Think of your website in the simplest of senses – as a collection of information about your business. Now, think about the people that you’d like to use or benefit from that information, and consider how you could encourage them to do so; what would you prioritise? How would you tell them the most important parts? How could you make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, quickly?
These factors all add up to paint a bigger picture, and that is your overall website structure. We’re about to explain why it’s important to optimise the way you share content, from a user perspective first and foremost, but also in regards to your website visibility in search.
What do we mean by website structure?
As we’ve alluded to already, website structure (also referred to as website architecture) refers to the choices that you make in the way you present and arrange content on your domain.
Why is having an optimal site structure helpful?
Optimising your website structure has benefits for your users, and for the way that your content is displayed in search engine results pages:
For your users
When your website content is presented clearly, it’s easier for your visitors to navigate through everything you’ve shared, and potentially find the service, or product that they’re looking for without any difficulty. In this way, having a clear site structure makes it easier for users to access and engage with content on your website.
You’ll need to have a clear idea of the type of visitor that you’d like to land on your website too, and the way you arrange your content should cater to their preferences. In this way, category naming conventions play a part in your website structure, as they serve as signposts to information for users. Ideally, they should be as clear and straightforward as possible, helping your users to find exactly what they’re looking for. When this condition is met, it’s also more likely that these visitors will turn into customers and convert.
The Pretty Little Thing domain demonstrates a sound awareness of its customers shopping approach, showcased by its ‘what to wear’ category; here, we see options such as ‘jeans and a nice top’, ‘airport outfits’ and ‘hen party’, showing how the brand has adapted content arrangement in categories to target specific types of visitors.
You can also use on-page SEO elements such as internal links (a hyperlink pointing from one page to another page on your website) to help your users to flow through content, or to find more related articles on your website.
For search engines
While we focus the majority of our website SEO efforts on user experience, having an optimal site structure does come in handy from a search engine perspective too.
Optimising your site structure is also an important factor for crawler agents (the systems used by search engines to understand content and decide whether or not to display it within results pages). Your website architecture creates a hierarchy by organising content based on levels of importance, and by interconnecting different areas of your website. For example, you might have ‘top level pages’ that sit in your main navigation menu such as ‘about us’, ‘blog’, or ‘shop’. From here, you might drop down a level beneath your ‘shop’ category, using subcategories to showcase your specific services or products.
This hierarchy helps crawler agents to understand the content on your pages, which ultimately impacts your rankings in search results. There are certain enhancements that you can add to your website to improve the way crawlers understand your structure; we’ll tell you more about this later on.
We can talk about internal links again here, as they can also improve how your site structure is understood by these crawler agents. An internal link passes authority (often referred to as “link juice” or equity) across your site, and this is understood as a signal of your authority. For instance, if you’ve been creating blog posts around a specific topic (forming a content cluster) and have used internal links to guide users to related content, you effectively build more link equity and these kinds of credibility signals are recognised by crawler systems.
How you can improve your website structure and enhance user experience
Whether you’re using a full website redesign as a starting point, or if you’d prefer to explore ways to enhance what you already have, take a look at how you can optimise your site structure with user experience in mind.
*Really* know your audience
If you’re investing in a website redesign and you’d like to ensure that your new site caters to your customers perfectly, prioritise carrying out some in-depth audience audience analysis at the start of the project. Having insights about the types of visitors that you’d like to land on your site will help you to create a structure that serves their search interest.
Add a SEO layer to category naming conventions
You can also conduct keyword research to identify the most commonly used searches for the products or service that your business provides. This will help you to align the category names that you choose with user search interest.
Use schema on your pages
There are also ways that you can define different elements of your site structure to search engine crawlers. Schema is one approach, and it involves adding a specific snippet of code to different pages within your website. Schema is intended to help crawlers to understand how content should be displayed in search results, and there’s a whole library of different snippets that can be used for different purposes. In this instance, some of the most useful types of schema might be:
- Review markup
- Product markup (essential for ecommerce businesses!)
- IsVariantOf
- Breadcrumb markup
Keep your sitemap up to date
Your sitemap might be on your radar when you develop your website, but it’s purpose might not be obvious in the long-run. You might not have to worry about updating this file if you opted for a dynamic sitemap (auto-updating sitemap used by many modern CMS platforms), but if you created your sitemap manually then you will need to check back in and ensure content is organised in the way you’d expect it to be.
Make use of internal linking
If you have lots of content on your website but you aren’t linking it together yet, you’re missing a trick! An internal linking strategy will help you to tell users more about a certain topic, and it’ll also help to communicate your expertise to crawler agents. A popular approach here is to build a category about a certain topic, and create related subcategories forming ‘content clusters’, linked together and linking back to the main category (or pillar page).
Internal linking is also part of your main website navigation, as the pages that you link to here are prioritised by crawlers. For example, it’s easier for crawlers to interpret and prioritise content linked to in the main navigation compared to an orphaned page (a page that is not linked to from any other part of your website).
Meet your users needs and increase visibility in search with an optimised website structure
By making efforts to optimise your site structure, you’re nurturing higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates. If you’d like a review of your current website structure, we can help with our initial SEO website audit. We’ll tell you exactly where users are encountering obstacles on your website, giving you a plan on how to improve from here. To find out more, simply contact us and we’ll take care of the rest!