Website structure is one of the essentials of SEO, as it not only helps visitors navigate and find what they’re looking for but also tells search engines how your site is organized and how pages are linked together. A solid site structure is essential and a key component to its success, when you are about to launch a new website or redesign your current site.

Google uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important. The more structured your site is, the more likely you are to rank higher in search engines.

In this article, you’ll learn what site structure is, why it’s important for SEO, and how you can build an effective 8-step site structure that helps your users and improves your overall site ranking.

What Is a Website Structure?

The structure of your website is the way your content is grouped together from your home page, linked to each other, and presented to users and search engines. This is sometimes referred to as your website’s architecture.

A well-organized website structure makes it easy for users to navigate between pages and for search engines to crawl your content and understand your site’s content. As you write blog posts or add product pages, your site becomes cluttered.

You need to organize them in an orderly fashion, so your visitors and Google can find what they’re looking for. If you don’t structure your blog posts and product pages in an orderly fashion, your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and Google will get lost too, which is important for your SEO.

Taxonomies, such as categories and tags, but also internal links, your navigation, and breadcrumb trails are the tools to structure your site. The ideal structure of a website looks like a pyramid, with the homepage at the top, then categories, subcategories, and individual articles and pages. 

– Home Page:  The home page is at the top of the pyramid.  It acts as a hub for your site visitors.  You should link to important or popular pages from the home page.  This will make it easier for designers to guide users to the most important pages.

– Categories: Categorization is a valuable part of a website’s structure. With proper categorization, you can help your users make decisions faster and easier and reduce the time spent thinking about a decision.

– Subcategories: They play a major role in defining the structure of a website. For example, online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon have an almost unfathomable number of pages. It would be easy for a user to get lost in the information provided.

Subcategories provide a structured methodology for navigating and categorizing information in a meaningful way, especially for websites with complex data.

– Individual posts and pages: Individual posts and pages are the basic building blocks of a website.

What Are the Different Types of Website Structures?

There are four main types of website structures.

Hierarchical model

The hierarchical model is one of the most common types of site architecture. It resembles a tree in that it has a trunk (your home page) that branches out into categories and pages. The hierarchical model is used in web applications that contain a large amount of data.

Sequential model

 The sequential model can be used to develop flows for a sample process to guide users through a sequence or step-by-step process.

Matrix Model

 The matrix model of a web structure allows users to choose where they want to go next through search or internal links.

Database Model

 A database model is a dynamic approach to the structure of a website that determines the logical structure of a database.

Why Is the Structure of Your Website Important?

The reason why your site structure is so important can be broken down into the following key elements:

Site structure for user experience (UX)

The primary purpose of your website is to present your products or services to the user. Site structure is important for user experience (UX) because it has a direct impact on improving the usability of your site by making it easy for users to find the products, services, or information they are looking for.

The easier it is for a user to find what they are looking for on your site, the more likely they will buy your products, sign up for your newsletter or come back for another visit. A good structure, therefore, contributes to usability and can help improve the overall user experience of your site.

A good site architecture facilitates navigation

Your site’s structure should be reflected in your site’s navigation to be effective in helping your users easily find pages and articles in as few clicks as possible. To make it as easy as possible for your users, you need to improve your site’s navigation, allowing you to keep your users interested prevent them from bouncing, and help them progress through your sales funnel.

Your website structure is a guide for search engines

A clear site structure also makes your site easier to crawl for Google and other search engines, which is extremely important for your SEO. Making your site appealing to users also makes it appealing to search engines, as important factors in Google’s algorithm are based on user input.

If your users spend more time on a page and have multiple pages per session with clicks, this tells Google that they are finding what they are looking for, which will improve your site’s overall SEO. This is because web crawlers, such as Googlebot, crawl your website in the same way a user might if they were trying to figure out what it is about.

Since the goal of crawlers is to index content in order to display it in search results, the more structured your site is, the easier it is for them to access and index your content.  The way your site is structured gives Google clues about where to find your most important pages (often called anchor pages or hub pages), and position them as the pages that should be ranking for high-volume, competitive keywords.

Good site architecture allows Google to more quickly crawl and find new pages, changes to existing pages, and determine the relationships between different pages.

A good site structure provides your site with sitelinks

Google sometimes displays your pages in the SERPs that are linked from your menu and other main navigation elements. This SERP feature is known as sitelinks which plays a huge role in SEO by increasing the navigability of your site.

Not only do sitelinks boost your brand reputation by helping you dominate the SERPs, but they also increase your click-through rate and shorten the conversion funnel by directing users to the most relevant information on your site. With a good site structure and internal links, you can determine your most important pages and categories for the chance to appear in sitelinks.

A good site structure helps avoid keyword cannibalization

When you create content on a particular topic, you may have quite similar blog posts on your site with the same search intent. This problem is known as keyword cannibalization and has the following consequences

Google will not be able to determine which of your content is more important when two or more of your pages with the same intent are competing. A good website structure (by creating internal links and taxonomy for particular content on your site) can help you let Google know which page is more important and eliminate this problem.

8 Steps to Build an Effective Website Structure for SEO

To create the best structure for your website that suits both your users and search engines, you need to consider the following factors:

1. Plan the Structure of Your Website by Researching Your Main Keywords

The first step in planning a site structure that works is to know the topics you will be targeting and the main keywords within those topics that you are trying to rank for. When setting up your site structure, you need to think about search intent, which is what people are looking for when they type a query into a search engine.

