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Semrush Site Audit: 10 Most Overlooked Features

Sandeep Mallya — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 07:23:07 +0000

The Semrush Site Audit tool is a powerful technical SEO tool that can identify and fix critical SEO issues on your site and help you achieve higher rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you want to stay on top of your SEO game, you need to run regular SEO audits on your site to ensure that its SEO health is intact. And Semrush‘s Site Audit tool is the ultimate SEO audit tool on the market.

However, despite being one of the most raved-about tools in the SEO community, some of the features and reports within the Semrush Site Audit tool are underutilized.

That’s why I thought it’d be good to bring these features to the forefront, so more Semrush users are aware of them.

In this article, I’ll share the 10 most overlooked Semrush Site Audit features to help you use the tool to its full potential.

Note: To get the most out of this guide, you need to have an active Semrush account. If you don’t have an account yet, click on the link below to get 14-day free access to Semrush PRO.

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How to Set up the Semrush Site Audit Tool

Before we get started, I’d urge you to run a fresh site audit. This will help Semrush identify all the new issues on your site since the last audit, and you can fix them while you’re checking out the features outlined in this post.

If you don’t have a running project on Semrush yet, you can create a new one by navigating to:

SEO Dashboard > On Page & Tech SEO > Site Audit

Click on the “+Create Project” button and enter your domain details.

This will open the Site Audit setup wizard where you can configure your crawl settings.

On the first page of the setup wizard, select the number of pages you want to crawl per audit and choose “Website” as the Crawl source. Keep in mind each level of Semrush subscription has limits on the number of pages you can crawl. For instance, Semrush PRO users can crawl up to 100,000 pages per month and 20,000 pages per audit.

The rest of the settings are optional, but I recommend you check them out anyway.

Configure your crawler settings by selecting “SemrushBot-Desktop” as the user agent (or “SemrushBot-Mobile” if you get more traffic from mobile), and choose “Minimum delay between pages” as the crawl-delay option. This option will speed up the site audit process.

Next, you can crawl or block specific subfolders on your website in the “Allow/Disallow URLs” section.

The fourth step of the configuration allows you to enter URL parameters on your website that you’d like SemrushBot to ignore while crawling. This helps Semrush avoid crawling the same page twice while auditing your website.

If you want Semrush to crawl restricted parts of your website, you can do that in the next step by providing your login credentials. This will allow SemrushBot to audit the restricted areas on your site with your login credentials and report issues, if any.

The final step is to set up a site audit schedule. Here, you can select how often you’d like Semrush to automatically audit your website.

Once you’re satisfied with your site audit configuration settings, hit the “Start Site Audit” button to kickstart the process.

10 Most Overlooked Semrush Site Audit Features

1. Optimize Your Internal Linking

Internal links improve your site’s navigation and play a crucial role in Google’s ability to index your website. In other words, internal linking can improve the crawlability and indexability of your website.

If a page has no internal link, also called an orphan page, search engines won’t be able to find it. For that reason, it’s important to quickly identify orphan pages on your site and point internal links to them.

A good SEO practice is to always link from top-ranking pages on your site to pages that you’d like to rank for.

Before you start adding new internal links, you should audit the existing internal links on your site to check for issues such as broken internal links, orphan pages, too many on-page links, links with no anchor text, etc.

This is where you can use the Internal Linking Report within the Semrush Site Audit tool. This report gives you a complete picture of your site’s link architecture and helps you identify and fix critical internal linking issues on your website.

To access this report, head to the Site Audit Overview report and navigate to “Internal Linking” under Thematic Reports. Click on the “View details” button.

Here you’ll find details on your site’s link architecture (useful graphs on internal link distribution and crawl depth), along with a list of internal link issues on your site. Pay special attention to the errors and warnings in this report as these issues are having a negative impact on your site’s performance in search results.

Click on the issue box against each issue to see the exact pages that are triggering the errors. You can also click on the “Why and how to fix it” link to get actionable recommendations on how to fix these issues.

Another thing to look out for is the Internal LinkRank (ILR), which gives you an idea of how strong a page is in terms of internal links. You’ll find this section right below the list of internal link issues.

These are the pages that are passing the most Internal LinkRank to other pages on your site. As such, you should be placing a link on these pages as they pass more link juice to other pages on your website. Just make sure the links fit the context and content of the pages.

