Your website is the digital representation of your business offerings. A strong website structure is pivotal, as it adjusts to your content and simplifies the user journey!
If you are confused about designing your website, our article will cover various website models depending on business needs!
Table of Contents
What Is Website Structure And Its Basic Elements?
Website structure determines the hierarchy and categorization of your pages based on the user journey you want to create!
The main objective is to furnish important information on the first page while imploring users to explore further!
- Categories: They group pages based on the broader subject of relevance. For instance, If we are a digital marketing website, Technical SEO would be a separate category from Content SEO! They ease user navigation.
- Navigation System: This means organizing your header bar, footer bar, and other menubars so people can find relevant pages faster!
- Pages type: You will have a home page, followed by multiple landing pages for your business offerings, blogs, and product pages! You will also use these pages as an opportunity to place CTAs (call-to-actions) such as “sign up,” “add to cart,” “contact us,” survey forms, and more!
Benefits Of Website Site Structure
Website structure determines how pages are interlinked and what steps people follow to fetch relevant pages!
An efficient website layout will reap the following SEO benefits!
1. Increased Crawl Speed
Internal links guide Google bots to the destined pages, encouraging them to crawl linked pages. Conversely, without a basic website structure, the crawl bots would take more time to scan your pages, meaning many more pages would be left out!
2. Enhanced UX
Users will navigate your website more if the content is organized in a neat and presentable manner.
- Generates leads for your products/services.
- Encourages visitors to subscribe to your newsletters.
- Increases user retention.
- More returning users.
- Good page speed.
- Google ranks sites that perform well on user behavior metrics.
3. No Keyword Cannibalization
This is how keyword cannibalization increases on a cluttered website.
- Scope For Confusion: Many times, webpages target keywords with slightly varying intent, causing Google crawl bots to be confused about which pages to scan.
- No Identifiers: Even while crawling pages, google bots wouldn’t do justice to analyzing and storing the metadata of the said pages, if they lack categories or tags.
- Outranking: This means that all your pages would perpetually compete for the crawl bots’ attention, at the same time, for any random keyword. Hence, one would outrank the other until you use distinguishing markers!
4. Search Result Snippets
If you have prioritized website structure, then chances are that Google will pull the links from your website and mention them right below your ranking pages. These links are also known as “site links.”
- If your rank decreases, Google may remove these site links from the search results.
- Google crawlers periodically re-scan web pages, so if you alter your website layout or delete the linked pages, these site links will also be removed.
How To Determine Website Structure?
Before knowing what website layout to proceed with, you must figure out the following things!
1. Competitor Research
Find the websites of your competitors and analyze them on these lines!
- Study the website layouts of competitors and determine how costly certain features could be.
- Determine where you want to replicate or be unique, and always think from your targeted user’s perspective!
- When you navigate a competitor’s website, consider what factors compel you to click their links.
2. Decide How You Will Organize Your Content
How will you create a compatible layout if you don’t know what content you will upload on your website?
- Decide your key focus: If you are a product-based company with a wide collection of products (not limited), then product pages would be your top priority, along with occasional blogs. But for a service-oriented company, a few service pages followed by blogs would be their main focus!
- Analyze content requirements: List your company offerings and count them as separate seed keywords. Fire one seed keyword on the keyword planner and filter out irrelevant keywords. For the ones you would still be left with, club them if their intent is similar, or let them separate. Repeat these steps for all seed keywords separately and count the ones you are left with. This way, you will know your website’s potential content volume!
- Content requirements will determine:
1. Categories and Tags
2. Landing Pages
3. Blogs
4. Product Pages
5. Menu bars
6. Filters
3. Website Template
Once you have decided how you will organize content, what features you will incorporate, and to what extent your pages will allow scrolling or pagination, you can now tailor a website around these requirements.
- If you choose a pre-customized template, it should suit your requirements and be malleable if developers try to tweak it using shortcodes.
- Or, if you build a site from scratch, utilize UX tools for website visualization and drafting.
Which Website Structure Is Suitable For Your Business?
A digital marketer‘s job is to structure your web page in a way that combines accessibility with utility! This begs the question: How many website models are there? What type of businesses can benefit from them?
Here’s our take!
1. Hierarchical Structure For Website
In this layout, the homepage covers broader categories. Exploring those categories leads to specific pages.
This structure is versatile and would suit:
- Service providers, online stores, etc.
- Any business, as long as the offerings are limited!
How to attain this website structure?
- Top-down approach: Lay the broader categories on the home page. Each should lead to more specific pages.
- Test Your Site: Use card sorting exercises amongst your team members to understand what links they are naturally attracted to. Then, use wireframes to get a rough visualization of your website.
- Finalize: Once the website is created, finalize internal link placements, content pages, and menu bars.
