While it’s common knowledge that your site architecture and menu structure can affect the ease and usability of your website, you may not know how much of an impact your site architecture can have on your SEO efforts. Poor site architecture can lead to indexing issues, inefficient conversion rate optimization, and other SEO consequences.

How can you make your website’s site architecture more SEO friendly?

Plan your site’s menu carefully

Take the time to think through the placement of the pages in your menu. Not only is it frustrating for visitors when they can’t easily find what they are looking for, search engines don’t like it either! Search engine spiders crawl websites by working their way through your navigation and internal links. The deeper your pages are placed within your navigation, the harder it is for search engines to find and then index them. By thoughtfully planning your site architecture, you can help visitors and search engines navigate through your site and improve the overall visibility of your pages.

Create a meaningful hierarchy

The way by which your pages are organized in your menu indicates each page’s relative importance. Visitors and search engines expect higher-level menu items to lead to generic, overview-style pages. Pages underneath those top-level menu items should be organized so that they progressively grow more specific the farther down in your menu they are placed. This is also an important SEO consideration since the placing of a certain page within your site’s architecture affects the overall SEO weight it carries. So, more important and priority pages should be arranged so that they are higher up in the site architecture and closer to the homepage in the URL structure.

Conduct keyword research first

Since search engines use your menu to better understand what your website is all about, it’s a good place to utilize your targeted keyphrases. Keyword research helps give you more insight into your audience, what they are searching for, and which terms will make the most sense to be featured in your main navigation. Make sure to conduct thorough keyword research before creating your site architecture so that you can seamlessly integrate those terms into your navigation as you go.

Make your users your priority

The goal of search engines has always been to provide users with the best possible experience. So, in order to please users and search engines, your website should provide an intuitive, user-friendly experience. This means that your site architecture should be created based on how your visitors think, search, and engage with your content. From your homepage, visitors should be able to easily and instinctively move through your website to find what they are looking for.

How did your B2B decide on your site’s architecture and main navigation? We’d love to hear from you!