SEO – Content Structure

As with most things, one of the key aspect of SEO is consistency. This may well apply to all aspects of your SEO strategy, however today I’m referring to your content specifically and the naming conventions used throughout your site. We often come across clients that have a suite of products or services yet make the common mistake of grouping them under a general term such as “services”. Let’s take a simple example company and call it Dogs R Us, assuming they provide services for dogs such as grooming, washing and walking.

In our example the primary menu structure they have in place is:

Who We Are | Our Services | Contact Us

Under Our Services there is:

Grooming
Washing
Walking

Now at first glance this seems like their customers have access to all the information they need and the site structure will deliver content to their users in a clear concise way. However, when we really break it down “Who we are” and “Contact Us” although relevant, is company information rather than actual content.

So, the first change we would look at is bringing Who We Are and Contact Us into a secondary menu, this is usually pushed into the header and footer of the site.

An example of this is:

Next, we must address the Primary menu. We will bring the main content pages now into the primary menu which also allows us to bring the content up a level rather then buried under “Our Services”. So, our new primary menu would look like:

Grooming | Washing | Walking

We can now make one further adjustment here and give these categories a little more context and help out our keyword strategy while doing so. Washing for example could mean anything, washing a car, washing clothes and so on. So, we will make our menu:

Dog Grooming | Dog Washing | Dog Walking

By going through the above exercise, we have actually made a number of quick SEO fixes.

• Key product/service content was pulled higher up the site hierarchy;
• The primary/secondary menus distinguish business info & content;
• SEO Keyword strategy is carried through to page names.

Whilst the above may seem like a simple exercise, on a large site this can become a complex task. We usually recommend having the right stakeholders involved when developing this hierarchy for your business as it lays the platform for the entire site.

For any more information on site structure or SEO please contact Suits Digital.