It is important, almost in anything, to count with good structure almost in anything. Digitally speaking, pages that do not have an “organized” structure or good website architecture end up having problems with Google’s algorithms, visualizations and rankings.
Imagine this: your friend invites you to their house for dinner. When you arrive, something doesn’t make any sense, the main door is on the second floor, you think – “oh, weird!”. Once you get in, you see a random organization of the house – “what was the architect thinking?” you think.
Just like you in your friend’s, Google happens to feel a bit puzzled when it has to “crawl” over sites that have bad architecture and then simply does not bother going over this sites, and then they finish being invisible for Google and its users.
Yes, website architecture does matter!
When users enter in a website, their good impressions on it relies in how accessible it is as well as, of course, how easy it is to find what they are looking for. It is certainly true that…
...a good website structure means an even better user experience. Click To TweetPutting aside colors, the fonts, the kerning, the graphics, the images, and the white space, if a site has a good design that is at the end what matters, it is really about a great structure, great website architecture..
Now, there is a proportion on how appealing your site to users as what it is to Google. It is from clicks and searchers where Google’s algorithm takes the necessary information to rank a site.
Users do not pay attention to sites of difficult access, difficult to read, and this makes a bad experience for them and not turning back to them. Then,
if the site has poor CTR (click-through rate) and low dwell time on users, it will definitely not perform well in the SERPs.
These two elements – dwell time and CTR – can be easily and positively manage with suitable website architecture. When users find a site that they like, one with a great structure, they don’t bounce and they stay longer. Accurate site structure can reduce bounce rate which will lead to improved rankings.
Sitelinks and site maps, both are important to consider!
Google has many ways to work its algorithms and translate them into web rankings. The web is in constant movement due to all of that interaction between Google and the websites.
The best example to explain this is Crawling and indexation. Take Google as having this huge book for all the pages there are. Then Google has these “crawlers” and “spiders”. They go reviewing all the net and making a mark in this huge book. The marks are of the sites that were easy to or positively checked.
As it is a machine at the very end, Google cannot understand some sites as a human can. Those sites that are easy to understand are marked a lot more positively on Google index (the big book).
But it is not necessary that a page is simple for it to be good, it is all about… yes, you guessed right, a great structure!
This is then when sitelinks and sitemaps enter in the game. A good site structure most of the time generates your site with sitelinks and sitemaps.
We have all seen them before, sitelinks appear in a listing format in the SERPs when we perform a search. Your site’s main page is displayed along with several internal links indented below. They all access specific parts of the site, this is a clear representation of a great structure.
Wouldn’t you think it is easier to explore a site that offers sitelinks and/or a sitemap? Well, Google happens to think the same and the reward for this great structure job us is continuously seen in the SERP.
Website architecture paves the way for SEO to succeed. In fact, there is some very solid and logical claiming on the fact that without a good site structure, you will never have SEO success.
Strong site structure gives your site an unbreakable SEO foundation that will provide you with vast amounts of search and effective traffic.
Proper website architecture provides the best of Google recognition
As in the best of the cases, website architecture provides the best of Google reaction to it. Google loves traffic, content, and links, and if you are wondering, yes, pretty much in that order.
If you are looking for the right key metrics used in part to calculate a site’s ranking then those are the ones to consider, professional SEO and the right structure of a website could lead a website to succeed in Google ranking.
There are cases in which Google penalizes weak brand architecture, not much of impossible to foresee and prevent, but genuinely important to consider on any SEO.
There is one common problem from the SEO performance in most cases: sometimes a company has sub-brands and hence sub-websites, any performance or existing SEO efforts can be easily marginalized, making it difficult to muster much traction in Google’s rankings. This is in time taken as weak brand architecture.
Summing up, there are many reasons on the importance of website architecture and how it influences the rankings on the net. Not paying attention to all those details will make a difference between successful and failing SEO, at the end, the main door of your friend’s house has to be in the right place, doesn’t it?