What is information architecture in SEO?
What exactly is information architecture?
What are the general benefits of effective information architecture?
What are the SEO benefits of information architecture?
What are the best practices to structure a site from the get go?
How should you approach information architecture if you already have an established site?
If you’re in the SEO industry, you may have heard the term ‘information architecture’ floating around. But what exactly is it, and how does it relate to SEO? Like any successful marketing strategy, it’s important to understand information architecture in relation to marketing as a whole. This includes SEO as well as other marketing activities. Information architecture is both its own strategy, as well as something that aligns with SEO objectives and overarching marketing strategies.
So where exactly do you start if you want to learn about information architecture and how it can be leveraged for SEO? In this article, we’ll be providing a foundational, entry-level approach to information architecture. We’ll define what it is, how it relates to SEO, its benefits, and more.
What exactly is information architecture?
Information architecture, at its most basic level, is the structure of a website. It’s also a foundational pillar of a successful marketing strategy that can be easily missed. Information architecture assesses a website from the position of a user as well as a search engine. Implementing an effective information architecture involves analysing the structure of a website, and making improvements based on what has been found.
Successful information architecture prioritises the user’s journey. It takes into consideration how easy it is to explore a website, in particular how easy it is to find key information, how easy it is to navigate and follow, and just how easy it is to travel across the website. Effective information architecture also takes into consideration how logically pages are categorised, as well as the subcategories that come off these. These move from top-level to granular categories, which can be used to build out clear, easy-to-navigate user journeys.
Take an e-commerce fashion site as an example. This may have categories that sell men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing. In each of these categories, there may be subcategories such as tops, trousers, and jackets. These then can be further categorised. For instance, tops can be categorised into blouses, shirts, t-shirts, and so on.
It’s quite easy to think of information architecture as navigation work. However, this is only a small part of the bigger picture. Information architecture is a broad look at the whole website, not just navigation. Another important point to clear up at this point; information architecture is not user experience. However, it definitely ties into UX practises. Like with navigation work, these are complementary strategies that work in tandem.
What are the general benefits of effective information architecture?
Implementing successful information architecture brings multiple practical benefits. It makes it much easier for everyone to journey through and across your website, incorporating not just user experience but also general usability. Specifically, it allows users to better understand the information they’re looking at, and how this information relates to the rest of the website. Information architecture can provide all-important context that can help with conversions and branding.
Strong information architecture also helps your users understand how to use your website, and know how to find what they’re looking for. The key to the success of this is understanding the customer journey, and learning how and why users are moving through your site. This granular detail can make a big difference to their experience. Taking this approach to information architecture ensures that it makes logical sense to your users so they can journey through your site with ease.
Remember, information architecture should be set up for the end user, not how you think they should move through your website. You want to ensure they are able to find what they’re looking for in the correct, most logical place. Clicking around a website not being able to find what you’re looking for can be quite a frustrating experience!
Information architecture also dramatically improves website accessibility. Clear linking structures make your website far easier for people who use screen readers. The amount of users who benefit from strong information architecture is wide.
And finally, information architecture will improve your website’s conversions too. User journeys will be clearly mapped out to lead to easy conversion points. They should also work to prevent potential barriers to converting. Remember, if users can’t find the pages they’re looking for, they won’t convert. It’s as simple as that!
What are the SEO benefits of information architecture?
There are a fair few SEO benefits that come from effective information architecture. As we know, user experience is important for search success as it’s a ranking factor. And as we have now learned, UX is impacted by information architecture.
You need to imagine that Googlebot is navigating your website like a user. Information architecture will let Google know what’s on your website and what pages are there so they can index them. This brings two-fold benefits. First, effective site structure indicates what are the most important pages here, and therefore provides Google with further ranking signals. And second, information architecture also improves crawlability, meaning that Google can understand how a site works at different levels. Structuring a site for a user is only a good thing in the eyes of Googlebot.
What are the best practices to structure a site from the get go?