2. Sequential Structure For Website
This layout takes users through a sequential journey based on their options at each stage. Users get to narrow down categories via filters and land on the required page accordingly!
This layout is more suited for:
- E-commerce sites with multiple product lines or product types.
- Websites that sell online courses.
- Ebook stores.
- Online booking sites with various options (restaurants, hotels, flights, courier services).
How to implement it?
- Progressive Unilinear Journey: The users will start from your homepage and eventually migrate to category pages or sub-categories. This journey should be a unilinear path, where they don’t have to visit one page for product info and then go back to the homepage for the payment gateway. It should be a progressive one-way journey from exploring services to paying for them.
- Filters: If you offer many products or services, you can add filters based on price, location, or other product features. While convenient for users, these filters heavily rely on “pagination,” where a new page is generated to meet the user’s search criteria.
- Compelling User Journey: Each page visited during the journey should be neatly arranged with captivating details. All your pages should convey a story, which can be done better with visual elements such as images, diagrams, etc. Adding CTA (call-to-action) links would also help prompt specific user actions!
3. Matrix Website Structure
This kind of website layout would reveal all options on the home page. It would increase scroll time or menu bars, but users would have the complete freedom to determine which page better serves their interests!
What kind of businesses can use this structure for website?
- A doctor or hospital website that wants to give users a choice regarding what treatments they want.
- A government website that lists all policies, eligibility criteria, and beneficiaries.
- Shelter/NGO websites that have different contact points and procedures for all their rescue services.
How does this model work?
- All-in-one Homepage: Your home page would be a blend of various product/service categories, with an addition of other informative pages linked to it. Here the need for developing new pages, such as blogs, would be less, and the need for updating pre-existing pages would be more!
- Dynamic Webpages: This structure would emphasize robust navigation systems, such as different menu bars. Scroll time and menu bars would be longer, while pagination would be zero.
- Personalization: Users can also insert keywords in the search bar and pull tailored content from relevant categories!
4. Database Website Structure
Users would have to give their input in terms of filters or keywords before reaching a personalized page!
What kind of enterprises is this model relevant for?
- Online booking sites with a broader chain of restaurants, flights, theaters, etc, associated with them.
- E-commerce stores with a huge collection of products.
How to achieve this structure for website?
- Choose a hosting service that allows you to create an internal database.
- Then, develop options and pre-defined paths for users.
Essential Practices – SEO Structure For Website
Your job doesn’t end with an aesthetic website. You will have to maintain it as well!
1. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are often visible at the top of your webpage, where users can see what options or links they clicked to reach their current page eventually. All terms on these trails should be clickable. They aid in crawlability and user experience.
2. Use Tags
Tags are used to club similar pages together. They also give a brief glimpse of what your pages cover.
Best SEO practices:
- Don’t produce way too many tags.
- Wherever you insert your tags, they should be easily visible to the users and crawlers.
- The tags should be clickable.
3. Monitor Internal Links
Adding internal links strengthens the authority of the linked pages. Finding their scope is possible only if you periodically review your links and pages.
- Find and replace broken links using semrush or ahrefs.
- Your pages should be within 3 clicks.
- If there are orphan pages, pass links to them or delete them.
4. Combine JavaScript With HTML
HTML is a hypertext markup language that defines the content structure of web pages. It should be used alongside Javascript to enhance website appeal!
- Why JavaScript? They allow developers to infuse complex elements into their web pages, such as interactive maps, animated graphics, and other interactive elements.
- What’s the benefit? In recent times, Google bots have begun crawling website features! So, JavaScript has an added advantage as long as you ensure your page speed is good!
5. Balance Scrolls And Filters
This decision would rest on content type.
- Filters: Users fetch customized pages with results matching their search parameters. This is known as “pagination” and is suitable for product pages.
- Consideration: Filters offer more control, but pagination increases the number of pages on your website and creates multiple versions. So you need to delete and redirect your pages consistently, depending on user sessions!
- Infinite scrolling: Conversely, users can scroll and locate desired content. It is helpful for blogs.
6. Sitemap Listing
Sitemaps simplify navigation for all crawlers and users.
- XML sitemap instructs Google crawlers which pages to crawl. This increases the chances of crawling and indexing.
- HTML sitemaps are crafted for users. So that they can find pages more easily!
7. Validate Your Structure
Use the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This tool allows you to validate your website’s HTML and XHTML scripts, ensuring that your website functions similarly on all search engine browsers!
Conclusion – Ideal Structure Of A Web Page
A website structure determines how users interact with different elements on your web pages and achieve their goals. Whether you design it from scratch or use a pre-generated layout, your job is to ensure that your target audience can find what they want! With some strategizing, the outcome would be a speedy customer purchase!
To build the best website layout that matches your business needs, we would recommend approaching experts and letting them take care of the rest.