Website SEO architecture and information flow: here’s how

We launched a new website recently and spent around four weeks defining the website architecture and information flow.

Don’t rush this.

What’s cool about doing the entire process is that it defines some pretty key business-building questions:

• What content do you want to create for your audience?
• Where should the content be displayed?
• How should your content be displayed?
• How should users flow through the site?

Not only that, but once defined, you’ve practically built an SEO monster foundation. We all know how competitive it is out there – you need to give your brand and your content a chance. This process does that, and more.

Note: you can run this for a brand new website – or redesigning your existing site.

As you go through the steps below, bucket up your thoughts into: ‘things I like’, ‘things I don’t like’. Ideas will naturally come as you do this.

Ok, let’s go.

#1 COMPETITION ARCHITECTURE

You might think you know your competition, but the competition you want to focus on are the ones ranking on Google.

Once you’ve got a selection of three to five competitors, time to analyse them.

Specifically during this step, pay attention to:

• Top-level menu: is it product/service based, audience segment based? What do they include?
• What categories/subcategories/tags do they use and how do they connect to each other?
• URL structure: does the URL follow the main domain (e.g. .com/service/photography) or does it lead to a unique URL every time (e.g. .com/photography-services). Are there any country-language specific considerations?
• Do competitor sites give specific pages more importance above others? Here you’re looking for multiple citations of the same page or category.

#2 COMPETITOR INFORMATION FLOW

In this step, we want to analyse a competitor's information flow to help brainstorm what it should look like for your website.

When I refer to ‘information flow’, I’m really thinking about what content a site serves up, how it does that – and most importantly how it impacts the user experience.

You should also review how content is used to move the customer towards making a purchase:

• Do they have a FAQ page? Does this appear across the site or one page only?
• Do they have blog posts? Do these appear across the site or only within the blog category?
• Do they nurture users by offering downloadable content and email lead magnets?
• Are the products integrated within the content itself?
• Can users get to the products in multiple ways?

By this point, your notebook should be filling up.

#3 COMPETITOR SEO KEYWORD RESEARCH

The above two steps are crucial to this step. Even though you may know an industry, I guarantee you’ll identify a few things about your competitor that’ll help you to identify good keyword research angles.

This step is all about finding out what your competitors are ranking for – and then using the knowledge gained in steps one and two. Ahrefs and SEMRush are good tools to help you do this.

When looking at keywords I’m looking at keyword difficulty, position, the word count of the page, and the quality of the content. If I feel like there are gaps missing in the content e.g. minimal FAQs, sections missing, etc then I’m starting to get excited.

During this step, you’ll begin to validate your thoughts about how the site should be structured and the best architecture. You may even start to brainstorm the UX layout of your key pages – but that’s for another post.

#4 WHAT’S YOUR ARCHITECTURE AND INFORMATION FLOW?

Use the research up until now to document your architecture.

• What’s your top-level menu?
• What’s your sub-menu?
• Are you giving important target keywords a home? e.g. general rule is one specific keyword/topic has its own page.
• Will users intuitively understand how to navigate your site?
• How does it compare to your competitors?

You can even ask a few people – ideally your target audience and get their thoughts.

This step can be more of an art than a science so spend the time, and get opinions but go with what feels right for the user in the end.

There are tons of pretty cheap tools to help you draw your diagram – for years I was happy with Google Slides. Now I use LucidChart.

#6 HOW DO YOU DIFFERENTIATE?

This isn’t strictly architecture but it’s a good time to think about this.

Now that you’ve got a solid understanding of the landscape, take your notes and ideas and start to prioritise – looking at what you can do differently to stand out.

We recently had our copywriters run a 90mins brand ideation session – because developing a new brand requires a good old brainstorming. Here we explored and unpacked user persona, brand personality, and brand essence. Only then could we start deep-diving into the tone of voice.

Our content team loves all things brand and messaging so it’s a nice way to not think about SEO. We ended up with two to three pages of gold.

There you go, make your architecture help make you more sales.

Hope that helps!