Websites are for people, right? You want people to come visit, explore what you are offering, and persuade them to become clients. You gear your content towards the user. Yet, how are people going to find your website unless you make it attractive to search engines? Without them, your website is lost.
The key to getting people to your website is to make it attractive for them AND the search engines. A critical part of this is your website architecture. An overly complicated structure will turn both visitors and search engine bots away.
What is the best structure for your website?
Think of your website as a tree. The trunk is the central support system for everything above it. From that main support, you move out to large branches. Then the branches get smaller and smaller until you hit leaves.
This is the structure you need for your website. It is logical, easy to follow, and easy to manage.
The trunk is your home page, the main support of your website. From the home page, you branch out into high level branches or categories. Each category has related categories or web pages inside it. This branching can continue to finer levels of detail until it reaches a web page, one of the leaves on your website tree.
How can you create a website architecture tree?
Let's use a full-service law firm as an example to make a “Content Hub.”
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Define the large branches or categories that will come off the main page. For a law firm, you could have categories for each practice area. For example, immigration law, personal injury law and family law.
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Split the larger categories into smaller related ones. The personal injury branch can be split into car accidents, wrongful death, premise liability, and so forth.
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If necessary, continue splitting the categories. Premise liability can be divided into slips and falls, dog bites, building/housing code violations, among many others.
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You may even be able to further split these branches. Slip and falls can be broken down into several categories, such as slip and falls on commercial property, slips and falls caused by food and drink at a restaurant, slips and falls at a residential property.
A few rules of thumb to follow:
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Don't let content overlap. It is confusing to both people and bots.
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Base your main branches on logical categories. For a clothing company, it can be by demographics (men, women, kids), by clothing type (dresses, trousers, tops), or by general size (petite, misses, plus).
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Don't go down more than 2 or 3 levels unless you are presenting an encyclopedia of information, such as the case with the law firm website’s architecture. The further a visitor has to dig to find information, the more likely they are to leave.
Your website can be attractive to visitors and search engines alike. A bonus happens when you create a visitor/bot friendly website. It is going to improve your website ranking. And that is gold in the world of content marketing.
Questions and Final Thoughts?
How did you build your website’s architecture?
