Topical Depth in Website Structures

Website structure is an underestimated entity in SEO. Sure, like everything it relies on other pieces being in place, but in itself it contributes a lot to ranking in competitive places.

Having informational content about a category should be linked to from the category/ sub-category. It’s very often housed in a separate part of the website such as a blog. Whilst this is conventional, it doesn’t provide the same clear topical depth that is achievable by structuring the information within the category.

The downsides to housing it in a /blog/category/ format:

• The content is often paginated and slips down the website hierarchy/ structure over time.
• It lends itself to a view of the website as a whole as an informational source, even though the website goal is likely commercial.

Here is a visual example of how this can be structured better.

 

By structuring it this way, the idea is that search engines can see that the most important page/ topic on the website houses the most expert knowledge. We have restructured a lot of websites in this way, whereby the website was getting a lot of traffic, but not translating into new business. This method supports better ranking for the category, which is nearly always the commercial goal in our experience.