To get ILR data on all your pages, click on the “View more pages” button at the bottom.

2. Audit Your Robots.txt File for Issues

Robots.txt is a text file that instructs search engines how to crawl pages on your site. A misconfigured robots.txt can quickly derail all your SEO efforts.

Robots.txt errors can go undetected, so it’s a good practice to audit the file for issues on a regular basis.

The “Robots.txt Updates” widget in the Site Audit Overview report will show you if SemrushBot was able to access your robots.txt file and the number of changes made to this file, if any, since the last crawl.

The widget will also highlight issues with the file that could impact the crawlability of your site.

If Semrush detects any issues with your robots.txt file, you can click on the blue link to open a filtered Issues report to see the exact format errors that are causing the problem. Click on the “Why and how to fix it” link against the errors to get recommendations on how to fix them.

3. Optimize Your Website Speed

According to Google, the probability of a bounce increases 32% when the page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. If your site takes 10 seconds to load, the probability of a bounce increases to 123%.

Image Source: Google/SOASTA Research

Long story short, you need to optimize your page speed. You need to make sure the content on your website loads faster by fixing all the performance issues on your site as soon as they appear.

The Semrush Site Audit tool can help you identify and fix site performance issues as well.

To do this, go to:

Project > Site Audit > Site Performance

Here you’ll find details on your page load speed as well as a list of performance issues you need to fix in order to improve your page speed and provide a smoother experience to your visitors.

Click on the issue box against each check to see the pages that have performance issues and click on the “Why and how to fix it” link to get more information on the issue and get actionable recommendations on how to fix it.

Prioritize fixing the issues in the “Errors” section before moving on to “Warnings” and “Notices.”

4. Implement Canonical Tags Correctly

A canonical tag informs search engines that similar URLs on your site are one and the same. This HTML code allows you to point out the main version for similar pages on your site.

Canonical tags, when implemented correctly, allow you to avoid content duplication issues.

The Semrush Site Audit tool lets you check if your canonical tags have been implemented correctly.

To identify canonicalization issues, go to:

Project > Site Audit > Issues

From here, click on “Category” to see if any of the following canonicalization checks have been triggered for your site:

Broken Canonical Link
Multiple Canonical URLs

Let’s examine each issue in detail.

Broken Canonical Link

This error is triggered if a link with canonical tag is broken and leads to a 404 page. A broken link makes it harder for search engines to crawl and index your website. As such, you need to fix this issue as soon as it’s identified in the report.

Click on the error to get a list of pages that have a broken canonical link. Click on the “Why and how to fix it” link to learn how to fix this issue.

Multiple Canonical URLs

This error is triggered if you have multiple rel=canonical links for one page. When search engines stumble upon multiple canonical URLs, they can’t identify which URL is the actual canonical page. This can lead to search engines picking the wrong canonical page or ignore all the canonical elements entirely.

Image source: Semrush

Click on the error to get a list of pages that have multiple canonical links. If you need help fixing these errors, click on the “Why and how to fix it” link to get detailed instructions.

5. Compare Crawls and Progress

The Compare Crawls and Progress reports within the Semrush Site Audit tool allow you to review which errors, warnings, and notices on your site have been fixed and if any new issues have been found over time.

The “Compare Crawls” report allows you to view your past site audits in a side by side comparison.

To access this report, navigate to:

Project > Site Audit > Compare Crawls

Here you can compare results between two different site audits. Just choose two different site audit dates you’d like to compare with the date drop-down menus above the table. For example, you can compare results between your most recent site audit and a site audit you ran one month ago.

Once you’ve selected the dates, you’ll see the number of issues that have been fixed and the number of issues that are new between the two selected dates.

On a similar note, the Site Audit Progress report features an interactive line graph that shows you how the number of issues have changed over time with your site audits.

Just select two different dates above the graph and pick the specific errors, warnings, and notices you’d like to analyze.

The Site Audit Progress report is particularly useful for monitoring the top issues affecting your site.

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6. Fix HTTPS Implementation Mistakes

Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. It started as a lightweight signal, but over time has grown in importance. With the Chrome 68 update, Chrome started marking sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure.”

As such, it’s extremely critical that you fix HTTPS implementation mistakes on your site as and when they show up.

The HTTPS Implementation report within Semrush’s Site Audit tool detects all errors related to the SSL certificate on your site.

