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Structuring your site

This guide takes a step back from fiddlier things like keywords and content, to think about the fundamental way your website is organised. I see a lot of websites where the owners don't seem to have a solid plan about organising the pages of the site, so they end up with dozens of links in the footer or dozens of categories which can be really hard for a visitor to navigate. And I also see plenty of sites which really just amount to one or two useful pages, when there's probably loads more the business could write about to attract visitors (if that's you, why bother promoting your site makes the case for growing it).

Think of your site as a tree

It might be useful to try and think of your website structure like a tree. Your homepage is the trunk, which branches off to your main categories, and specific products or services branch off those. The site has a hierarchical structure which makes sense to both humans and search engines.

Why does this matter? Well most importantly, it makes it easy for visitors to find what they need. If your homepage links through to 100 different products, worst case scenario your visitor has to scan a hundred links to find what they want. But if it links through to ten categories, and each of those links to ten products, the most amount of links your visitor needs to read is twenty.

The tree structure is also really useful for search engines, because the links logically group your products together. If all of your blue widgets are under a blue widgets category, then Google knows to show those kind of pages for blue widget searches, and not your red widgets section.

The other major benefit is that a tree structure is easy to manage as you grow. You'll know where each new bit of content belongs, meaning you can have a really large site covering a lot of topics without getting lost.

A real example

Renegade Solar, a solar panel installer I work with here in Manchester, is a good illustration of a deliberate tree. The site has six services at the top - solar and battery installations, commercial solar, home batteries, EV chargers, electrical testing, and safety inspections - and the four biggest services each have their own page for every town Ashley covers, which works out at about 80 service-and-town pages. Alongside those sit 23 area pages, seven accreditation pages (MCS, NAPIT, Trustmark and friends), and a couple of dozen question pages answering the things people actually ask him, like whether solar panels are worth it in Manchester. Roughly 150 pages all told, and every one of them has an obvious home: a new town slots under the services that cover it, a new accreditation goes in the accreditations section, and a question someone asked becomes a question page.

His old Wix site was the opposite of all this - a handful of pages, test products stuck on there that he couldn't figure out how to remove, accreditations he couldn't properly show off - and it ranked for nothing except his business name while bringing in maybe one enquiry a year. The restructured site now gets roughly one enquiry a week and ranks on the first page for plenty of valuable searches across Manchester. Structure isn't the only reason for that (the content is genuinely useful, and the old platform was painfully slow), but the tree is what everything else hangs off.

Planning your site structure

So, let's discuss how to plan and implement an effective website structure that works for both visitors and search engines!

First up - planning. This can save a lot of trouble later. When I'm structuring a site for a client I start by listing everything the site needs to include - products, services, locations, and any other key information about the business - usually just as a big messy list in a text file, before worrying about where anything goes.

Group these items into logical categories based on what visitors to your site might expect. So you might have "Products", and then under that "Red Widgets", "Blue Widgets", and "Green Wotzits". And under "Services" you might have "Delivery", "Repairs" and "Sales". Under "Locations" you might have "Bury", "Prestwich", "Whitefield".

If "Blue Widgets" contains a hundred items, you might want to consider breaking it up into "Blue Party Widgets", "Blue Wedding Widgets", and so on. The idea should be to never give the customer an overwhelming amount of potential things to click. If a category ends up holding most of your site, my guide on writing a good service category page covers how to make the category itself pull its weight.

It's also important to be mindful of the order of the items within each category. For some categories, like products, you might want to put your most profitable or popular items first. For others, like delivery areas, it might make more sense to list them alphabetically. Think about what visitors to your site are likely to expect - don't just randomly order things.

There's an industry saying that you might have heard, that everything on your site should be reachable within three clicks from the homepage, and in my experience this is usually well doable unless your site is absolutely massive. And if your site is very small then maybe you don't even need that, and everything can be reached within one click of your homepage. But probably, if you're trying to write content to do well on search engines, you'll quickly grow past this size.

If you're restructuring a site that already exists

I rework existing sites for a living, so let me share the thing that surprises people most about it: the messy old site usually isn't wrong about the business. Copy that's been sitting on a site for a few years tends to be owner knowledge - what they actually sell, where they really go, which item is genuinely the popular one - written down untidily. So before you shuffle anything, read what's there and note down every specific fact you find, because the restructuring is the perfect moment to rescue those facts, not to bin the lot and start from a blank page.

The structural fixes on a site like that are usually the ones in the pitfalls section below: merging the thin categories, deciding which of two near-identical pages survives, and finding the pages that nothing links to.

