There are some things most businesses expect when they first approach SEO. Some businesses may expect their code to undergo a certain amount of modification. Most, if not all, are prepared for their site’s content to be completely overhauled. Not many businesses, however, are braced for the deep impact a thorough SEO campaign can have on the structure of their site itself.

If your site is your web presence, the site structure is the bones. Everything hangs from your site’s structure. The flesh of your site’s content, the veins of the code and the vital organs of its design all depend on a well-constructed system to rest upon. A malformed skeleton can prevent your site from climbing the rankings as it should.

Your site could need a little restructuring in order for your SEO plan to be truly successful. Although it may be initially frightening to have the familiar skeleton moved in unusual ways, the end result is a structure with more integrity.

The ideal situation from an SEO point of view is a site that doesn’t exist yet. In this case, search engine optimisation can come in right at the start, beginning with identifying the keywords the business wants to compete on and moving from there. In most cases, SEO is being applied to an existing site. Several different things may be involved.

Restructuring from keywords
Your keywords can give you a great deal of information on how your target users think. Related keywords can help you create a site structure that follows predictable and desirable thought paths. For instance, if your main keyword is ‘dog health’, related keywords with a high volume of traffic may include ‘dog health treatments’, ‘dog health advice’ and ‘dog health products’. These in themselves provide good options for main sub-sections. This is, of course, a very basic example, and you should talk to your SEO consultant about using your keyword list to develop structure.

De-cluttering restructures
Sometimes, particularly if a site has been established for a long time, a little thinning out is necessary during the restructuring process. If you’ve been adding content frequently, there may be too many pages leading off the main pages, or pages may rest too many clicks away from the home page. Each of these will affect how the search engines index your site, and may need to be reorganised as well as de-cluttered.

Restructuring for future plans
It is often a good idea to develop a strategy for future content and SEO upkeep when first implementing your SEO plan. In many cases, this will involve the provision of fresh content to your site. In order to avoid cluttering up your site, it may be restructured to allow room for new pages to be added.

The actual way in which your SEO will affect your site structure will necessarily vary from business to business. In some cases, restructuring may not fit in with your time or resource constraints and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult if you have concerns about these types of restriction. For a thorough SEO plan, though, some restructuring may well be involved.

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