How to Structure Your Website Architecture for SEO

Googlebot usually starts crawling from the homepage. The closer a page is to the homepage in terms of clicks, the easier it is for Googlebot to crawl it. Conversely, the deeper a page is hidden, the less likely it is to be crawled.

And Google's crawl budget for each website is fixed. New websites typically have a much smaller crawl budget compared to large websites.

If your website structure is complex, has many layers, and many broken links, your crawl budget might be wasted on low-value pages, redirects, or even 404 pages, leading to important pages being indexed slowly or not at all.

A flat website structure allows all pages on our website to remain within 3-4 clicks from the homepage, making it easier and more efficient for Googlebot to crawl our pages.

It might sound complex, but in practice, it's very simple to implement. You might not even realize you're using this SEO-friendly flat website structure.

The image below is a simple example of a flat website structure.

“A flat website structure allows recommendation signals (Link Juice) to be passed between important pages through internal links, which helps improve Google SEO effects.”

In the field of SEO, PageRank is an authoritative measurement algorithm adopted by Google in its early days.

It primarily judges the authority and importance of a page based on backlinks from external high-quality websites pointing to your website's pages.

Pages with high PageRank (such as homepages, popular product pages, authoritative content pages) can effectively pass some authority to other related pages through internal links.

For example, by linking from the homepage or core category pages to newly launched product pages or special topic pages, these new pages can inherit some weight and gain better ranking opportunities in search results.

At the same time, an official website with a flat website structure helps Google discover new pages through internal link navigation to add them to its index, and reduces the generation of isolated pages (pages without internal links pointing to them).

A flat website structure allows users to reach products, services, and other important pages with fewer clicks. Clear and intuitive path design can effectively reduce the difficulty for users to find information, helping them smoothly enter your marketing funnel.

This efficient navigation experience not only enhances overall professionalism but also strengthens user trust in the brand.

The smoother the user experience on the website, the number of pages viewed and the dwell time typically increase. A good information architecture can inspire users to explore further, turning more ordinary visitors into potential customers.

Google's official documentation at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content also repeatedly emphasizes that user experience factors are also considered when determining a website's ranking.

If the user experience is good, with long dwell times and low bounce rates, then these user behaviors will be further adopted by search engine algorithms, which will drive an overall improvement in SEO performance.

“First, we need to plan all the important pages.” For example, if we are building a B2B foreign trade website, the pages typically include:

• Homepage
• Product Category Page
• Product Detail Page
• OEM/ODM Page
• Client Case Study Page
• Solutions Page
• Contact Us
• About Us
• FAQ
• Blog Aggregate Page
• Blog Detail Page
• Download Page

“At the same time, identify the main entry points that users are concerned about and that lead to conversions, and place them in the navigation bar.” Generally, these include: Homepage, Products, Client Case Studies, Solutions Page, About Us, and Contact Us.

If we have too much content, we can also use a Mega Menu to display our pages, but it's best to ensure there are only two levels of navigation.

For example, for product category pages, you can construct the URL structure like this:

• https://seocheckkit.com/product-category/category-1
• https://seocheckkit.com/product-category/category-2

Product detail pages:

• https://seocheckkit.com/product/product-1
• https://seocheckkit.com/product/product-2

Not recommended URL structure:

• https://seocheckkit.com/main/product-category/sub/product-1

Integrate related content under the same topic through internal links and a clear directory structure.

This linking strategy is called “content clusters.” This marketing strategy helps search engines better discover and understand the relationships between pages, highlights your professionalism and authority on the topic, and provides users with a more complete and systematic knowledge base.

Google crawlers traverse web pages through links. Therefore, “orphan pages” (pages that have no internal links pointing to them) are very difficult for Google crawlers to crawl and index.

Consequently, users can only access these pages by directly visiting their URLs, which severely impacts the user experience.

These orphan pages are typically article pages. It's highly probable that we didn't plan for them initially, but then wrote these articles after seeing high search volume and low competition during keyword research.

After publishing the article, if we don't link to it from other articles, it easily leads to the creation of such “orphan pages.”

It's advisable not to create orphan articles solely for a “low competition” keyword. Instead, integrate keywords naturally into topic clusters or use them as extensions and supplements to existing content.

A sitemap is an important tool for improving search engine crawling efficiency and user experience.

Through an XML sitemap, you can clearly communicate to search engines like Google and Bing which valid pages are on your website, helping crawlers quickly and comprehensively discover new content and updates.

We can easily achieve this by using SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and others.