Planning Website Architecture for SEO Success

A successful website architecture can mean the difference between your visitors becoming a sales lead or just bouncing away to a competitor’s website.  A more formal name for website architecture is “information architecture”, which is the goal of building a website with your audience’s needs in mind and making information intuitively discoverable.  A successful website architecture gets the right information to the right person as quickly and as simply as possible.  Since websites have different types of visitors, each with different goals, needs, and nuances, it can be difficult to know how to get started planning your website’s structure.  This article covers some website architecture best practices and methods that will help you plan the most effective strategy.

There are two types of people; designers and developers.  Designers come up with all kinds of wacky ideas to make the website look unique and pretty, but they usually have no idea how to organize information and content.  This makes the path that visitors take, from website entry to conversion goal, difficult and confusing to navigate.  Developers on the other hand, usually have great site navigation, but lack the creative talent necessary to make a user-friendly interface.  The happy medium is, well, in the middle, of these two methodologies.

Website Architecture Basics

Never forget the goal of your website; to sell an idea.  Whether you are literally selling physical products, or you are trying to build an online following, the goal is the same – to sell a particular audience on a particular idea.  But one common trap site owners tend to fall into is that they fall in love with their website, this is a big mistake.  You must look at your site objectively, and be willing to make design and organizational changes that could be radically different from what you would “think” is the best website architecture.  What is best for you, may not be what is best for your target market or audience.

Start out with answering the question, “What is it that you do?” according to the formula provided below:

TO (target market, target audience) PROVIDES (services, products) BY (unique methods, advantages) FOR (results).

An example should help illustrate:

E3 is a Pittsburgh based (TO) internet marketing company that PROVIDES web design, online video, and SEO services BY offering over 10 years of industry experience FOR building your brand’s online market share.

This elevator pitch, more or less, will be your About Us page.  There are many possible variations, feel free to mix the elements of the formula around, but you should try to include all four of them.  All in all, someone should be able to understand, appreciate, and tell someone else after hearing your About Us elevator pitch only once.

Segmenting Your Site’s Structure

Now that you have your About Us page together, come up with a list of ALL the different types of people who may come to your website.  Take a piece of paper.  On the left hand side, write down every group that will come to your site.  A few examples:

• Potential customers
• Returning customers
• Press or media representatives
• Suppliers
• Potential allies
• Competitors

On the right hand side of the piece of paper, come up with a unique “success point” for each group.  In other words, what is it that you want each group to do once they get to your website?  Some ideas:

• Lead a potential customer to a contact form
• Send a returning customer to a support forum
• Guide the press to a photo gallery or video page

Then decide on the path each visitor would take to reach their unique success point.  What links in the menu, sidebar, footer, and “inside the body content” will these different visitors be clicking on to get them to the page that contains their success point?  Think of this “navigational path” and plan it out on a piece of paper.  Take note of which pages seem to overlap.  Do you really need a “Help” page and a “FAQs” page?  Or both a “Request a Quote” and a “Contact Us” page?  Probably not.

A good practice is to keep the number of pages (remember, pages are different from posts) on your website down to about 10 – 15 max.  This will keep your content concise, reduce the risk of your visitors getting lost, and increase the chances that you will actually maintain, monitor, optimize, and improve your pages over time, which is absolutely critical for long-term success.  Every month or so, check with your Google Analytics account to see how your pages are performing.  If they are not doing so well, make a few adjustments, and let it run for a month.  Then come back and edit the pages to optimize their performance for the different segments of your target audience.