If your website structure is built in a way that limits organic potential, then read this article. We will show you how to build a fully optimized and also scalable website structure.
Even if your website has valuable content, superior page speed, keyword relevance, and flawless UX on all devices, your competitors may still be snatching your visitors away.
We have all seen websites on the Internet that we thought had impossible navigation. That you can’t find your way around, etc.
Unfortunately, it is also often the case that newly created or relaunched websites are built on a structure where the potential is quite limited.
Now how to approach a good website structure.
First and foremost, I recommend you look at your existing structure. View them on all devices and also from the perspective of a visitor and also the bots. Find out what is not so optimal. This can be divided into three areas.
The first area is the information hierarchy.
Consider yours very carefully. What information is currently being conveyed. With most websites, the branding is conveyed first and foremost, which then transitions from the brand to the product and/or service in question. Features, messages are broken down in terms of benefits. But what would be other information that YOU would absolutely need to convey?
Once you have this set, take another look at your website structure. Are you currently communicating the information? Which ones are missing?
The structure and also the hierarchy of your page structure should fit the information you want to tell the users. What counts here is the message and the supporting elements of the message. The search engines will also recognize the logic of how your information is structured. The information content is also expressed in the url, flat and one-level urls should be avoided.
The second area is scalability
If you are building a new website, keep scalability in mind. If you do not consider this, you automatically limit the growth of your website. And within a very short time you are again faced with the situation of having to completely adapt your website structure. Make sure that subpages that are added fit back into the existing structure and match it again resp. forms a valuable addition.
The third area is targeting your audience
Make sure that the structure of the website also fits your target audience. A target group that is found in the B2B sector has increased interest in detailed information. Therefore, it is of significant importance to place them at the forefront.
If your target audience is found in the B2C sector and they are looking for social cues, you should include those clearly and other elements around them.
We can also put it another way. Base the structure of your website on the priorities of your visitors.
Helpful tools to evaluate your website structure
To get structural assessments you can use valuable tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to perform a crawl. You will get very important information about hidden pages, sitemaps, scripts and much more. After that, you should create a sitemap from which you can see the relationship between the individual pages and their history. By history we mean how many layers, how many subpages and other resources there are. To “read” these better, there are again great visualization tools.
Another powerful tool is Google Analytics which gives you valuable information about the behavior of your website visitors.
Where is the entry point (access) to your website
Where the visitor spends the most time
What does the visitor finally do, buy or contact?
Where is the jumping off point?
Are there areas where the visitor is not behaving as you would like or expect?
Where does the user perform actions?
Are there navigation points that are not used at all. Can these be moved or removed?
A perfect complement to Google Analytics is of course the Google Search Console, which gives you information about pages that rank well or not.
Another good tool to elicit user behavior are heat mapping tools like Hotjac.