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SEO is a necessary part of any business’s marketing strategy. Organic traffic from Google can make up around half of website traffic, so investing in SEO is a must-have for any business that wants to make it long-term.

There are multiple aspects to SEO, like content creation or link building, but all of it should be built on a solid foundation of technical SEO.

Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing the internal structure of your site to be in line with Google’s best guidelines. The website structure and navigation not only influence how Google sees your website but also make it easier to use your website. This can also influence your SEO as better sites will have a lower bounce rate and a longer dwell time, signaling to Google your website is trustworthy.

The end goal of technical SEO is to make your website accessible to both the search engine and the users and for the website to rank higher on SERP.

With that in mind, let’s explore how you can improve your website structure and navigation to benefit your SEO efforts.

1. Create a logical website hierarchy

Your first task is creating a website structure that is intuitive to navigate. This will be useful for both website visitors and Google bots that try to index the site. Here’s how you do it.

Group the pages of your site together under categories and subcategories. You can have a main page for each category that links to the pages within that category. For instance, you can group all the pages for each service your business provides under the services category and then create a single page that describes all services and links to individual service pages.

What you shouldn’t do is create too many subcategories. It’s best if your website is no more than four levels deep. So, the final page address would look like this:

Yoursite.com/services/consulting

And not like this:

Yoursite.com/offers/2023-01-23-0394/in-person-services/consulting

This ensures both Google crawler bots and users have an easy time reaching the low-level pages.

2. Create an XML sitemap

A website structure component that is only meant for search engines is the sitemap. This document, which can be either a code file or a text file, contains a list of all the pages on your site. It can also add more contextual information to the pages, like the time it was last modified.

Since it’s a full catalog of your website URLs, it helps Google discover your website, properly scan it, and index it. 

Creating an XML sitemap manually may be cumbersome, but many modern CMSs can generate them automatically, and there are plenty of third-party SEO tools that can do that for you. 

There are many SEO tools for agencies that provide comprehensive solutions. Along with sitemap creation, they offer technical auditing of your pages and identify other problems with their crawling and indexing. 

3. Optimize your URL structure

In the sample URL above, you might find one of the category pages’ names odd and rightly so. When you give URLs meaningful, descriptive names, it’s easy to understand what they mean. When you put the date as the URL or in any other way stray away from URLs that speak for themselves, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Users might feel confused and wonder if they’ve arrived on the right page if the URL name doesn’t describe the page. What’s more, search engines have a harder time understanding what your page is about.

You should name your URLs in a way that shortly describes the page they represent. URLs also give you an opportunity for keyword optimization, as you can put keywords in URLs to signal to Google what the page is about.

It’s also a good idea to stick to URL naming conventions. For instance, only using the hyphen to separate words. Google might not read the underscore in the URL and might misunderstand what the page is about. If possible, try to avoid using dynamic URLs — they typically have lower CTR and can cause duplicate content issues.

4. Use internal links effectively

Next, you need to work on your internal linking. Linking to pages within your site both helps with improving their ranking potential and leading website users to helpful pages.

The basic internal linking is providing navigation links in the footer and in the header.

It’s a simple way to link to all the most important pages of your site and make it accessible from any place on the site.

You should also place contextual links from page content. Link to relevant pages where it makes sense and use descriptive anchors for these links. Don’t just link to a page with a word like “here” or “click.”

Use words that describe what the page is about and use keywords where it makes sense. Search engines will look at key anchors to determine what your pages are about, so including keywords in them is good for SEO.

One last thing to tend to is making sure there are no pages on the site that can’t be reached by going through links.

5. Implement breadcrumb navigation

Another aspect of website navigation is adding breadcrumbs to your subcategory pages. Breadcrumbs are links that lead to the category above and help users navigate through your website structure.

They also help SEO directly by improving the crawlability of your site — since there are more internal navigation links, Google crawler bots will be able to crawl your site faster.

6. Optimize your website for speed

None of the navigation matters if the website structure doesn’t let your website load fast. That’s why the last part of website structure optimization is improving the loading speed of your site.

It will prevent users from leaving due to low loading speeds, and it is a direct ranking factor.

Start with implementing these best practices:

• Minify images
• Minify CSS code
• Prioritize loading the most important parts of the website
• Lazy-load less important elements
• Resolve problematic scripts that take too much time to load

With this, you should have a website that loads fast and creates a better experience for your visitors.

Conclusion

Technical SEO has many facets, and solid website structure and navigation are necessary for great SEO. Follow the tips from this article to transform your website from a mediocre one to a well-optimized site that can outrank competitors.