant), hours of operation, etc.
- The category pages are next in line as far as importance goes; they help visitors navigate through all the products or services available on your site by providing them with additional information on each item you offer. If there are too many pages crammed into a single category – especially if it’s something like “Products” or “Services” – users may have problems finding what they’re looking for with ease. A few well-organized subcategories can make things much easier for both visitors and search engines alike!
- Finally, once we get past our top-level categories (or subcategories), we’ll start hitting lower levels such as product pages where visitors can find out more about individual items without having scroll through endless lists filled with unrelated content.
Find a balance between crawlable and static pages
The lines between crawlable and static pages can be blurry. For example, a blog with an RSS feed is considered crawlable by search engines because it’s accessible through an API, but it also allows your content to be syndicated on other sites. That makes the blog page a bit more difficult for search engines to read and index, since it’s not technically “static.”
If you have any type of dynamic content on your website that could be considered crawler-unfriendly (e.g., JavaScript rendering), you should consider how those pages will affect your SEO efforts. If these types of pages are important to your site’s architecture—or if they’re just plain necessary—you’ll need to build in ways for them to be found without hindering SEO efforts too much.
This is an important part of website structure and SEO.
Make sure your readers can get back home easily
- Make sure your navigation is easy to find.
- Make sure your navigation is easy to use.
- Make sure your navigation is easy to understand.
- Make sure your navigation is easy to remember.
- Make sure your navigation is easy to use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets
Make sure your content and keywords pair up with the right page.
- Make sure your content and keywords pair up with the right page.
- If you have a lot of different pages that are trying to rank for the same SEO keyword, it’s possible that you could be losing out on opportunities to capitalize on traffic from that keyword because it doesn’t know which page to send visitors to. This is called “keyword cannibalization,” and when this happens, Google Analytics will show a drop in organic search referrals for your site.
Website structure and SEO is great for search engines and your users.
Your website’s structure is important for SEO and user experience. You might think that “structure” refers to the way you lay out your site, but it actually refers to how the different parts of your site are connected.
The best websites have clear structures and they’re easy to navigate. A good structure helps people find what they need quickly and efficiently, so it makes sense that it would also help search engines rank them highly in SERPs.
Conclusion
Whether you’re looking for more organic traffic or just want to improve your website experience, website structure and SEO is something that should be taken into consideration. It’s easy to think about SEO as an abstract concept, but it has a real impact on how people interact with your website and even whether they keep coming back! By following these tips, you can make sure that everything works together like it should—and then reap the rewards of increased engagement and sales. Need help with your website structure and SEO? We can help! Check out out website design services and SEO services!