Select your top keywords for pages that should be at the top of the hierarchy based on their search volume and organic traffic potential. Once you’ve identified the main topics you’re going to cover, you should use them for anchor pages.

Avoid keyword cannibalization

Too often, keyword cannibalization is explained as something that happens when you have content for keywords that are too similar, these pages eat into each other’s ranking ability and none of them perform as well as they should. When it comes to planning your structure on a new site, targeting a specific keyword intent can prevent keyword cannibalization problems.

Read More: 

4 Best Keyword Research Tips to Improve Your Ranking

How to Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool Review

2. Plan Your Site Structure and Hierarchy

Once you’ve selected your top keywords, you need to categorize them to create a content hierarchy. Categorization will help you choose the main keywords for each category, determine the type of page and create hierarchies – subcategories, keyword-based subpages, and long-tail questions.

The ideal structure of a site looks like a pyramid. At the top, you’ll find the home page, just below that, the main sections or categories, possibly followed by subcategories.

In general, a site’s hierarchy looks like this:

Planning your site’s structure around the main theme allows you to group content related to that theme with a strong internal link structure and showcase your thematic authority, which is essential to ranking well in the SERPs. By establishing a logical hierarchy, you’re telling Google which articles are most important and which ones you want to appear at the top of your stack.

 Determine your pillar pages, which are the top-level content pages covering the general topic of each group. You should then expand on the details in the corresponding group content, which are more in-depth pages answering specific questions about the general topic. These pages should then link back to the main pillar page so that the links between your content are clearly visible.

HubSpot illustrates the pillar pages as follows

3. Define Your Site’s Navigation Elements

Defining your site’s navigational elements is essential for visitors to move easily from page to page and find the pages they are looking for. Since navigation menus are the highest level of your site’s structure, they are an excellent indication of the most important pages.

Think carefully about how you structure your navigation menus and take the opportunity to put your main pages in front of your users. Your website exists to serve your users, so it’s important that you consider how they can discover or interact with your site.

Your home page should serve as the navigation center for your visitors. Your website’s main menu or navigation should be present on your homepage, which is the first page in your website’s hierarchy and the central place from which users navigate your site.

Make sure that all of your main categories are represented in your main menu or navigation that is located at the top of your homepage and especially avoid adding distracting and unnecessary items to your menu.

Also, consider the depth of your site’s key pages. The most important thing to keep in mind when planning the structure of your website is to create a flat, shallow structure, which is important for both users and search engine spiders.

It is generally accepted that all pages should be accessible within three clicks from your site’s home page. But if your site’s structure is deep, you can use breadcrumbs for navigation. Breadcrumbs help users who land on a deep page to navigate your site and even return to a category page.

4) Consider Your Site’s URLs

Another essential element of developing a solid site structure is your URL structure. Whenever possible, it’s a good idea to structure your site so that your URL structure follows your hierarchy, meaning you should place the content grouped in the same subcategory as the topic pillar.

Let’s say your pillar page is yourdomain.com/pillar/.This means that all your cluster content is on URLs such as yourdomain.com/pillar/cluster content/.

This is called URL silos and it keeps the thematic relevance within the subdirectory of a site. However, if this is not possible due to technical restrictions, you can use internal links to highlight the thematic link between pages.

Read More: On-Page SEO:10 Essential Factors for Ranking on the First Page

5. Create a Sitemap

Generating sitemaps that are visible to users, but also serve as a list of URL links that can be crawled by search engines, is necessary to have a solid website structure. Sitemaps distribute PageRank, reduce the risk of orphaned pages, and allow Google’s crawlers to quickly discover new pages, which impacts your SEO performance.

6. Improve Your Site Structure With Internal Links

Internal links that point from one page of your site to another are essential to planning an effective site structure. One of the main benefits of internal links is to group topics together and help users navigate your site.

But using internal links also helps search engines understand the structure of your site, convey link authority and indicate which pages are most important. You can create internal links using several different strategies, including the following:

– navigational links

Your site’s navigation links should include internal links to main categories and subcategory pages, but you should also make sure that your individual pages have internal links to each other as well.

– contextual internal links

Contextual links are internal links that are relevant to your pages through anchor text that points to other pages on your site. Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you are linking to. Adding links with meaningful context allows Google to gather information about the page you’re linking to, evaluate it and rank it correctly.

– Breadcrumb

Read More: 8 Internal Links Optimization Strategies for SEO & UX

7. Check the Structure of Your Competitors’ Websites

By taking inspiration from your most successful competitors, you can plan your website structure more easily. Study the structure of their websites to find their strengths and use them to your advantage.

8. Maintain the Structure of Your Site

Site structure should definitely be part of your long-term SEO strategy. Also, make sure your categories are roughly the same size so that your site doesn’t become unbalanced.

If you write a lot of blog posts on one topic and very few on others, your site’s pyramid could be unbalanced. When you create new pages, you place them in the most relevant parts of your site, but what seems relevant today may change in the future.

When the focus of your business or website changes, you need to not only fix the structure of your site but also keep an eye on it while adding new content. You may need to restructure parts of your site and even remove some pages.

If you had links to the page you want to remove, set up redirects to ensure you get those valuable links back for your SEO, even if the page no longer exists.

Conclusion

Improving and maintaining the structure of your site should be an essential aspect of your SEO strategy. Take the time to plan your site structure according to the tips and guidelines listed here, so that it works for both users and search engines.

It is important to remember that the site structure is part of an ongoing process that, as your site develops, will need to be maintained. This is a very practical part of SEO that you can control and improve fairly quickly by rearranging some of the navigational elements.

Start improving the structure of your website.