How to Plan Website Structure for Better SEO Step-by-Step Guide

What happens when you have a reliable website style structured as it should be? It would be trouble-free for Google bots to crawl your website. As you flesh out page after page, your overarching primary nav will be put to the test. Don’t be afraid to tweak as your website structure comes into view. Well, bad information architecture causes most user failures.

• Don’t forget that spot-on keywords increase your site’s visibility for search engines.
• Use this guide to help you get started with planning your website structure and make the most out of this endeavor.
• Ultimately, the idea here is to ensure that users can find the info they need in as few clicks as possible.
• In this article, we explain how to check and improve your website’s performance and speed.
• The website structure you choose will largely depend on the type of website you’re building.
• A website shouldn’t be a random collection of pages and posts.
• Find out the user’s attitude to the work of your competitors at different stages of interaction with the brand.
• The next step is the development of a semantic core and its clustering.

It allows for a better distribution of content across the web pages according to different topics and queries. This is known as URL silos and helps to keep topical relevance within a site’s subdirectory, and wherever possible, it makes sense to structure your site in this way. To earn high-quality backlinks, you want to have different pages answering different questions. This way, you have several pages across your domain that are beneficial to users. You’re able to acquire more relevant, quality backlinks this way, too. The right website architecture helps you highlight your most important pages and position them as the pages that should rank for competitive, high-volume keywords . In this guide, you’re going to learn how to build a site structure that works and helps your site achieve SEO success.

steps to plan & create a website structure with a site map

What’s more, you have an opening content strategy by this time. Note this pointer that whatever design skills they have, anyone can draft a sitemap. It’s because it’s only an outline or flow-chart of the essential contents for your website. The sitemap provides the web designers a clear outline of the website’s information layout.

Once you’ve mapped out your site’s structure, this can make a great reference point as you build out content and continue to grow. You’ll be able to see shared keywords, unique opportunities, and more, helping to steer your keyword strategy and ensure you’re covering all your bases . You can use the Keyword Magic Tool to help you to find the keywords that your prospects are using to find businesses just like yours. Brainstorming can also help you develop ideas for the main topics your site should be covering. At this stage, these ideas are more to get you thinking about those that are referenced by others creating content in this space.

Keep up on Keyword Research

Think carefully about how you structure your navigation menus and use these as an opportunity to place your main pages in front of your users. Your pillars are the top-level content pages that cover the broader topic.

Enter a topic and hit ‘get content ideas’ to return a list of potential topics based on what you entered. Keyword cannibalizationcan prevent your site from ranking as well as it could when two or more pages that have the same intent compete with one another. The right website structure can make it easier to stop this issue from occurring due to a clearly defined place on your site for a particular topic or piece of content. While a good website architecture is important for presenting a great user experience, it’s also a key part of achieving SEO success.

Designate type of page template (e.g. form, gallery, PDF, etc.)

Group the filtered phrases using the ‘Clustering’ tool in Serpstat. Based on the keywords for ‘bathrobes’, I found out that users are interested in such categories as material, fabric type, size, style, brand, and also discounts. A clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. Correct website structure positively influences search engine ranking and users’ perception of your website. Here at Correct Digital, we take online businesses and turn them into online empires by employing smartdigital marketingstrategies. Our team of digital marketing experts are trained inSEOto help you rank higher in search results andad managementto ensure your message gets seen by the people you want. We also specialize inwebsite designand online sales optimization to help your business grow like never before.

Structured data includes tags, JSON code, and rich data which was created for and understood by search engines. Using structured data has been recommended by Google since 2014. It can drastically improve website visibility with some sites reporting as much as 400 percent increase in rich result organic traffic. Lastly, an intentional structure helps prevent keyword cannibalization. This means content that covers similar topics will be distinguished and organized from one another, giving users and crawl bots a clear idea of the intention for each piece. Now a sitemap can be just a list of pages, like you find with the sitemap.xml files that search engines read.

Keep Links on Any Given Page to a Reasonable Number

There’s a relation to designing a solid site structure to all the other reasons why linking structure is essential. Content that’s instructive or explanatory plus keyword-rich gets picked up by search engines. All these advantages help to make your website easier to find.

The structure of the website is the correlation between all its pages and the clear hierarchy. You can easily visualize the website structure in the XMind tool. To do so, select the necessary part of the structure in the chart or the entire structure, copy and paste it without formatting in XMind (Shift + Ctrl + V). To transfer the website structure data to a tab, use the ‘Extended Copy’ feature.

How To Plan A Website Structure: Complete Guide

Search crawlers find and index websites by going from one page to another, and they do so by following the links, unless they are told otherwise. Smart internal linking will help crawlers find all the content on your website. When you have a set of pages prioritized and organized within a hierarchy of your website, you need to provide a clear connection between them through internal linking. It enhances your website’s navigation and helps spread link juice around the web pages. Run an analysis of a major competitor site and go to Pages in the Organic traffic research section. Here, you can see all pages and subdomains and filter them by traffic share and number of keywords. Export the results in .xls or .csv to examine the structure by URLs.

• To transfer the website structure data to a tab, use the ‘Extended Copy’ feature.
• Content that’s instructive or explanatory plus keyword-rich gets picked up by search engines.
• It prevents and fixes errors that your competitors had formed at the beginning.

A challenge with top-down structures is everything needs to be planned out from the start. Once it is established, it’s impossible to change the overall flow and website setup. Second, and perhaps of the same importance as the first point, is Search Engine Optimization .

Remember, a good post’s content or how easy the competition is not guaranteed to be on top. If there’s not enough research, there won’t be the right representation of the business. That’s what happens in a simple website structure and sitemap.