How to Build SEO Friendly Website Structure

The structure of a website is so consequential for the way customers navigate around your site. It’s also crucial for search engine optimization (SEO). For an SEO-friendly website structure, it matters how you organize your menu, whether pages are connected to each other and where you place key pieces of content.

How does Website Structure help with SEO?
When a customer is directed to your site, how easy is it for them to find what they’re looking for? Easy navigation is imperative for SEO and customer experience. A logical, functional structure helps search engines ascertain what each of your pages are for. That’s one of the reasons you’ll often find menu structure and dropdown menus have common, strong keywords that people are familiar with, such as home; about; services and so on. While it can be tempting to get clever with content, it pays to focus on strong SEO keywords for those key clickables such as menu, products or contact. If your structure is too complex and doesn’t make sense immediately, search engines can be unable to figure out where your page sits in page results.

Tips and Tricks on SEO-friendly Web Architecture
The way you map out page structure, sometimes known as web architecture, can really improve your user experience and your website authority. So, how do you design a website that’s ideal for search engines as well as your customers’ experience? Here are some web design structure insider tips:

1. Bundle related content together. Make your content placement and structure simple and logical. For example, put your ‘Meet the Team’ on your About Page. On your Services page, perhaps pop a list of projects you’ve completed. When it comes to product-based websites, group similar products together by type or category. For example, for a fashion brand bundle by category or season (women’s clothing together, winter clothing etc.) or group them together in product types: Shoes, Dresses, and so on.

Page Structure versus Long Scroll: For websites with long-form content like blogs, sometimes infinite scroll can work really well. On the other hand, for a website that offers specific services or products such as makeup, sometimes infinite scroll can take too long for the customer to get to what they want, plus they can’t find their way back!

Have a logical hierarchy with not too many clicks: while hyperlinks between pages are great (they help search engines determine structure and what pages relate to each other), you don’t want a really deep structure where people have to click more than around 4-5 times to get what they want. Map out a structure of how many layers there are to your website depth, and how many clicks it takes to get to subcategories in the structure hierarchy.