So many factors affect how long people spend on a particular website, but one of the most common reasons they leave is poor site structure. A considerable percentage of online users leave a site once they notice it has a non-responsive design, but many others don’t explore a site any further if it has poor content structure. This emphasizes that the more logical and clean your site structure is, the greater the SEO, User Experience (UX), and other benefits you’ll witness.
However, deciding how your website should be structured and how it should look eventually takes time. Essentially, it revolves around how vital information is presented through your website and how each of those pages connects. Make a mistake here, and visitors will leave and go elsewhere to find what they need.
7 Tips to Improve Site Structure for SEO Benefits
When considering SEO performance and how a website’s structure can support, boost, or enhance it, a helpful starting point is to ask what is website structure exactly.
Website structure has everything to do with how your website looks, feels, and delivers information to your audience. A well-planned and logical structure is vital for user experience, which is one of the Google ranking factors. Interestingly, many SEO experts now believe that structured data will likely become an important SEO factor, too, after recent Google updates.
Here are some tips to improve your site structure, which is going to have a positive impact on your website’s SEO performance:
Establish a Clear Hierarchical Structure
For websites, applying a hierarchical structural model is a way to organize the website’s content. It creates a framework that builds a hierarchy. When it’s mapped out, it takes on an arrangement that is not dissimilar to a family tree. The broad categories are at the top, with branches to related subcategories, which branch out again to related individual web pages.
The advantage of a website structure is that it disseminates information logically, beginning with broad topics and becoming more specific.
To create a clear hierarchical structure:
- create a site map to plan out the structure
- start with between 2 and 7 broad categories
- develop the subcategories, keeping them relevant
- limit the depth to 3 or 4 levels
- keep menus clear and consistent
- use keyword-rich descriptive URLs reflecting the hierarchy
- breadcrumb the user’s location on the site
The best way to structure a website in a hierarchy is to leverage AI tools. First, you can use AI overview tracking to understand your site’s performance in SERPs. It also shares details about keywords and content trends to think about. This AI-based ranking data, together with search intent insights, can help reorganize pages into more logical categories and create a well-structured hierarchy.
Ensure Optimized URL Structure
The URL structure refers to the organization and format of the various web addresses a site uses. A clear URL structure is an essential component of the site architecture for SEO, vital as it guides crawlers and users through a site.
Keyword-rich descriptive URLs improve the site’s overall SEO performance, with efficient and accurate indexing having a positive impact on ranking in the future.
For best optimization:
- keep the URLs succinct and simple
- use hyphens, not dashes, to separate words
- include relevant keywords
- use consistent naming conventions
- use lowercase
- create a hierarchy
- activate HTTPS protocol to secure the HTML structure for SEO benefits
Implement Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb website navigation refers to a website’s secondary navigation scheme. It uses text links to display the user’s location on the site. They are displayed as a pathway from the homepage and can be used as navigational shortcuts to go back.
Being a hierarchical pathway, the crawlers find them helpful, too. Therefore, when thinking about how to plan website structure for maximum SEO performance, it must be intuitive and easy to use navigation.
To implement breadcrumb navigation:
- choose an appropriate breadcrumb type
- locate them at the top of the page but below the main navigation menu
- label clearly and concisely
- use appropriate separators between the levels
- ensure the current page is unclickable
Make the Right Use of Internal Linking
Strategically placed internal linking enhances the user experience.
Good links help keep visitors longer on a site, increasing the dwell time. Strategic use of internal links signals quality content to the crawlers and makes it easier for users to browse, moving from one page to related content without using the navigation search bar or going back to the main menu.
When links are placed in critical positions, users tend to stay and explore, creating more opportunities for conversions.
Internal linking is another aid for crawlers when indexing and is essential for the website’s overall present and future SEO. Using the internal linking as a guide, the crawlers can determine the relationship between the pages and the content and its importance from its place in the hierarchy, which can influence ranking.
To utilize internal linking strategically:
- create a logical structure
- use descriptive anchor text that reflects the linked content
- ensure all pages stay within a few clicks of the homepage
- use contextual links within the content
- don’t use too many links on one page
Give Good Attention to Mobile Responsiveness
There are some similarities between computer and mobile operating systems, but it’s important to ensure a website performs perfectly on mobile devices. Mobile responsiveness is essential SEO for website visibility and ranking. This is the website’s ability to adapt to screen sizes and devices seamlessly.
The search engine prioritizes sites with mobile-first indexing and responsive design because they offer an enhanced user experience. Also, over 60% of organic search engine visits are conducted from mobile devices, further highlighting the importance of a responsive website.
From the navigation perspective, mobile responsiveness reduces user stress and frustration, impacting bounce rates and increasing dwell time and, hopefully, conversion rates. To the crawlers, these positive signals mean responsive design, fast load times, and user satisfaction.
For mobile-first responsiveness that supports the SEO structure without compromising performance:
- use a responsive design framework to automatically set the layout to the screen size
- optimize images and media
- use clear fonts
- use appropriately sized buttons
- simplify the navigation menu
Ensure Good Site Speed
Site speed is directly related to the user experience. Consequently, fast load times pages are vital for visibility and the best SEO website ranking. Well-optimized for speed, loading in less than the 3 seconds preferred by Google may also help reduce the bounce rate (though other factors like quality content also play a significant role in determining the bounce rate.).
Bounce rate is included in a package of user-centric metrics Google calls Core Web Vitals. The search engine uses data provided by the metrics to determine a site’s ranking. Even a high-traffic website will eventually fail if it is not constantly tweaked for better load speed.
Fast site speeds improve the crawl rate, with the benefit of crawlers logging the site for revisits, enhancing its SEO and boosting its visibility for the future. The crawlers crawl more pages, taking pressure off the crawl budget – the amount of time allocated for crawling a site.
To optimize site speed for fast load times, you have to improve website coding first. It’s also important to pay attention to the following:
- leverage browser caching by storing static files on the user’s device
- compress images and optimize using modern formats like WebP
- minify large file sizes like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- use a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudburst
- implement lazy loading, prioritizing above-the-fold content for images and videos
Monitor and Update Content Regularly
Just like the website structure, the quality and structure of website content can have a massive impact on how effectively a website performs in SERPs. The ultimate goal should be to keep visitors happy, and that’s possible only by creating high-quality content that is informative and solves a problem. Of course, it needs to be optimized with the right keywords and must utilize JavaScript to be rendered perfectly.
Following what other similar websites are doing will help here. If a competitor’s site ranks high, they must be doing something good when creating content. Identify that and apply it to your website. But don’t stop after making some initial changes. Be ready to monitor the performance of your website and its content, and if something doesn’t perform, be sure to update it. Again, using AI and SEO tools will help compare websites with others ranking high in SERPs to know what needs to be changed to get better results.
Conclusion
Getting better rankings without improving website structure quickly becomes a dream, especially when other websites have already understood it and made changes accordingly. Be sure to go back to the drawing board and fix whatever navigation and site structure issues there are, and you will notice a positive change in your rankings and traffic.