A strong site structure should be at the core of any programmatic or larger-scale SEO build.
How the value of your site flows around the site is crucial to ensure both key pages ranking, and longer tail pages are seen as valuable enough to rank.
Let’s dig into building a strong site structure.
The importance of URL structure in SEO
The URL plays a key part in defining how pages relate to each other.
Whilst a breadcrumb can also help do this, the URL structure handles this in a stronger and clearer way.
The structure helps Google quickly understand what a page’s parent is, and thus it can understand the relationship between the two.
By default, the fact a page is a child of another page would help it know that the content will probably be extremely related, with a lot of topical cross-over.
The structure also helps pass SEO value around the site effectively.
Ensuring that child pages pass their value up the hierarchy, to their parent page.
Ensuring that a parent can help give their children pages a little boost from their value too.
Topical relation + SEO value passing = a win.
When building a strong site structure, URL structure is number 1. However, site structuring via breadcrumbs can also come into play.
Not just as a backup, but also as something that can work hand-in-hand with the URL structure.
If all else fails with being able to implement URL structures, breadcrumb structures are your best backup.
They’re pretty much the only other way, to effectively set the parent-child relationship.
The downside here is that they only really work up the chain, rather than down, due to how a breadcrumb works.
Leveraging breadcrumbs on top of a good URL structure is where they stand out.
Not only can you back up the URL structure, by following it up with a breadcrumb structure that imitates the URLs, you can also drop in extra levels where applicable.
Sometimes a piece of content sits across different levels in the URL structure.
You obviously can’t include both in the URL, as that wouldn’t be right,
You can, however, drop the extra level into the breadcrumb structure and let Google know that relation with no issues.
How to build a strong site structure
Let’s look at how I’d be recommending you structure your site.
Just remember, there isn’t a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer here, but pays to put in the effort at the start as it’s not exactly something you want to change.
Organising your content around a core structure
My primary aim with the structure is to try and put the items with the highest differentiation between them, higher in the list.
This way, you put related content together, and try and separate un-related content as best possible.
For real estate, at the heart of all listings are two channels – Buy & Rent.
So I’d recommend starting here with;
/buy/
/rent/
For the second tier, I would bring in location.
Something like;
/buy/melbourne/
/buy/sydney/
The third tier is when I would then bring in the property type;
/buy/melbourne/apartments/
/buy/melbourne/houses/
But you’d still have the no-location search URLs available, like;
/buy/apartments/
/buy/houses/
The reasoning behind structuring it this way, is that buy versus rent are two completely separate journeys.
It’s a rare occurrence for someone wanting to both at both renting & buying a home to live in.
The next thing they’re looking at is the location. There’s more of a chance they’ll want to look at both apartments & houses in a location, than to look at just apartments in multiple areas at once.
On top of this, you’ll also get property types like ‘apartments’, ‘units’, ‘condos’ and ‘flats’ being seen as extremely related in Google’s eyes. Sometimes even direct synonyms.
Google won’t ever see nearby suburbs in a city that same way.
Well, maybe not never. But very very very rarely.
Leveraging your blog content in a core structure
You can dramatically improve the value of your core structure, by leveraging your blog content.
Rather than throwing your blog content under /blog/, /advice/ or something completely random, nestle it under your core structure.
Sometimes harder said than done, even just using the parent folder can dramatically improve the value passed through to that folder, helping it and sub-pages rank.
This would involve post URLs like;
/buy/how-to-buy-a-property/
/rent/the-ultimate-guide-to-renting/
and similar.
If a post relates to the location too, it could be;
/buy/melbourne/how-to-buy-a-property-in-melbourne/
And an even more extreme could be about a location + property type article;
/buy/melbourne/apartment/how-to-buy-an-apartment-in-melbourne/
But that’s getting a bit deep, and would probably be a bit more on the difficult side of an integration.
You’ll always get a bit of tech pushback due to the way the URLs resolve from the server.
It can be done on pretty much any tech, with the work.
There’s also a bit of a shortcut, that would still work wonders.
An old workplace got around to restructuring their blog.
Whether they found an old doc I was working off, or whether one of the newer team got it done, they restructured their blog content to add value to their core structure.
airtasker.com/cleaning/guides/how-to-clean-home-after-flood/
They used the /guides/ subfolder to hack the content in there. The server knows where to grab the content from, purely from that subfolder.
An alternate way of doing this could be to just use ‘/guide-‘ with a dash, rather than creating a whole new directory, but the directory does make things a bit simpler.
They’ve used only their top-tier folder from the structure, and yet have added significant value to all content within the /cleaning/ folder now because of this.
Flat verse foldered
A debate that’s raged for years.
Is a flat site architecture better than a built-out, folder structure?
Not something that is easy to prove out at this scale with 100% certainty.
A flat structure would be similar to the below;
/apartments-for-sale-in-melbourne/
/houses-for-sale-in-melbourne/
It could be said that it’s more optimised due to the use of the exact keyword, but it lacks the ability to set another page as the parent clearly via the structure.
This lack of structure also leads to a lack of efficient page grouping.
Fine with small page sets, but once you’re talking thousands of pages with 100s very similar, we really need that clear hierarchy via the structure similar to the one below;
/buy/melbourne/apartments/
/buy/melbourne/houses/
This gives a clear indication of parent > child, and should also be helping more appropriately group highly related content.
This follows the old-school setup where each level was actually a folder and that was the clear parent > child setup.
A clean structure from top to bottom.
Query parameters vs clean URLs
This is a big part of developing your site structure, as not everything needs its own clean URL.
I’ve written more about this specifically here in my search filters post, so check that out for more on the topic.
There is no ‘best’ site structure
There might be ‘best for you’, but there is no ‘best’ site structure for you to build.
There are definitely wrong site structures though, I’ll tell you that.
Just build out the one you feel is best, based on what’s discussed above.
Should you be siloing your site?
To properly ‘silo’ your site, every single link on the page needs to be tamed and within the silo’s rules.
Every link.
It’s a lot of work.
Almost impossible at the enterprise level.
You can, however, keep note of what’s linking to what, and limit it where possible, to ensure the most value is passed to each individual link.
Is it worth migrating to update the structure?
It takes a lot for me to recommend an existing site migrate over to a new structure.
One of the core decision elements here is the amount of opportunity they stand to gain from doing so.
If they’re newer, planning a massive expansion, or have an extremely large amount of market opportunity and are prepared for the risk, then I’d say the migration to a more-solidified structure is worth it.
For a #1 in the market, a structure change could be more-so a solidification of their position, rather than for growth opportunity.
It’s a dangerous change to make, as you’re essentially redirecting over the core of your SEO performance, and risking it, during and after the migration.
What Google says
Google has a little bit of documentation around this, with the first being here; https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure
This one is more about URL guidelines, rather than creating a structure out of the urls.
Then they have this one too; https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/designing-a-url-structure-for-ecommerce-sites
There isn’t much extra in there, other than a mention of this;
It might be looking into it too much, but both URLs they recommend for the green t-shirt, sit below the current t-shirt URL.
The alternative flat version would be;
/t-shirt/
/green-t-shirt/
Both links provide information more around basic URL rules and parameter usage, but this is just something extra to add here, but it is from Google so probably not worth reading into too much.
Site structure is a key element
Just remember that site structure is a key element when it comes to the optimisation of your site.
Many other factors are at play, but the site structure is the core of your website.
Get it right, and the work done will be repaid.
