Designing an SEO-friendly website structure is an important criterion for ranking on Google and other searching engines alike. By far, it is one of the most crucial elements of your SEO strategy. As your website grows so does its structure, which you need to pay close attention to because if you do not, you will be far behind your competitors who continuously work to design and improve their website for SEO.
Yes, it sounds complex, as lots of factors are involved in making your website’s structure SEO-friendly, but you do not have to do it all on your own. If you tackle it yourself, you would have to become familiar with several different areas of SEO, and doing that will leave no time for other things related to running your business.
Instead, you can hire an SEO Agency to provide you with the assistance you need to design an SEO-friendly website structure. But before you visit an SEO company, let us tell you about the importance of creating an SEO-friendly website structure, three key things that you need to give careful thought to when designing an SEO-friendly website structure, and the steps to design it.
The Importance of Designing an SEO-friendly Website Structure
Designing an SEO-friendly website structure is important for the following reasons:
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Provides a User-friendly Experience
The structure of your website is not about the colours, graphics, kerning, imagines, and white space. It is about what is left of your website when you take all of that away from it. In the end, all users want is cognitive equilibrium.
This means that they do not want to stumble upon a mess of pages when they land on the website, but want an organised structure where they can find everything they need quickly. If they can navigate to other pages of your website easily and locate what they need, they will stay on your website longer. This will also sit well with Google’s algorithm.
Google’s algorithm will use information from users to rank your website on its search engine. This will also increase your Click Through Rates (CTRs). If your website has a great website structure, users will not bounce from your website, but they will remain longer on it. When you have a good website structure, it will reduce bounce rate and improve the number of users who remain on it and in return, this will increase your position on Google.
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Provides Your Website with Site links
Site links, a listing format in search engines, display the main page of your website along with more than one internal link. From an SEO perspective, site links give you a major SEO advantage. Site links benefit you in the following ways:
- Increases the navigability of your website
- Directs users to the most relevant information
- Enhances the reputation of your business among users
- Improves and gains the trust of users
- Assists you to dominate Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and increase the click-through rate, and decrease the conversion funnel.
How can you acquire site links for your website? You can obtain site links for your website by designing an SEO-friendly website structure. Upon seeing your commendable SEO-friendly website structure, Google’s algorithm will award your website with site links.
If you have a less than impressive website structure, your website will likely not receive any site links. Without site links, you may be missing out on more targeted traffic, higher clickthrough rate, and increased conversions.
Instead of tackling this yourself, you can hire a reliable and experienced SEO Melbourne agency to design an effective website structure that can put you in the good books of Google and get you the site links you need to stand out.
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Provides Improved Crawling
Web crawlers crawl your website to index the content, so it shows up in the search engine results. If you have an easy to navigate and SEO-friendly website structure, it will make it easier for web crawlers such as Googlebot crawl to access and index your website’s content for search engine results.
However, website crawlers do not crawl every page that is on your website. There will be some pages that the website crawlers may not discover or URLs that Google’s normal crawling process may not be able to discover.
For this reason, your website needs a sitemap. Even so, make life easier for website crawlers by designing a strong website structure. A strong website structure makes their life ten times easier, as it allows them to access, crawl, index, and return the pages of your website to the search engine results.
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Provides SEO Optimisation for Website Crawlers
Your website’s structure is an important part of your SEO strategy. It paves a path for SEO success for your website. If you do not have a good website structure, there is a good chance that it might affect your rank on search engines like Google. But a strong website structure gives you an indestructible SEO foundation that will improve and increase your organic search results.
When you are designing an SEO-friendly website structure, you need to remember three key things that you need to think about when you sit with an SEO agency to discuss how to go about designing an SEO-friendly website structure.
3 Things You Need to Think About When Designing an SEO-friendly Website Structure
You need to think about the following three things when you design an SEO-friendly website structure:
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You Need to Prioritise Keywords and Pages
You need to place certain pages and categories of the pages to certain parts of your website. When you do that, you can add emphasis on these pages. In doing so, search engine crawlers will prefer your pages, and this will help you rank better for keywords and web pages that you prioritise over others.
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You Need to Make it Easy for Web Crawlers
Do not go for a complicated website structure, as that will make it harder for web crawlers to index your website for search engines to rank on their platform. If the web crawlers visit your website and they cannot find any content, it decreases your chance of ranking on search engines.
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You Need to Give Thought to User Experience
You want to put emphasis on improving user experience. This is the first thing that you need to think about when designing an SEO-friendly website structure. You need to have a simple website structure versus a complicated website structure. Just like website crawlers need to be able to find content on your website easily so do users who land on your website.
4 Steps to Designing an SEO-friendly Website Structure
You need to follow these four steps for designing an SEO-friendly website structure:
You Need to Place Your Website Hierarchy
You need to build a simple website hierarchy. In a simple website hierarchy, you need to rank the most important web pages at the top and filter down to the pages that are less important. However, there will be pages that will be an exception to this rule. Here is how your hierarchy needs to look like, from top to bottom:
Homepage needs to be at the top, as it is the most important page of your website. This is the page that users will land on and will go back to from another page on your website.
- Category pages or the most important landing pages.
- Sub-category pages
- Articles, products, and more
Plan your website hierarchy with the SEO Melbourne agency you are consulting with for designing an SEO-friendly website structure. Doing this before you design a website prevents it from becoming a big confusing mess.
You Need to Match the URL of Your Website with Its Structure
Your URL needs to match with the website structure. For instance, you are selling a maroon bag, your URL will look like this: www.bagwebsite.com/bags/new-bags/modern-maroon-new-bag
You have the category, sub category, and product, thus making it easy for both web crawlers and users to navigate your website.
Design a Shallow Website
You need to design a low depth website. This means that users should be able to access every page on your website from your homepage with a few clicks of the mouse. It also improves user experience, as it can easily find the information they are looking for.
You Need to Use Internal Linking
If you have a large website, a shallow website would not be a good idea for you. It will become difficult to sort hundreds of pages into a limited number of categories. Instead, you need to use internal linking. Internal linking is a link between two pages of your website, and this is a good SEO strategy to use. They reduce the number of clicks required to visit another page of your website and allow you to use the keyword for anchor text.
Designing an SEO-friendly website structure is hard work, one that takes time, which you might be short on. Therefore, you need to hire an SEO agency to help you design an SEO-friendly website structure.
