Both SEO and UX depend heavily on the navigational structure of a website. The better-organized and designed your website is, the easier it will be for users to navigate your site. This will also provide a better user experience for search engine bots to crawl your site, helping them to find all the site’s content and allowing them to use crawl budgets more efficiently.
A website’s navigation should be assessed and improved based on the following factors:
- Site depth
- Site architecture
- Structure of URLs
- Breadcrumb navigation
- Internal search
It is important to create an optimized user experience, as well as a logical hierarchy of content, to create a well-structured website.
Site depth
Deep and shallow structures are the two basic types. A deep-structured website has content far from the homepage, and users must click multiple links to get to the page they are looking for from the home page.
User navigation may become confusing as a result. As well, crawlers are less likely to encounter deep content. Sites with shallow structures allow users to access most content within two or three clicks. Using this method, a website’s content is concise and easy to navigate, and the spider finds it easier to find pages, since it doesn’t have to spend time searching through everything on the site.
It is almost always easy to arrange your site’s content, even if it hosts a large amount of content. It is still a good idea to consider the most efficient structure for your website. Keep it as shallow as possible.
Site architecture
A site’s architecture describes how its content is organized. The content of a site arranged by topic areas may be preferred by Google. Users (and search engine spiders) will find it more logical by siloing the content. Topic authority is quickly rewarded by Google, so you should include as much relevant content under the same silo as possible.
Adding new FAQ pages within silos on related topics could be done instead of creating a single FAQ section on the site with all FAQs. It is especially beneficial if the content of your website is so broad that a complex navigation scheme becomes unavoidable.
URL structure
The names of all your URLs should also be logical. Some content management systems suggest URLs automatically, while others suggest them numerically based on the number of pages before it. Having a URL that is relevant to the page’s content will increase rankings, and it will also improve user experience by letting them know what they will be reading when they click the link.
Breadcrumb navigation
By showing the user exactly where they are on a site, breadcrumb navigation is the most effective method for helping them understand where they are. Following the URL path, or following the architecture of your site, will organize your breadcrumbs. The breadcrumb would look like this if a user accessed our ‘SEO Pricing’ page:
Website – Web Marketing – SEO – Pricing for SEO
Internal search
The internal search feature is very convenient, especially when you’ve got “orphaned” pages without a logical hierarchy leading to them. It’s not recommended, however, to isolate pages this way. As detailed above, the silo structure will greatly simplify access to all content, as it will be arranged in a logical manner. The purpose of internal search engines is convenience, not to replace an effective internal link structure.
