Significance of Site Structure in SEO
Site structure is the most crucial aspect of optimizing your website. Arranging your site structure strategically is essential both for users and search engines. Learn how to do this effectively and its SEO importance. You can also start with learning SEO for dummies to know this thing properly.
What is site structure, and how to build it?
Site structure is how to group and link web pages together. The content doesn’t exist in isolation but is somehow related to each other. Site structure establishes the relationship between the content pages for users to find them easily.
Consider these pillars to frame worthwhile site structure:
Set the hierarchy
Building the proper website structure starts with deciding the categories and subcategories. Look out for your competitor’s web pages and know your audience to decide categories. Consider the website as a tree in which the trunk is the URL. Here, categories are like branches that tell within seconds what your business is about.
Further, subcategories are sub-branches that add meaning to each other. Performing keyword research, LSI keywords, and customer demands will help you make correct divisions.
Balance the classification
Say you are keeping 15 topics under one classification and three under another class. It will imbalance the website architecture and works like framing another group to address the market and keep the site structure balanced.
Additionally, grouping together similar topics enhances the number of users and webs crawlers visiting your pages.
Structure depth
Site structure moves from top to bottom from the main navigation menu to other web pages. It must take a maximum of three clicks to reach the home page. Further, keep the category number between two to seven and its name simple and easy to understand.
Internal linking
Understanding how to assign internal links eases your job considerably. The first thing is how to allocate internal links? Internal links must add value to the readers and be related to the topic.
It is not like the category is of shoes, and you’re linking the shirt page to it. Yes, you can link contextually relevant pages like sneakers and boots to it.
URL structure
URL structure is a living entity in the search results that forms the topmost part of any search results. Including breadcrumbs from categories to subcategories puts life to the URL. It adds the most pertinent information and keywords to the link instead of random characters.
Remove invalid pages
Keeping the pages not relevant to your business and industry does more harm than good. But, how? It may contain information that is obsolete or out of the stock products.
After removing them, assign redirects to other relevant pages so that customers get a place to land rather than in the air.
How does site structure boost your SEO?
Although sometimes underestimated, SEO experts create site structure to refurbish your SEO strategy in several ways like:
Gives the best user experience
Site structure enhances the user experience to the next level. When you assign relevant internal links, you satisfy the curiosity and pain areas of readers. With this, users can explore the required pages, move back and forth from one page to another easily.
It improves the time spent per session while decreasing the bounce rate. A well-established site structure shortens the sales cycles by tapping into every conversion step.
Search engine indexing
Are search engines able to crawl and find your web pages? Search engines come to know the pages at the top of the hierarchy and authoritative pages. Further, the internal links make indexing and ranking your web pages easier.
Informative site links
Sitelinks are of immense SEO importance. You improve the navigation of your website from search engines results themselves. Obviously, there is no such provision in the Google search console but the Google algorithm uses site structure to display site links.
What is the purpose behind creating the site links? Whenever a user puts the query, the search engine shows connected links to save the user’s time and satisfy user intent. The following figure shows how it works:
Boost conversions and get your business to grow
Internal linking is the vital aspect of site hierarchy. With this, you can enhance the significance of your most important pages like landing pages and home pages. It will amplify your sales by internal linking to highly converting pages.
Improve the relevance of web pages
The shallow depth of the site structure improves the relevance of each web page. On the other pages, deep links are difficult to index and get lost. Not only do users can’t reach them, but search engines can’t detect them. It may lose many of the most valuable pages.
Save web cannibalization
Cannibalization is a very serious issue that makes web pages compete amongst one another. In this, similar pages of a website fight for search engine rankings. Properly arranged URL structure according to breadcrumbs doesn’t let it happen,
Final takeaways
Site structure is the first step to designing your website logically. Create a hierarchy that starts from category and high-authority topics to subcategories linked together and form further divisions. With a well-established site structure:
- Illustrate what are the most significant pages on your site?
- Help users explore your website.
- And search engines can crawl your web pages easily.
Also Read : How to Use Photoshop to Create Web Designs