What is site structure and how does it affect SEO?
We explain what's meant by the term site structure and how neglecting this aspect of your website can have harmful effects on your SEO efforts.
What is site structure?
Site structure simply refers to how your website’s content is organised. You can structure your site well using things like taxonomies, such as categories and tags, internal links, your navigation and breadcrumbs. It’s useful to get your site structure right from the very beginning because if not, as your site grows, it will become extremely cluttered and will be difficult for users to navigate and find what they’re looking for.
Why is site structure important?
If you structure your website well, Google can index your URLs better. It also means that visitors to your website can easily navigate your site, making them much more likely to find the information they need and complete an action such as buying a product or registering their contact details for example. Poor site structure can leave users of your site frustrated and can lead to them exiting your site without completing an action. Once you’ve lost a visitor through frustration it’s unlikely they will ever come back to your site again. Who can be bothered with the headache of trying to find stuff on your site when your competitors make it so much easier?
How does site structure affect SEO?
Your site structure is a guide for search engines
You want to make it as easy as possible for search engines to navigate and read your website content. After all, it’s how they determine how valuable your website is and how highly they should rank certain pages. Search engines crawl websites by following links, internal and external, in order to determine the relationship between the various pages. Basically, your site structure gives the search engines hints about where they can find the most important content.
You may end up competing with yourself
In the world of SEO, you want to be competing with your competitors, not yourself. But if your site structure is poor that’s what can happen. You can end up competing with your own pages for high rankings on the search engines unless you tell the search engines which content they should prioritise. To do this, you need a good internal linking structure.
It all comes back to UX
Doesn’t it always come back to UX? If you read any of our blogs we might sound like a bit of a broken record when it comes to user experience. But it’s because that’s what the search engines use to evaluate websites. Or at least it’s one of the main ranking factors. Why? Because you’re putting the user first. Something the search engines love. They absolutely love websites that help the user do what they came to do. The structure of your website should be reflected in the navigation of your website. If this structure is clear, your audience will easily find their way on your site.
Getting help with your site structure and SEO
It can be difficult to sort out your site structure and SEO efforts by yourself, especially if you’ve no experience in digital marketing. But that’s where we come in! We’re an experienced SEO agency in Manchester who can help get your website ranking. For help with organic search and everything that entails – drop us a message or give us a call.
newbusiness@foreveragency.com / 0161 204 7200
