SEO is the best tool for a marketer to generate traffic, multiply the conversion rate and grow revenue. It’s still dominating other tools available. However, with changes in ranking signals by Google, user experience and website structure too have become essential for a successful website.
Structure of a website is important. It depicts what the pages on the website want to convey and how they are interconnected. It’s pertinent for marketers to strike balance between look and feel of the website and website’s architecture. They altogether improve your website’s overall visibility.
Website Structure and Its Impact on SEO
While preparing a workable strategy for SEO you can’t simply ignore website structure. Without a perfectly organized website structure you can’t gain much from your content, links and promotional efforts.
The impact of website structure on SEO, traffic and conversion is undeniable. It helps you to ensure better user engagement and align well with your evolving business goals.
The article captures few crucial website structure elements and the way they affect your website’s SEO performance.
Site Crawlability
Let’s start with website crawalability. It’s of utmost importance if not the only. Crawalability refers to search engine bot’s ability to crawl through your website content to ascertain its intent. Bot scans through website pages, categories, subcategories and topics get the idea what the website is all about.
Monitor your site on regular interval for crawalability. Interconnect related pages for easy navigation. Stick to organized breadcrumbs, schema, and structured data formats. Poor crawalability may affect your SEO, traffic and ranking if bots fail to crawl your website for any reason.
URL Structure
URL structure is another important element of your website that affects SEO. They create site hierarchy and directing your website users to locations across websites. URL nomenclature should be done wisely. It should be easily readable by user and scannable search engine crawlers. While making website URLs make sure they are easy to spell, read and shouldn’t contain too many parameters.
Internal Linking
The main motto behind internal linking is to allow user navigation from one page to another effortlessly. It’s deemed a great navigation if it takes maximum three clicks to reach to a given page on the website.
Internal linking is a great way to help users and search engine bots to discover a page and create a flow between pages and content. Links should be interlinked in a way to avoid any damage to your website structure.
Ideally internal linking is a practice to linking relevant content pieces on your website. It’s also a way to reduce page depth. Internal links provide better user experience. You can interlink new content with older content through the use of internal linking.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate or plagiarized content is bad for ranking and user experience. Google deems it spam. Marketers must focus on unique and quality content to keep website structure intact. Unique and engaging content helps in SEO too. Use Google search console to find and remove duplicate or thin content on your website. The moot point is- refrain from using duplicate content in any form.
Core Web Vitals
This is newly inducted part of Google’s page update experience. Core Web Vitals are quite significant when images are optimized during the SEO. They could impact ranking at some extent. These core web vitals may turn into a major ranking factor in 2021.
Unfortunately, so far the percentage of websites meeting CWV benchmark is quite less. Webmasters and marketers have time to gear up for the update. If you haven’t yet prepared for the update, this is right time to go.
Navigation and User Experience
User experience is now a ranking signal. Bad user experience not only hurts your SEO prospects but also annoys your users a lot. No one will ever want to interact with poorly loading and cluttered websites. If users fail to ascertain how to find a desired page on your website, they will switch to your competitor’s website.
On the basis of user interaction with your website, Google interprets future search results. The search giant takes into consideration Click-through rate, time spent on site, and bounce rate among others to figure out user experience on your website.
Mobile Friendly
After mobile friendly algorithm update Google made mobile friendliness an important ranking signal. A website is said to be mobile friendly if it opens on all mobile and tab devices regardless of their screen size.
Time and again Google has made it clear that the websites that don’t meet mobile friendly criteria can see a sudden drop in search ranking. Google confirms mobile friendliness an important user experience savior.
Website Speed and Performance
Slow loading websites are a huge turn off. They kill user experience. Unresponsive pages annoy users and force them to switch to your nearest competitors. Experts say that one second of drop in page load time can hit website page views and website traffic hard. It hurts conversion prospects significantly.
Conclusion-
To get best out of your SEO campaigns, you should take website structure seriously. Keep your pages in hierarchical format for both users and your business. You should plan your website structure in advance. Make sure that your website architectures and design is alighted with your SEO efforts.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.