URLs that follow the tree

Once you have a tree, give your URLs the same shape. Renegade's solar and battery page for Prestwich lives at /services/solar-and-battery-installations/prestwich/ - you can tell what that page is before you click it, and you can chop the end off the address to climb back up a level. Compare that with the kind of URL a lot of platforms generate, like /page?id=8472&cat=12, which tells nobody anything, including Google.

Two practical notes from doing this a lot: use real words in your URLs Google: #1, and keep them stable once they're live. Renaming things on a whim means redirects (below), so it's worth an extra minute of thought at the start.

Navigation and menus

It's likely that your site has a main menu that appears on every page. This is crucial real estate on your site, so you need to make sure every page it's linking to is worthy of the spot. I'd generally advise linking to your main categories from here, because it's the first place visitors will look to click. And I'd generally advise against linking to pages that only a minority of visitors will be interested in - link to those pages from a branch instead.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Let's talk about some common pitfalls that you can run into when structuring your site. The first and most serious is orphaned pages - this is when you've got a page on your site that isn't linked from anywhere. Search engines struggle to find these pages, and so will your visitors. Each page on your site needs at least one link from elsewhere to it Google: #2. Running a broken link checker over your site will find both the orphans and the dead ends, and it takes about two minutes. It's also worth keeping an XML sitemap up to date (most site builders generate one for you) and submitting it through Google Search Console, so Google has a complete list of your pages even if a link goes missing somewhere Google: #3.

The next problem I see a bunch is when there are multiple pages that are basically about the same search phrase. For example, you might have a "Event Widgets" category which contains one "Event Widget" product. Google will have to pick one of these to show for "Event Widget" searches - so it's better to be focused and just have one page which matches that term.

Some sites also end up with lots of categories with barely any content in them, which means the pathway to their products passes through a page which is hard for Google to categorise. You might instead want to merge these thin pages into one larger category with more depth.

Moving pages: redirects

Sooner or later you'll want to move or rename a page, and this is the one part of restructuring that has real teeth. Any link to the old address - from your own site, from other sites, from Google - stops working unless you set up a redirect, which is a rule that says "this page has moved here, permanently". Redirects pass most of the old page's search value to the new address, but not instantly and not perfectly Google: #4.

Whenever I restructure a site I keep a list of every URL that changed, add a redirect for each one, and then check Google Search Console a few weeks later to make sure nothing fell out of the index. And I'll be honest about the risk: rankings can wobble for a few weeks while Google re-processes everything, even when the redirects are spotless. It's usually still worth doing - just don't do it the week before your busy season.

Interlinking your content

It's one thing to have this overarching tree structure to your products, but you can also provide value to your visitors by interlinking the various branches when it makes sense. For example if one product is regularly hired alongside another, you should probably link them together in their descriptions. On Renegade's site the installation pages link to the relevant battery pages, and the town pages link back up to the main service. By interlinking your pages like this you make it really easy for visitors to discover other things they might be interested in, and you're giving Google extra context about what each page is for.

Keeping an eye on it

Structure isn't a one-off job either. I monitor where my clients' pages rank for the phrases that matter to them (I use serpdino.com - the most affordable SERP tracker I've found, and while every SERP tracker is somewhat janky, serpdino is reasonably un-janky and pleasant to use), and when a page isn't ranking as well as it should, the fix is usually either updating that page or adding a new one to the tree - a new town, a question people have started asking, a service that's outgrown its parent. Small additions like that, done steadily over a year, are a lot of how a site grows into a shape that earns traffic.

When this doesn't apply

Honest caveats, because structure advice is not one-size-fits-all:

  • If your site is four pages, you don't need a tree. This guide is for sites that are growing, or planning to.
  • If you're on a locked-down platform like Wix or Shopify, you often can't control your URLs or menus properly, and at some point the real fix is a website migration rather than more shuffling within the platform's limits.
  • If your site is established with lots of inbound links from elsewhere, take the redirect section above seriously and do the restructuring carefully, not casually.

Summary

So that's the approach: list everything, group it by what visitors expect, make the URLs match the tree, link every page from somewhere, and redirect anything you move. It's not just a technical consideration - it's about creating clear pathways for your visitors to find exactly what they're looking for, and knowing where any new page you write is going to live.

Don't worry if you need to revisit and adjust your structure as you go! That's a normal part of your site's evolution. The important thing is to be thinking about this deliberately.

If you'd rather have someone do this with you, my SEO audits include a proper deep-dive into your site's structure, with a prioritised list of fixes and an honest note of what to leave alone. They start at £200 and I work to a flat hourly rate beyond that, so you always know exactly what you're paying for - and if your structure is already fine, the audit will tell you that too.

If you'd like help structuring your website for better navigation and SEO, send me a message through the form below.

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