So you’ve got a brand new site and you want to prioritise information architecture. What are the best practices you need to get right? The biggest piece of advice we can offer is this – if you can, start from scratch. Planning is key to successful information architecture. And the sooner you establish a solid site structure, the fewer headaches you’ll encounter in the long term.
Start your project by understanding what you’re doing now, and what categories you’ll need for this web content, and then think about how your business could potentially expand or branch out in the future. This approach can help you define top-level categories and where they could go in the future. The narrowing-down process for these categories should be logical and granular, and involve a lot of sense checking. You need to define a place for everything, which can be a long process but is important to get right. You really don’t want to have any orphan pages floating around!
Remember to implement breadcrumbs and horizontal linking too, with the understanding that navigation shouldn’t just be downwards through a menu. You want users to easily travel backwards and sideways through their journeys.
During the research phase, look at your competitors. Specifically, take a look at how they lay out their websites, the types of keywords they target, and see how they categorise their content. During your keyword research, analyse keyword volumes using SEO tools like our keyword universe offering. This will help you define your top-level categories.
And finally – prioritise consistency! Take a pragmatic and sensible approach, and ask yourself questions in the planning and mapping stages. Use the following prompts to help you:
- Does it make sense?
- Can you use it yourself?
- Could someone new to your site easily find key information?
- Does your site structure prioritise the user journey?
How should you approach information architecture if you already have an established site?
If you already have a website, reviewing and updating your information architecture is a far more complex task. However, how much of a challenge it will be will vary case-by-case. The principles remain the same as if you were approaching it from scratch. But the major difference is that you need to apply it to your particular site, and as such you may end up with something that isn’t ‘perfect’.
So before you do anything, pull all your pages and identify your key pages. These may be your top sales pages, or pages that get the most traffic. You don’t want to break what traffic and traction these pages already have. Where these currently sit on your site should be carefully thought over before any changes are made. For instance, restructuring existing URLs can lead to chaos, even if it tightens up your overall information architecture. Remember where the value is in the site you already have, and that it might not be worth breaking.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself through this process to get started:
- Do you need all the pages you have on your website?
- Have any pages been created in error or without an SEO strategy in mind?
- Can you consolidate or remove pages without a negative impact?
You also need to ask yourself – if your information architecture hasn’t been fully defined and implemented, are you willing to accept short-term traffic loss in order to get it to a better place in the long term? Or should you focus on getting to a place where it’s kind of mashed together with random bits and pieces but it ultimately does the job? There’s no straightforward answer to this question, so approach with caution.
Where should you get started with information architecture?
So where should you start with an information architecture project? First of all, set expectations. You should anticipate that 60-70% of this process will be research and planning. For a successful information architecture implementation, you’ll want to gather as much data as possible. You should also look at your competitors, and see what they’re doing from an SEO and a usability perspective.
Once you’re beyond the research stage, you’ll get onto planning. The objective here should be to ensure that everything on your website has a home. Mock things up in a spreadsheet or a mirror board first before building anything. You’ll also want to futureproof your information architecture as much as you can, and leave space for potential changes in your business that won’t cause problems in your original information architecture.
Conclusion
Information architecture is a key component of a technically sound website. It works in tandem with SEO, improving user experience and positively impacting search performance.
Preparing information architecture should be done ahead of a website build to ensure optimum customer journeys, accuracy and futureproofing. If you already have a website and want to improve your information architecture, it may be a little more of a complex process and should be approached on a case-by-case basis. What can work for one established website might not work for another.
If you’d like to learn more about how we at Blue Array can advise on your website’s information architecture, do reach out and arrange a chat.
Jordan Francis
Jordan is the SEO & Strategic Growth Director here at Blue Array. He’s a contributor to the Blue Array Academy and has been a consistent trainer at BrightonSEO, where he oversaw the SEO Auditing course for multiple years. Additionally, Jordan has been a featured speaker at various industry events, including both legs of Friends of Search 2022 (Amsterdam and Brussels).