How to create an SEO web architecture

How to create an SEO web architecture

The information architecture is an aspect that is gaining more relevance on the web every day as it directly addresses a user’s need to easily find the information or products they are looking for without having to use anything other than their intuition. This web architecture of information must be taken into account when structuring a website, whether it is a new website or a redesign. But … Why is it so important to consider SEO in our architecture? At the SEO level, a good structure of the information assumes the success in the capture of traffic, generating a satisfactory user experience and having the search engines on our side. It is fundamental to find the balance between the SEO and the user’s experience since an over-optimization of the site can be detrimental to the organic positioning. Process to create a SEO Friendly architecture:

• Business priorities Before starting to consider the web architecture itself, we must make sure to know the core products or information towards which the bulk of the business is really directed. Prioritizing these URLs, we will focus our efforts on the most important ones to place them in the most accessible categories of the architecture, thus optimizing resources and obtaining more traffic in the URLs that support the weight of the business.
• Keyword Research With the Keyword research or the study of keywords we will get to know how the user searches for the type of products or information that we want to provide.  This point will be key in the process as it will allow us to know how and how much the user is looking for the products or information that we offer and will allow us to prioritize the URLs with the highest volume of search in the architecture. Likewise, we will assign a main keyword to each URL to optimize all the SEO elements of the page once we get fully involved with the On Page optimization of the site.
• Type of architecture: Horizontal or vertical The objective of a good web architecture is to get the user to find the information / products that he / she looks for in the least number of clicks possible (recommended maximum 3-4 clicks of depth).  Taking this into account, the most advisable thing is to build the site with a horizontal structure, with around 3 levels of depth at most. In this way the crawler budget or the time spent by Google tracking our site will be more effective, accessing a greater number of pages per crawl.  In addition, with the horizontal structures, lacking as many levels as in a vertical structure, we will be able to build shorter URLs, in short, more SEO Friendly for the google robot and for the user.
• Prioritize important content and eliminate unnecessary content We will place the most important pages as close as possible to the homepage. Following this model, we will avoid burying the priority content (that which we have also identified by reviewing the business priorities), making it more accessible to the user and the Google robot.  In this restructuring, we can also eliminate all unnecessary content for SEO or for business, reserving these priority categories to products / information that really attract volume of relevant traffic and avoiding to include very similar or duplicate content.
• Architecture in keywords silos With an architecture in keywords silos, we will organize the content around all the semantic research we have done in keyword research. Making sure to include all the terms or keywords in the architecture and giving relevance to our website in the eyes of the search engines.  In addition, we can link through interlinking or linked internal pages to other related sites to give more weight SEO to priority pages, to establish a logical hierarchy in the eyes of Google and to improve the user experience on our website.