A How question

How does an SEO company improve site architecture?

3 min read Cites 3 sources

By mapping how your pages are organized and linked, then reshaping that structure so every important page can be found, both by Google’s crawler and by a visitor, through clear paths of links and readable URLs. The work runs in an order: crawl and map the current site, group related pages, make sure each page you care about is linked from somewhere sensible, tidy the URLs where it is worth the cost of redirects, and crawl again to confirm the changes worked.

Mapping what exists

The company crawls the whole site to see how pages link to each other: which pages are reachable only through long chains of links, which have no internal links pointing to them at all, where internal links are broken, and where related content is scattered across unrelated sections. It compares that crawl with your sitemap and with Search Console’s indexing data, because a page can be listed in the sitemap and indexed while still being cut off from the rest of the site.

Making every important page reachable

Google’s guidance on crawlable links sets the basic test: “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.” The same page explains that Google generally follows only links written as standard HTML anchor elements with an href attribute, and cannot reliably follow links that work only through scripts. So the company checks both that each important page has internal links and that those links are of a kind Google can read.

Pages with no internal links are not invisible: Google’s guide to maintaining your website’s SEO notes that “Although Google won’t limit crawling to pages listed in your sitemaps, it will prioritize crawling these pages.” But a page found only through the sitemap gives visitors no route to it and gives Google no context about how it relates to the rest of the site. Each such page is either linked into the section it belongs to, merged into a stronger page, or removed if it no longer serves a purpose.

Grouping related content

Related pages are grouped around hub pages: a page that covers a subject broadly and links to the pages that cover its parts in detail, which in turn link back. Navigation menus and breadcrumb trails then follow the same groups, so the path to a page reflects where it fits. The aim is that a visitor, or a crawler, moving from the homepage reaches the important pages through a short, logical route.

Readable URLs

Google’s URL structure best practices recommend: “Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans.” Changing URLs on an existing site has a cost, though, because every changed URL needs a permanent redirect and the change has to be processed by Google. A company should change URLs where the gain is clear, such as replacing unreadable ID strings or fixing a structure that misrepresents the site, and leave working URLs alone otherwise.

Confirming the result

After the changes, the company crawls the site again to confirm that the planned links exist, that previously isolated pages are now linked, that redirects resolve in one step, and that no new broken links were introduced. Because new pages and edits can recreate the same problems, this check belongs in regular maintenance, not only in the project.

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