A good website architecture leads to a great user experience, which is important for SEO marketing. It focuses on things like fast loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design.
Ideally, you’ll map out the architecture of your site before even buying the domain. That allows you to really get into your user’s head and reverse-engineer your way to a great user experience (UX).
ConversionXL has a great guide on how to make sure your UX is effective. You also need to optimize a few things for a great “search engine experience.” The more accessible your website is to Google, the better it will rank.
Elements of Site Architecture
If you’re having a hard time understanding site architecture, the following sections should clear it up for you.
Easy to Crawl
You’ll see the word “crawl” used a lot. This means Google is going through your site to try and figure out what it is. Google identifies important keywords, diagnoses on-site issues, and uses these factors to determine where you rank.
Depending on how well they can index all the pages on your site, they’ll be more likely to report a good result. The thicker the web of links between pages of your site, the easier it is for the spiders to reach all of them, giving the search engine a better understanding of your site.
You can make this job easier for Google by creating a sitemap with a simple plugin if you’re on WordPress or using an online XML sitemap generator.
Your goal should be to make the site as easy to crawl as possible. If Google has a hard time figuring out your site, you’ll have a more difficult time ranking because the AI won’t pick up on all the keywords you’re using.
Duplicate Content
There are a lot of myths around duplicate content and how it hurts your rankings. Many people incorrectly assume that everything on your page should be original, but the fact is, search engines do not penalize websites for duplicate content.
Reposting your content on other websites or publishing your guest posts again on your own site doesn’t hurt your SEO unless you do it the wrong (spammy) way.
For example, if you repost your exact same content to a big outlet like Medium, it might hurt your rankings because Google indexes your Medium article first since it’s on the more authoritative domain. This is often referred to as a “canonicalization” problem, and it might already be happening on your site without you realizing it.
Canonical issues occur when one or more URLs on your site displays similar or duplicate content.
In reality, there’s a lot of duplicate content on the internet. One situation that a lot of site owners run into is having duplicated content that appears on a sidebar. If you post a blog article on your site and have an intro in the sidebar, Google could consider that duplicate content.
There are also instances of duplicate content on two different domains. Content syndication is an example of this. Syndication is when original content is reposted somewhere else. As long as this is done with permission, Google won’t penalize you for it.
Mobile-Friendliness
We know Google indexes for mobile first. This means we need to create a site that performs well on mobile because that will be the most important deciding factor when Google determines how easy it is to crawl your site.
If you go into your Google Search Console, you’ll find a lot of information about what Google thinks of your site.
Taking a look at the above image, you’ll see this site has one issue for mobile usability. If you see issues like this in your Google Search Console, you’ll want to fix them right away.
Page Speed
With the implementation of Core Web Vitals, Google puts a lot of emphasis on page speed and usability. If your site loads too slow or certain elements load slowly, Google may penalize you or make it more difficult for you to outrank your competition.
Once again, the Google Search Console will provide you this information so you don’t have to go digging for a tool to tell you what your page speed is.
HTTPS and SSL
Security and safety are the important ranking factors. If Google thinks your site is spammy or sketchy, it’s not going to give you a first-page ranking.
One way it’s helped filter the good from the bad is through SSL certificates and HTTPS. It’s simple to set these up and can give you the little lock next to your URL and HTTPS before the URL string. This is an important trust signal, and while it doesn’t provide that much SEO juice, it’s a best practice that will benefit your long-term goals.
3 Tips to Improve Your Site Architecture
There are three important factors to keep in mind as you improve your site’s architecture. Take a look.
1. Make sure you understand Core Web Vitals: The most important piece of the puzzle is Core Web Vitals. You need to understand what these are, how they impact your rankings, and what you can do about them. Read more about it and make sure you’re making all the right moves on your site.
2. Get a sitemap: Use something like the WordPress sitemap plugin if you have an extensive site. A great example of this is for a real estate website. Sites like this are huge because they have thousands of pages for all their real estate listings. To make matters worse, the pages are constantly changing as houses are bought and sold. Getting a sitemap would help the real estate site rank for each address, dramatically increasing the number of keywords they rank for, their traffic, and their domain authority.
3. Fix canonicalization issues: The feature that causes duplicate content is often built into the site, but there are ways to fix canonicalization issues like these. The exact solution depends on what’s causing the original issue. It could be as simple as removing a line of code or as complicated as restructuring your entire site to prevent duplicate content.
Even though Google Search Console or another tool says you have thousands of duplicate content errors, you really just have one big root cause.
If you have multiple versions of the same page, the canonical tag can help you specify which content is the original. All you have to do is drop in a single line of code that references the original page URL, like this:
Fortunately, plugins like Yoast SEO make this simple. You can set the default page or post version as the canonical so it always adds this line by default. Alternatively, you can specify it manually under the advanced settings options for each page or post:
Another time-saving WordPress tip is to use the Quick Page/Post Redirects plugin. This one is helpful if you’ve had old pages morph into new ones, which often leaves behind a wave of broken links. Install the plugin, and you can add the old URLs in bulk and then the new version of each page.
Use this one with the Broken Link Checker plugin to see which URLs you need to redirect.
Most SEO-focused tools also crawl your site like search engines to audit these common issues.
Duplicate content and broken links (or 404 errors) are the two most common crawl errors plaguing most websites.
If you’re not on a content management system like WordPress, you’re going to have to edit the .htaccess file of your site to include 301 redirects. I’d strongly recommend educating yourself about 301 redirects and getting some professional help in this case.