Planning Your Website Structure

By Gavin Kilgallon on Tuesday, 26 November 2024

Building a website requires a well-planned and structured process to create the ultimate user experience. By providing an intuitive and logical structure built around the visitor, you can create an experience that supports your core website objectives (brand promotion, lead generation, online sales, etc). As a highly-regarded London web design company, we are regularly asked to audit websites and suggest ways to improve them from an end-user and SEO perspective. This article will discuss how to plan your website structure, some strategies to consider, and potential pitfalls to avoid.

Define Your Target Audience

While your website should be accessible to all, optimising for your target audience is essential as they will most likely engage with your business. By delivering an experience that your user expects, you will boost engagement, encourage return visits, and increase conversions. You can help define your audience by considering their behaviour patterns, what need they are trying to resolve by visiting your website, and what will motivate them to complete your website goals.

Research And Plan Website Content

Content should be relevant and immediately engaging to help keep people on your site. Users should be taken down a journey and not overloaded with excessive content.

Understand your target audience and what information they need to complete an action on your website and plan your content to achieve this.

Low-quality, rushed, or poorly thought-out content will lower engagement, negatively impact the user experience, increase the bounce rate, and lower conversions.

Page Hierarchy

How you structure your website will have a big say in its success and needs careful consideration and planning. Important information needs to be easily accessible towards the top of the page, and this should be further enforced with clear headings, subheadings, and CTAs where necessary.

Some key considerations should include:

Create a site map to help visitors understand the structure of your website and its main sections and subsections.
Important content should be readily accessible and located towards the top of each page. Site visitors shouldn't have to hunt for information.
Consider using whitespace, which can help emphasise important content and make it more digestible.
Research content and make sure that it is search engine optimised to help with SERPs.

Search Engine Optimisation

Website structure and SEO go hand in hand. A well-planned site structure with SEO-rich content can significantly improve your site's rankings and visibility. Best practices should include:

Keyword and content research. Find popular search terms and create your page hierarchy and content around them. Research keywords using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to help identify industry trends and popular and related terms.
Include keyword-rich URLs, H1 headings and sub-headings

See What Competitor Websites Are Doing

Looking at your competitor's websites can provide insights and ideas for your site structure. Some areas that should be analysed include:

How have they structured the layout of their website (sitemap)?
What navigation menu items do they have?
How well are their listing for core keywords on the SERPs?
Content and headings, and how they align this to SEO.
How do they use CTAs?
What are they doing to differentiate themselves?

In Conclusion

At ID Studio, we have years of experience helping website owners create and optimise website structures and user experiences. Contact our web design team to discuss your current website needs and see how we can help transform your site.