Is Your Site Architecture Hurting Your SEO? Here’s How to Fix It

The Importance of Site Architecture for SEO

• Improves crawlability
• Improves user experience (UX)
• Improves domain authority

Important Elements of Effective Site Architecture

Effective site architecture is essential when it comes to ensuring your high quality content is placed in front of your target audience. Some essential elements of site architecture includes:

Seamless Navigation

If your navigation menu is difficult and frustrating, you could be losing valuable website visitors. Navigation menus should be intuitive and simple. Follow these best practices to improve website navigation:

• Limit your navigation menu to seven or eight main categories
• Use descriptive labels
• Include a search function
• Add breadcrumbs on each page, showing users how your pages are connected.

URL Structure

If you have complex URLs, it could be negatively impacting your SEO efforts. As a rule of thumb, we recommend you keep your URLs as simple as possible:

• URL structure that is easy to understand
• Clear and descriptive wording
• Short and simple
• Include targeted keywords
• Maintain consistency when it comes to the URL pattern of your website 

Internal Linking

Internal links are essential for your website, weaving your site together, while helping search engines and users find relevant web pages within your website, helping them discover further. This strategic approach involves:

• Link related content using a descriptive anchor text 
• Create content hubs around main topics
• Use category pages to group related content 
• Add a side bar with related content, providing easy access 

Category Structure

If you don't have an organised structure for your content categories, you could be losing out on valuable conversions. In order to optimise your category structure, you can:

• Create a main category, or pillar page, covering broader topics
• Use subcategories or cluster pages to categorise related content
• All pages should be within three clicks of your homepage

Conclusion

While we have provided some valuable tactics you can start today to improve your site architecture, we know that this is a time consuming and difficult task, if you don't have the knowledge and experience. This is where Genie Crawl comes in. We are a boutique digital marketing agency with a talented team providing customised SEO services to businesses of all sizes. If your site architecture is hurting your SEO, get in touch with us now to secure a free evaluation and quote.