Site Architecture Best Practices: Improve SEO and the Buyer’s Journey

How Site Architecture Impacts the Buyer’s Journey

A well-organized website is critical to digital success. Site architecture can influence users' experience and lasting perception of your brand and how search engine crawlers (and perhaps AI crawlers) navigate and index your content. 

But how do you know if users are having trouble? How do you know if it’s “good enough” for Google? How do you know if your content resonates with the right audience at the right time?

Let’s dive in. 

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What is website architecture, and why is it important?

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What is website architecture? It’s the perfect combination of meeting business objectives, answering your prospect’s questions at the right time and place, and speaking to search engines to establish expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and experience in your area. 

Website architecture encompasses content organization, information hierarchy, usability, web design, user experience, and search engine ranking goals. A website re-architecture project aims to match intent, experience, and technical setup with every step of your users’ buyer’s journeys.

How does website organization influence ranking? SEO and Site Architecture:

Search engines provide humans with information based on user search queries. If a human is confused while navigating your site, a crawler will likely be, too. 

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Ideally, information is focused and aggregated by topic. This provides a logical path for a user to follow and validates expertise. Structure your content like an inverse pyramid - your broadest topics build off of contributing topics, and each might even have contributing topics. 

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These topic umbrellas have several names: Hubspot calls them “pillar pages,” Yoast uses “content clusters,” and Semrush refers to them as “topic clusters.”

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The same logic applies to search engines crawling the site - they want to follow a logical path that delves deeper into topics. 

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Website user behavior, information hierarchy, and search engine optimization: 

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1. Document how users access information on your site: 

1. Document the share of traffic that comes from each marketing channel.
2. Identify landing pages for users that enter from organic search. 
3. Use Google Search Console to determine the queries driving traffic to the landing pages.
4. Consider a tool like LogRocket or HotJar to capture user sessions and heatmaps to better understand how users navigate your site.

2. Document points of failure:some text

1. Which pages have a low engagement rate? 
2. Which pages have rage clicks?
3. Which pages are losing users regularly and at a high rate?
4. Baseline KPIs - document overall and by channel: some text
   1. User engagement: scroll depth, video plays, engagement rate time on page, and time on site. 
   2. Conversions: lead forms, newsletter and email sign-ups, and content downloads. 

3. Channel performance: some text

1. Traffic drivers: channels that are driving visits.
2. Valuable traffic drivers: channels that are driving engagement and conversions.

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How do search engines crawl websites?

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1. Search engines, like Google, have bots that crawl websites and index content. Google’s bot is GoogleBot, and Bing’s crawler is Bingbot. These bots discover websites through various means, including sitemaps and links. 
2. Once a bot lands on a page, it “reads” it. It looks at key elements, including header tags, metadata, headlines, OG metadata, images, and links, to understand and contextualize the page. 
3. Then, the bot stores important information in a giant catalog that organizes information by topic and category. This is called the index. 

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How does information show up on Search Results for users to access?

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Google and other search engines are notoriously complex in their algorithms, and they don’t publish their “secret sauce” to serve the best information to users. However, a few items are known to impact whether a specific page shows for a specific user’s query. 

• Relevance: How relevant is the content to the query?
• Authority: Is the website that published the information trusted in the topic of the query?
• User experience: Does the website provide a good experience? Or is it riddled with pop-ups, banners, and slow load times? 
• Freshness: For some search queries, freshness is paramount. For example, breaking news search queries are likely to result in more recent content showing at the top of the search engine results. 

It’s important to note that search engines are constantly evolving, and ranking factors and weights can change over time. However, the core principles above remain essential.

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Common Pitfalls and Questions: 

1. Content is organized by type, not topic: we frequently encounter websites that organize content by type instead of topic. Users generally don’t care if it’s an infographic, an article, or a podcast as long as the information is what they’re looking for at each stage in the buying cycle. 
2. Getting lost in how it will look vs. how content is organized. While your architecture and navigation will largely mirror one another, there are some cases and entire industries where this might become a gray area. 
3. You forget that you can break things into smaller like-chunks, but they should tree up to the fewest possible top-level categories while still making sense. (Reminder - structure does not equal what the user sees). 
4. “That’s how we’ve always done it.” While, of course, your site was structured to fit a specific need and strategy, that doesn’t mean those strategies hold up today. AI, chatbots, and the rising importance of giving users what they need while establishing expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness all contribute to the necessity of constantly monitoring user behavior and acquisition trends for your site.
5. Getting too granular immediately. It’s a good idea to establish requirements for a new topic before becoming a parent, child, grandchild, and so forth on a site. Setting high standards and sticking to the strict requirements of creating a new area will help you avoid needing a complete re-architecture in the long run. 

It’s time to consider a website architecture project if:

• Users have a poor experience accessing, navigating, and using the website. Low engagement rates and falling conversion rates are clues that this is happening. 
• Traffic from organic search is dwindling, especially for key queries. 
• Impressions are falling, resulting in fewer clicks, even if your CTR is consistent. 
• Customers are confused when talking to sales and don’t understand your product or service. 
• You’re ready to optimize for generative search experiences.

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If you’re a B2B SaaS website owner, and ready to improve your website design and architecture, redesign, or search engine optimization, schedule a free consultation. 

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