Why is Website Structure Important for SEO?
A good website structure is essential for the overall success in search rankings. It’s all about organizing pages in a way that it’s easy for users to find what they need. Search engines’ requirements stem from their users’ interests. When you think of a SEO-friendly website structure, it also means user-friendly.
Below you can see how to plan a website structure so it improves your site’s SEO and how it benefits your site.
Effects of a good website structure:
- With a clear structure websites get indexed much faster. This is particularly important for big websites with several levels of page hierarchy. For example, e-commerce websites or business catalogues.
- A good structure also helps avoid duplicated pages and duplicated content.
- SEO has a better impact when keywords are well distributed across different webpages — with different keywords placed on relevant landing pages.
- If Google sends a user to a wrong page of a well-structured website, the user will easily navigate to the content they need.
- As a result, the structure provides better user experience, enhancing a website’s behavioural signals to search engines.
- Finally, it improves conversion. A website that enables seamless interaction and navigation will also keep its visitors and convert them to customers.
To feel the advantages of all the mentioned effects, let’s figure out what a good site structure means and how to build it.
Website structure is the way your website’s pages are organized and its elements can be categorized as follows.
Homepage — the main page of your website that encompasses the key information that gives a quick but clear image what your business is about.
Main sections — specific landing pages that represent your services, product categories, special content sections on the media websites (news, stories, interviews, etc.).
Subsections — transitioning pages that help users go into more detailed descriptions of products or services. If your website is not that big, you’ll most likely skip this level at all. Conversely for an extensive site, there will be several levels of subsections.
Pages — Pages are the lowest level of the hierarchy that includes item descriptions, blog articles, “contact us” page, i.e. the most concrete type of information describing a particular product or answering a specific question.
Subdomains — For bigger websites it makes sense to separate part of its content (blog, help section, store) into subdomains. Technically, subdomains are different websites but are still a part of your brand and business. You should consider them as elements of your website structure and manage subdomains carefully to ensure it’s not damaging your SEO.
