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How to build your website structure for a strong SEO foundation?

A right website structure helps the visitors as well as search engines to easily navigate and find content on it. Thereby, improving traffic, conversions and offering a solid foundation to your SEO efforts.

Done with the keyword research for your website?

Now, it’s time to plan a solid structure for your website.

What do you mean by website structure?

A website structure refers to how you organize the website content or interlink the webpages. A perfect website structure helps the search engines as well as visitors to navigate and find the content on the website easily. This logical structure gives an exponential boost to the traffic, conversions and gives a solid foundation to your SEO efforts.

Whether you are about to launch a new website or redesign your current one, a solid website structure is a must-have for outstanding performance. It may not be inevitable for a small website but becomes critical as you scale.

Why you should care about website structure?

All online marketing activities are interlinked and intertwined, so designing a logical website structure brings out a strong SEO foundation. Have a look at why website structure matters so much for all your marketing endeavors?

·         Intuitive UI

Providing an intuitive interface significantly boosts the user experience. If visitors to your website need to click tons of pages to reach the desired content they’ve been looking for, they would probably leave the website and go somewhere else.

Read more: How to improve your web design in 2021? Web Designing Tips for Beginners

·         Page Rank

Internal linking not only makes your content easy to navigate but also helps in giving a proper direction to SEO. The internal and external linking allows page rank to flow around the website and build the authority of the pages.

·         Site links

Google shows your most important categories or highly visible pages on the site links. Pages that are linked with your main menu (or main navigation elements) are shown by Google site links.

·         Crawl efficiency

A solid website structure results in optimized crawl efficiency.

Read More: How long SEO takes to kick in for a blog/ website?

·         Content planning

It’s the website structure that helps you plan out when and where to create new sections or pages.

·         Future-proof your website

Once the website is up and working, new pages are created and placed in the relevant sections of the website. But, as you start adding more content, things that seem relevant today may turn irrelevant in future. So, you would need website re-designing.  Planned website architecture mitigates this over-expenditure and makes your website future-ready.

How to create a solid website structure?

If you have already done the keyword research and your website is relatively small, the website structure can easily be curated within an hour. Let’s check how to create a website structure for beginners.

1.       Mind Mapping

You need to have a visual foundation of your website or a map that you can share with your team. There are many mapping software available on the internet. Try one.

Planning the website structure could be complicated if you’re starting from a scratch. The best way to do this is to explore some top-performing websites of your competitors. Using a similar structure would impart a sense of familiarity to your customers. Also, your competitor’s websites are already structured in an ideal way. So, taking inspiration from your competitor’s architecture and improvising on that would be a visual treat for your visitors.

Read more: How to fix Low Conversion Rate despite having High Traffic? | Conversion Rate Optimization

2.       Create a Logical Plan

Make sure to structure your website using a flat approach and avoiding a deep one.

Website Structure

Image Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/6-flat-vs-deep-structure.png

Having a flat website structure will ensure that every page is just a few clicks away. This is an important aspect for both visitors as well as search engines. You can consult a web development company or digital marketing consultant for appropriate assistance on your website redesigning needs or depth analysis.

Make sure that all your valuable pages are properly linked from other pages.

Till this point, you should have a clear picture of your website structure. Make sure that your structure should include these points.

  • The website structure should have all the pages crucial to your business such as home page, contact, services etc.
  • Design new pages/subfolders that are performing well for your competitors.
  • All the orphan page issues should be considered.
  • The categories/menu or navigation elements should be designed as per flat structure.
  • Give proper attention to product feed attributes while running Google shopping ads in case of e-Commerce website designing.

1.       Complete the remaining structure using keyword research data

For the top-level pages use the main keywords from the keyword research data based on organic traffic potential and search volume.  The best way is to categorize your keywords by creating a content hierarchy. This helps you to choose the main keywords in each category and decide on page type, create subcategories, subpages, filters etc.

2.       Decide the deeper levels

The top-level of your main navigation menu should belong to one of these categories.

  • Stand-alone Page– This page does not require any subsequent page at deeper level such as pricing, about us, contact page etc.
  • Category Page – Blog, career page, product categories etc all fall under this category.
  • Content hub page– This is a high-level content topic that has many subtopics. For example- digital marketing has links to various subpages that talk about it such as SEO, SMM, PPC, etc.

Based on industry knowledge, keyword research and your expertise, you can design the top-level pages.

3.       Work out on navigation components

Apart from top-level navigation elements, many web developers also supplement the navigation with footer links. You can also place some top-level pages to the footer that weren’t able to gain a place in the header or could even repeat the already existing ones.

Next, you also need to map out other navigation components such as breadcrumbs.

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These breadcrumbs play an important role in navigation especially at the deeper levels and are also used to jump to the specific category. They are not much useful in a smaller website but are extremely critical as the website scales to deeper levels.

Final words

Website structure is the backbone of every website.  The impact and complexity of website structure are proportional to the website’s growth. Connect with a web development expert or contact us at +91-9814820845 if you are facing any problems while designing your website.