Having a logical site structure helps visitors and search engines find your content easily while improving conversion rates and supporting your SEO efforts. A solid site structure is essential when you want to launch a new website or redesign your existing website. The larger your site, the more critical this becomes. In this article, you will learn how to plan and create a great site structure in these 5 steps.
Site structure is about how your site is organized and how the pages internally relate to each other. Know more
Having a logical site structure helps visitors and search engines, as well as SEO-assisted sales, to easily find your content while improving conversion rates and supporting your SEO efforts. A solid site structure is essential when you want to launch a new website or redesign your existing website. The larger your site, the more critical this becomes.
In this article, you will learn how to plan and create a great site structure in these 5 steps:
- Preparation for visual mapping of everything
- Check how competitors’ websites are structured
- Create a logical plan based on your current pages
- Completing the site structure using keyword research data
- Mapping of routing components on the site
- But before we get to the above, let’s look at why you should care about building a solid structure for your site.
Why is site structure important?
We all know about the interwoven activities of marketing along various channels. The structure of the website is not much different, the structure of the site is as much related to the user experience as it is to SEO.
user experience (UX)
Suppose you want to buy a frying pan. You go to a website that sells kitchen appliances, click on the “pots and pans” category, and then select the pan.
user experience (UX)
Whichever store you visit, the process is almost the same because this structure leads to a great user experience. If you had to click through dozens of pages to get to what you were looking for, you would probably leave the site and go to another site.
Internal links
Using simple navigation and internal linking structure is beneficial not only for your users but also for your SEO. Because it allows PageRank to flow around your site. PageRank shows the validity of a page based on its internal and external backlinks. This issue, which was created in the early days of Google’s existence, has been the basis of the ranking algorithm and is still used as a ranking signal today.
By linking related pages to each other, you influence the PR flow around your site, meaning that pages with more internal links are likely to rank better. Don’t try to make a game out of it, only link to other pages when it benefits your visitors.
Link site
Google sometimes shows your best pages on the search results page. This feature of the search results page is known as Sitelinks.
Link site
You have no control over what Google decides to show in this section, but they are usually some of the most important pages and categories on your website, and that importance is based on your site structure and internal links.
Naturally, pages that are linked from your menu and other main navigation elements will show up in Sitelinks more than others.
Crawl Efficiency
If a page has few valuable backlinks, you can’t expect people or search engine bots to keep visiting it. Such pages are considered unimportant. You probably don’t need to worry about optimizing Google bot review productivity and budget. This is a task for very large sites, so you should have no problem with this if you have a strong site structure.
Content planning and framing
Your site structure tells you when and where to create new pages or sections. As this is closely related to keyword research, some of your current pages may do better by targeting different keywords based on their high traffic potential, but not all. Design teams, especially in the early stages of designing a website, are better off using frames.
Wireframing is a simplified layout of the page that lays out its structure without adding any content or images. In this way, it takes into account the needs of the user and his journey throughout the site, which is inevitably dependent on the structure of the website. For example, given the structure of the website, a designer knows that a particular page is in the top category and can set another instance of it for two levels lower in the site hierarchy.
Site scaling
When you create new pages, you place them in the most relevant parts of your site, but what seems relevant today may not in the future when you add more content. Maybe you need to restructure some parts of your site and use redirects.
A planned website architecture makes your site shockproof against future changes. You always know to base your content on the research behind it.
How to create a website structure
The investment in time and complexity of creating a site structure depends on two things:
- How big is your site and will it be?
- Is your keyword research ready?
If your keyword research is ready and your site is relatively small, creating a site structure can be done in less than 1 hour.
1- Draw everything visually
The most important aspect of building a website is having a basic image that you can share with your team. Take a look at the image below which is a draft of Ahref’s site structure:
Please click to see website design examples.
Visualize everything
They have a relatively small site, but in this video they had to zoom in and show horizontal slides to fully see the structure of the site. We’ve seen site structures that span enormous conference tables when printed. If you have a large site, prepare yourself for these things.
All you need to do is choose a mind mapping software to use to create the structure. For the image above, Xmind was used to create this draft.
2- Check the structure of your competitors’ sites
Planning a website structure from scratch can be quite complicated considering the size of the site. So first take inspiration from your best competitors because their site structure is probably very close to ideal. Using a structure similar to that of competitors also creates a sense of familiarity for your audience.
To get started, enter your competitor’s site in Ahref’s Site Explorer. See how much organic traffic each section of the site is responsible for. Do this for their subfolders first.
Check the structure of your competitors’ sites
Get inspired by the structure of the sections that work best. Grab their URLs and continue this process by looking at the deeper structures with the Top Subfolders report. Just make sure you set the Prefix option in the address bar to consider the top pages you’ve selected as seed pages.
If you are working in the field of commerce, it is better to look at how industry giants like Amazon are structured. You can see all kinds of categories on this site. They have done it well, so use it.
