I have an aunt and uncle who used to live in a condo that had the kitchen right by the front door and the dining room at the back.
To go from the kitchen to the dining room you had to go through a long hallway that led past the closet and the bedroom.
It was awkward, cumbersome, and counterintuitive. Exactly what you don’t want in a space where you want people to feel comfortable. But it wasn’t too bad because the condo was so small that it didn’t take long to find your way around.
But now they live in a giant mansion. Can you imagine walking into a huge house and having no idea where to find what you need? You could spend hours wandering from room to room while desperately trying not to pee your pants because you can’t find a bathroom.
Hopefully no one is that desperate when they visit your website, but you get the idea. The harder it is to find something, the more likely we are to just give up and leave.
This is especially true online where leaving to find what we need somewhere else takes no more than a few clicks.
That means, not only does your website need to be attractive and have awesome content, it also needs to be easy to navigate.
It doesn’t matter how highly you rank for your most relevant keyword if your website is so badly designed that no one can find the content they’re looking for.
So let’s talk about what website architecture is and why it’s so important for attracting, engaging, and converting high-quality leads online.
Table of Contents
- What Is Website Architecture?
- Why Should I Care About My Website Architecture?
- What Is a “Flat” Website Architecture?
- What Is a “Deep” Website Architecture?
- KISS
- Website Hierarchy
- Categories
- URL Structure
- Use Internal Links to Direct Traffic
- Use a Sitemap
What Is Website Architecture?
Website architecture is how the pages on your website are structured and linked together.
It is how people find their way from one page on your website to another.
When mapped out, your website architecture should look like a house with the home page at the top with lines representing links going from the home page to your categories, then from your categories to your subcategories, etc.
Why Should I Care About My Website Architecture?
Good website architecture improves Google’s ability to crawl and index all pages of your website. The more clicks people have to take from your home page to find a certain page, the less likely it is that page is going to get crawled by Google.
The same number of pages on a website with a more horizontal — or “flat” — structure are more likely to all get crawled by Google’s bots.
What Is a “Flat” Website Architecture?
A website that has a “flat” site architecture arranges the pages in such a way that, no matter how many pages your website has, it only takes a few clicks to get to any given page from the home page.
It’s called a flat architecture because it looks like a ranch house.
Flatter site architecture makes it easier for the real, live humans visiting your website to find what they need. The more clicks away from your homepage a page is, the less likely your human visitors are going to be able to find it.
By making your site easy to navigate so people can find what they’re looking for, you increase the chances they’ll stick around. If they can’t find what they need, they’ll click away to get it from someone else.
A good rule of thumb is that any page on your website should be no more than 4 clicks away from the homepage.
Flat architecture means you end up with a lot of links from pages that tend to get lots of backlinks (like your homepage) to pages that tend not to get lots of backlinks (like your sales pages.)
Most people when referencing your business, or sending a referral your way, will provide a link to your homepage, rather than your sales page. That’s all well and good, but you need your sales pages to get all that good backlink juice for their SEO benefit.
That’s where the flat site architecture comes in handy. Providing links from your homepage to your sales pages, not only drives traffic to your precious sales pages, but it also improves their ability to rank for relevant searches.
What Is “Deep” Website Architecture?
A website has “deep” site architecture when the map looks more like a tall Victorian house than a wide, squat ranch house.
This is a problem for SEO (and for users) because websites with deep site architecture have multiple pages that require clicking on 4-10 links from the homepage to reach.
This is a problem because, the harder people have to work to find what they need, the more likely they are to give up and click away from your website altogether.
It’s like trying to find a bathroom in a huge mansion that only has one bathroom and it can only be accessed by walking through all the other rooms in the building. You’ll do it if you really need to use the bathroom, but if you’re just interested in how they remodeled the bathroom, you’re probably not interested enough to wander through room after room trying to find it.
The other problem with deep site architecture is that it hurst your SEO, especially the SEO of the pages you’ve buried under all those links.
Although Google’s search algorithm is made up primarily of robots, it’s still limited in the amount of content it can crawl in a given time frame. The more links you make Google follow to crawl certain pages of your website, the less likely Google will be to follow those links and crawl all the pages on your website.
Instead, it will determine your website has used up your crawl budget (the number of pages on your website that Google is willing to crawl, categorize, and index) and will abandon your site in favor of another without bothering to see what other content you have on your website.
So, if you want all your web pages to show up on Google, use a flat site architecture.
KISS
Keep It Super Simple.
The simpler your site architecture is, the easier it will be for people to find what they need when they need it.
Again, think of what people are likely to see and do when they get to your website.
What are they looking for?
How are they looking for it?
How can you make it very easy for them to find it?
Website Hierarchy
One of the best ways to keep your website architecture simple is to establish an hierarchy for your website and maintain that hierarchy as your website grows.
Your homepage should always be at the top of your site hierarchy, followed by your main categories, followed by your subcategories, etc.
Categories
Categories are great for SEO because they make it easy for Google to figure out what your content is all about so it knows which searches to pair you with.
Categories are also a great way to implement and maintain a site hierarchy. Every time you create a new page, add it to an existing category, then link to that page from the category page. This enables Google and human visitors to click on the category from your homepage, and from there to the new page. Two clicks and they’re done. Easy as pie.
It also makes it easy for humans to navigate your website by giving them an idea of an area of your website they might want to explore without overwhelming them with options.
For example, someone who lands on your homepage and sees dozens of different pages they can visit is likely to become overwhelmed and click away.
By contrast, 3 categories looks much less intimidating. Anyone who has an idea of what they might want from you (or even just what they’re interested in) will simply have to find the category that best matches what they need and they can go from there.
Your content is gold. But that doesn’t mean you should bury it like gold.
URL Structure
The structure of your URLs should follow the structure of your site architecture. For example, https://website.com/category/subcategory/target-keyword.
Keep in mind, that’s just one example. Your URLs don’t have to look exactly like that, but you can see how incorporating your site architecture into the creation of your URLs will make pages easier to find.
It also helps Google understand and index your content when your URLs match up with your site architecture.
Use Internal Links to Direct Traffic
Creating links from one page of your site to another page is a great way to direct traffic to the pages you want people to visit.
It also boosts the SEO of both pages, but especially the page on which people land after clicking on the link. Granted, internal links don’t have as much value in the SEO world as external links, but they’re not worthless. By creating a pillar page with a ton of valuable content and linking to it from several other pages on your website, you’re signaling to Google that this page is special, so it should sit up and pay attention.
Of course, an external linkbuilding campaign for those pillar pages wouldn’t hurt…
Use a Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of your pages that goes in the footer of your website. It should list the categories, subcategories, and pages on your website.
You don’t have to list all your pages there if you have more than 20 or so because that can get overwhelming. But do list your categories and subcategories because it’s a great way to provide a visual representation of the content on your website. It also gives people a chance to click on a page without first going to the category page.
If you found this content useful and would like to have more like it sent straight to your inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter in the space below. You can also see what we’re up to by following us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
