TL;DR

Our site structure and architecture service helps businesses resolve issues caused by organic, unplanned and undirected website growth. By auditing and reorganising site hierarchies, crawl paths, and sitemaps, this service makes sure that search engines and AI platforms correctly understand and prioritise your most important content, ultimately improving visibility, UX and user conversion rates.

Pain points

Sites – especially for brands that have been building for several years – grow organically, and often without a clear plan about what that communicates to search engines, agents and humans alike. Site structure and information architecture are vital to sending the right signals to all three.

So, if you’re having problems with the following, our site structure and architecture service may be what you need:

• High rate of customer drop off between landing page and conversion
• Wrong kind of page ranking for revenue driving keywords
• Difficulty ranking product or key service pages
• Significant issues with ‘discovered not currently indexed’ pages in Search Console
• Search engines and AI platforms having difficulty understanding what you do

What we mean by site structure and architecture

As mentioned above – websites, once they’re launched, often grow organically. This means that new sections come and go, sometimes pages are orphaned, sometimes sections outlast their usefulness and are left serving no purpose (or even negatively impacting performance), redirects multiply, dead-ends proliferate and your site begins to branch in an uncontrolled manner, communicating the importance of various pages incorrectly or unevenly.

When we say ‘site structure and architecture’, we’re talking about exactly how your site communicates the importance of the information you’re putting out into the world. 

That means how easy your site is to crawl, where your robots.txt file is highlighting and the information it is burying, how your folder structure channels crawlers and humans through the path to purchase and exactly what needs to improve to make sure you’re sending the right signals.

MMC Digital’s site structure and architecture service

We audit your site to establish the performance of your site structure versus your stated intentions – examining how you are communicating the importance of your information, how easily accessible that information is, and how easily navigable it is for humans and crawlers alike. 

This will, obviously, depend to some extent on the CMS you are currently operating on – as they each have various levels of restriction on how folders and pages can be structured, but our service will include:

Site structure audit

Using Screaming Frog and other leading industry tools, we audit your site to establish your existing site structure – taking stock of how your site is currently set-up. 

The aim is to track down redirect chains, dead ends, orphaned pages and existing folder structures. This allows us to see what improvements need to be made to the structure to improve performance.

Robots.txt, html and xml sitemap audit

Each of these files serves a similar, but important role in your site’s structure and information architecture – they control crawlers, emphasise the importance of some content, set a vital hierarchy of on-site content, and make sure you’re showing unique, fresh content in order of importance to search and AI crawlers.

Execution and/or recommendations documentation

Depending on your in-house capacity, we can provide documentation of recommended changes, or – given the required access – we can handle execution and make sure that implementation of our recommendations are handled in a timely manner. We will deliver: 

• A site-map organised to give you the best chances of improving visibility and establishing a useful information hierarchy.
• A sheet with advice on content to keep, prune and combine.
• A redirect sheet to handle existing issues and to correctly handle any page and folder moves.
• A reworked robots.txt file to control crawls and properly communicate importance (as well as to block crawl of pages and folders that can cause ambiguity, weaken authority or other issues).
• A reorganised html and/or xml sitemap (some CMSs handle this natively, but we can rework for those that don’t or which are handling the creation poorly).

What can our site structure and architecture service do for your business?

Site structure and information architecture about sending the right signals to search and AI algorithms which will help them to understand what your brand is about and why it’s important. While there are certainly things that carry greater weight when search engines calculate rankings, this is a foundational technique that makes sure your brand is present when those calculations are made.

Your online presence no longer begins and ends at your website – and hasn’t for a long time – but it is where the vast majority of business critical information is located, and it’s the only place where you get to specifically control the perceived importance of that information. Our site structure and architecture service makes sure that it does those things in a way to maximise your chances of being understood and attributed the proper level of importance in your vertical.