Restructuring is one of the more important, and more disturbing, things you can do as part of your search engine optimisation. No company enjoys the idea of ripping up the structure of their site, and most are resistant when their SEO consultant suggests such a thing. What these companies don’t realise is that their habitual way of thinking could be holding their site back in the rankings.
There’s one bad habit almost every site owner is guilty of: being site-centric. By this we mean that every site owner gets into the habit of looking at their site in a certain way. It gets comfortable, familiar. This bad habit can have a major detrimental effect on your site, if you’re not careful.
Over familiarity with a site can prevent site owners from seeing where the major problems lie for their SEO. This is the reason so many businesses approach a professional for their optimisation, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia. Your familiarity with your site can prevent you from seeing that the way you structured your pages years ago bears no resemblance to the way people think right now.
Survey user groups for ideas
The purpose of your site structure should be to present pages in a logical manner to your site users. If a user has to travel from A to G to Y to X and to C in order to get to B, they could very well give up and try a different search back on the search engines. Yet many companies structure their sites in this very way, linking pages together out of habit.
When it comes to restructuring your site, it’s important to look at the way in which your target user groups link together topics. Some of the paths users take might come as a surprise. An average internet user might not think that there’s any logic in the path of wizards > train > jellybeans, but readers of the Harry Potter series might.
Much of the information needed for restructuring will appear during the keyword research stage of search engine optimisation. Related keywords can provide you with valuable insights into how your target users think. There are also a number of free tools that you can use as well. Some of the refined Google searches provide an invaluable insight into how the search engine links topics together.
Site structure also needs to allow for a number of different ways of thinking. Very few sites have only one target user groups. Your site needs to provide clear pathways for every user group, so it’s a good idea to draw up a number of structural options and try to work them together.
Every business gets into habits of thinking that can get them into trouble. Any business owner who has been involved in internet marketing will be familiar with this. You get used to thinking of your site in a certain way, and are surprised when an outsider suggests something different. These outside points of view are valuable, particularly when you SEO.
