Site Architecture: why is it important for SEO?
(5 minute read)
author: liane abrams
Your website is fundamental to the success of your business.
It’s the one platform you are completely in control of and that can be used entirely to promote the core values of your brand. So, making sure that people can find your site is, obviously, really important. Making sure Google has everything it needs to present your site to potential customers is the core goal of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
SEO has a reputation of being complicated, scary, and expensive. Yes, it can be complicated and it can be expensive, but its importance outweighs both of those. The complications are easily outsourced and the expense is necessary.
Think about it this way: is it cheaper for you to ignore SEO completely and not get any sales because your site either can’t be found or is impossible to navigate, or is it cheaper to invest in your SEO now so that your website performs at its best and you can watch the sales roll in?
SEO is important. But it’s also a tiny little acronym that covers a million-and-one different things.
One of the many things it covers is site architecture.
What is site architecture?
Site architecture is the structure of your site.
This includes the menu layout, the pages, and all the internal links between pages. Essentially, it’s the map of your site. A simple site architecture is just homepage, services, about and contact — those four are the core pages of the site.
However, site architecture can get a whole lot more complicated than that. Consider a big, complex site like gov.uk - it’s huge and its site architecture is impossibly complicated. There are so many different departments, each with its own set of sub-pages, and all of those pages are internally linked in an almost inextricable network of connections.
But in both cases, the site architecture a) serves a purpose for a visitor to the site, b) is structured enough for Google to like it, and c) is presented to the visitor in a way that lets you find exactly what you need.
Why does Google care about your site architecture?
When Google looks at your website, it crawls (looks at, analyses, assesses) every page it is allowed to crawl. It starts at the homepage, and works its way out from there. When Google presents a website in search results, it’s because it has crawled that site and recognises that the page it shows is relevant to the search term used.
So making your website easy to crawl is absolutely crucial to ensure that Google is able to properly understand the point of your site and what it can help searchers with.
A deliberate site structure makes Google’s life a whole lot easier. Google assigns each site a ‘crawl budget’ - a limited amount of time or effort it will invest in understanding your site. A definitive site structure means that less of that crawl budget is taken up with Google trying to understand which parts of your website are relevant to which other parts, and what the overarching point of your website is.
Having an organised site is essentially a map, allowing Google to understand your website and understand more effectively how it could be relevant to the search terms you want to be ranking for. It also makes it easier for a visitor to navigate, which not only reduces the friction between visiting your site and buying your products/contacting you, but also makes Google prefer your site over another where a customer is confused, struggles to make any progress and leaves feeling frustrated.
What can I do to fix my site architecture?
The first step is to assess what your site is doing at the moment. Take a look at your site and the menu - is it well organised? Are the right pages under the right headings? Or is your About page under your Services heading?
Perhaps one of the best ways of analysing your existing site structure is through a free tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
It’s a downloadable piece of software that mimics what Google does, by crawling your site and identifying your current SEO status. It highlights pages where your tags are missing, or duplicated, or where an error is found - as well as many many other things.
Of particular interest if you’re trying to fix your site architecture, Screaming Frog gives you the option to see a visual representation of your site - which pages are central, which link to other pages, which are out on a limb and therefore probably not super important.
What you want to see from a visualisation of your site architecture is clear, distinct clusters around particular topics. For example, if you have a blog on your site, you’d want the posts on your blog to be targeting particular topics under specific categories. If your site architecture is successful here, you’d see a blog ‘node’ with a number of category nodes coming off - and then a cluster of post nodes coming off each category node.
Below are two examples of this: one is an example of a good site architecture (left), while the other is messy and difficult to navigate (right).
Good site architecture
Bad site architecture
If your site architecture isn’t organised, or you’re seeing a high bounce rate, it could be time to restructure and reorganise your website’s content. If your site architecture isn’t right, you’re unlikely to be appearing in search results - can you afford not to?
SEO can be tricky, but it’s absolutely vital to the success if your business. If you’re feeling out of your depth, an SEO audit is a great place to start. Get in touch to find out how we can get your website work harder.