3- Create a logical map based on your current pages
The most important thing to keep in mind when designing your website is to make your structure flat and not deep. Having a flat site structure ensures that any two pages on your website are just a few clicks away from each other. This issue is very important for both users and search engine bots.
Create a logical map based on your current pages
If you are in the process of redesigning your current site, you can check and see if your site structure currently has depth issues. Use the site measurement tools to check your site and then go to the structure section and open the depth report.
Create a logical map based on your current pages
This report usually shows the distribution of links based on their distance from your home page. First, categorize the report so that only 200 pages of code show the status of the HTML pages by applying the bottom categorization.
Create a logical map based on your current pages
This will remove all the photos, javascript files and other types of links that you don’t need to measure in this section.
Create a logical map based on your current pages
Depending on the complexity of your site, you may see the numbers go up to three or four clicks away from the home page and then quickly return. In general, you should not have a page that is more than 6 clicks away from the main page. This leads to fewer visits from both visitors and search engine bots.
It is also important to check if you have an unattended page on your site. Orphan pages are those that do not have internal backlinks and it is impossible for those who browse the site to access them. You can check this in the Ahrefs Site Audit tool. Just make sure to add sitemaps and backlinks to source URLs in the project settings.
To read How long does SEO take to produce results? | Opinion of 10 SEO experts Click on the link.
Orphan Pages
After the site is checked, open the Page Explorer and apply the bottom filter to the previously used classification.
After the site is checked, open Page Explorer
If you find a valuable page in this section, you should link to it from your other pages. Once you’ve identified these problems, it’s time to visualize the structure. Write it based on the information you have obtained so far:
- Pages that are critical to your business (home page, about us, contact information, features, solutions)
- Subfolders and pages that work well for your competitors
- Depth problems and unattended pages
- Product categories if you use Google Ads
You may have built the entire structure of your site up to this point, but most likely you have left some pages and don’t have much data to back it up. The next step is this problem solves
4- Complete your site structure using keyword research data
Keyword research allows you to modify the structure of your site and complete it. You can choose the main keywords for the top pages that should be at the top of the hierarchy based on search volume and organic traffic potential. Although, if you haven’t done keyword research, you should consider doing it first. This will ensure that you complete the following steps in a systematic manner with all available information in mind.
Group your keywords to create a content hierarchy
Filtering the main page of your keyword research into groups of keywords related to a particular meaning or word is very useful. This becomes a must for larger e-commerce websites. Continuing with our kitchen appliances example, let’s take a look at a small sample of the keywords we’ve categorized:
Group your keywords to create a content hierarchy
The above photo contains the extracted data of keywords through Keyword Explorer of Ahrefs website. Since manual classification takes a lot of time, having an automatic tagging system is very important.
We use Open Refine and its keywords to tag a lot of keywords at once, but the platform’s user interface is not very interesting. You can use no-code automation or ask an SEO expert to do your keyword research. In the next step, we will tell you about an alternative method suitable for beginners.
Categorization helps you determine the main keywords for each category, determine the page model, and create hierarchies that include Subcategory, Subpage, or filters.
Identify the main keywords for your best pages
Whether you have this data from your current site or competitor analysis, you need to make sure you are targeting the most appropriate keywords. For example, it makes sense to create two main categories for kitchen appliances at the top level, one for pots and one for pans, but it’s probably a better idea to combine them into one category called “Pots and Pans”. Is.
Identify the main keywords for your best pages
A less systematic and beginner-friendly way to categorize keywords is to go to your main keywords page in Site Explorer. In this section, you can find data from reports such as those that have a similar topic, keywords that rank for this topic, and keywords that are discussed next to these keywords by clicking on Terms or Parent Topic in See the sidebar in the keyword grouping.
The grouping of keywords under the title of Terms acts as a category filter of the Google Sheets classification that we gave an example of earlier. On the other hand, Parent Topic grouping can help you find different parent keywords and pages that are targeting those keywords and can rank for them.
Your top pages fall into these categories:
- Stand-alone Page: which does not need other sub-pages at deeper levels. (such as solutions, tools, pricing pages, contact information)
- Category Page: such as blog, product category, knowledge base, job page
- Content Page: High-level content about a topic that has many subtopics. (Like a page about marketing that links to subsections about market research, marketing strategy, and marketing tactics.)
- You can decide whether or not to expand your top-level pages based on your knowledge of the industry, common sense, and keyword research. Your keyword category tells you what to target when expanding your primary keywords.
5- Mapping of site routing components
Top-level navigation is vital for visitors to easily navigate through your most important pages. These pages represent the highest level of your site structure.
This could be something as simple as the Ahrefs site:
- Mapping site routing components
Or it can get very complicated if you have a large site. Although it can still be created in a user-friendly way:
- Mapping site routing components
Many websites supplement their Header navigation with a Footer. You usually see pages like T&C, Privacy Policy and other boring stuff in this section. Many visitors do not go to the bottom of the site page, but you can also consider the footer as an important navigation element. You can link to the best pages that could not be in the Header or even repeat the ones that are in this section.
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