Website architecture refers to the way that a website’s pages are linked together, or structured. It’s how users are getting from one page to another. Good website architecture is crucial for SEO, and is part of our SEO audit process here at Relevance Advisors.
Most obviously, having a navigable site is necessary if you want visitors to stick around. If users entering the site are unable to find the information they’re looking for, they’re going to look elsewhere (perhaps on a competitor’s site). Imagine you have the content they’re after, but they simply can’t find it. You don’t want that!
Easy-to-navigate website architecture is vital to the user experience, but it is also important for helping search engines find and index the pages of your site. Unlinked or orphaned pages (and pages that are too many clicks away from the homepage) are hard for bots to index, and that can make it hard to understand the content of the site. If Google doesn’t know what your site is about, you’re going to have a more difficult time appearing in the search results.
Keep It Flat
“Deep site architecture” is a type of website structure where some pages are five or more clicks to reach. That structure is unideal if you want all the content on your pages to be accessible. In general, it’s best to have something called “flat website architecture,” where users can reach any page on your site in fewer than three or four clicks. This means linking more pages on the home page and having an overall “wider” site map.
Topic Clusters
A group of interlinked web pages is known as a “topic cluster” or “content cluster.” Their importance reflects the changing landscape of the internet, and the prioritization of websites with topical authority over those with one-off pieces on the same topic. In other words, when a user searches for “tropical plants from South America,” Google is more likely to promote a website with a topic cluster of pages that go into detail about each individual plant than a blog that features one post about tropical plants. This also relates to the organization of your site. If you have blogs or pages that are related by some common theme, link them together, and make them accessible from a parent “topic page”.
URL Structure
For clarity’s sake, it’s important that your URL structure is logical. If some blogs’ URLs end with blog/[date]/[title], but others end with [date]/article/[title], users are going to get confused. Is there a difference between your site’s articles and blogs? Are the dates formatted in the same way? Don’t leave your visitors second-guessing because of a formatting issue. Keep the URL structure consistent to minimize confusion and stay organized. This will also be helpful if you ever restructure your website and need to find and group URLs into updated topic clusters.
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