To access this report, head to your Site Audit Overview report and navigate to “HTTPS” under Thematic reports. Click on the “View details” button.

This report will show you all the HTTPS implementation mistakes on your site.

Image source: Semrush

Here are some of the top HTTPS issues you may need to fix to achieve a perfect score:

HTTPS pages containing internal links to HTTP pages
Issues with mixed content
Expired certificate
Non-secure pages
Issues with incorrect certificate name

To get detailed instructions on how to fix these issues, click on the “Why and how to fix it” link underneath each issue.

Once you’ve taken the necessary steps to fix these errors, run another site audit to make sure these errors are not triggered in the HTTPS implementation report again.

7. Get More Statistics with Google Analytics Integration

Semrush allows you to integrate the Site Audit tool with Google Analytics. This integration will potentially unlock a wealth of traffic data that you can analyze from one central hub — the Semrush interface.

By integrating Google Analytics with the Site Audit tool, you can get 3 additional insights for your site:

Pageviews
Pages that take longer than one second to become interactive
Orphan pages

To connect Google Analytics with SEMrush, go to:

Project > Site Audit > Select “Google Analytics” from the menu

Next, you need to select the account, profile, property, and view for the Google Analytics account associated with your site.

Once you’ve entered these details, hit the “Save” button.

That’s it! You’ve now successfully integrated Google Analytics with the Semrush Site Audit tool. Wait for 15 minutes and perform a fresh site audit for your Google Analytics data to appear under your crawled pages.

8. Optimize Your Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content. The two most important meta tags are page title and meta description.

With the Semrush Site Audit tool, you can optimize your titles and meta descriptions to improve your site’s search visibility.

To optimize your meta tags, go to:

Project > Site Audit > Issues

Look for issues like missing titles, duplicate titles, and duplicate meta descriptions.

Rewrite the titles and meta descriptions of pages with issues.

Keep in mind that the Site Audit tool will analyze your meta tags purely from a technical SEO standpoint. You can further analyze your meta tags from a content standpoint by using Semrush’s Content Audit tool.

To prevent future SEO mistakes concerning meta tags, check out our extensive guide on meta tags.

9. Audit Your AMP Pages

If you use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on your site, it’s important to audit them periodically to ensure they are error-free.

That said, auditing your AMP pages and fixing implementation mistakes manually can be stressful, especially if you have a large website.

You can use the Semrush Site Audit tool to check the SEO health of your AMP pages. The Site Audit tool tests your AMP pages’ health for 33 technical issues and provides actionable recommendations on how to fix each implementation mistake.

To audit your AMP pages, navigate to the “Issues” tab and click on “Category” to see if AMP issues have been triggered.

Image Credit: Semrush

The AMP issues are groups into 4 categories:

AMP HTML issues
AMP style and layout issues
AMP templating issues
AMP Canonicalisation issues

You can click on any of the issues to see all the pages with AMP issues and click on the “Why and how to fix it” link against each error to get a detailed description of the error and instructions on how to fix it.

10. Hide Irrelevant Issues from Your Site Audit Report

When you evaluate the site audit report for your website, you can probably tell which issues deserve your immediate attention and which ones are irrelevant. For example, a webpage that works fine may trigger a 404 error if it blocks Semrush crawlers. Now, you can choose to ignore this issue as you know it’s inaccurate.

But things can get complicated if you’re an agency owner and you have to share a similar report for your client’s website.

In such cases, you can use individual check filters to manually exclude specific issues from the Site Audit report and get an accurate picture of the website’s overall SEO health.

To do this, go to:

Project > Site Audit > Issues

Click on any of the issues to see the exact URLs that are causing the error. From here, you can exclude insignificant issues from your audit report by clicking on the “Hide results” button on the right side of the interface.

Hiding these issues will not just exclude them from the site audit report, but will also positively impact your overall SEO health score.

Final Thoughts

The 10 features outlined above are incredibly useful, but it’s easy to miss them. By using these features, you’ll be massively improving the SEO health of your site and fixing all the bottlenecks that are preventing your site from ranking higher on Google.

Let me know in the comments section if you were able to improve your site health score by using any of the features above.

And if you’ve never used Semrush before, please sign up for a 2-week free trial of Semrush PRO by clicking the link below.

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Experience the full power of Semrush Pro with a 14-day free trial.

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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 14 June 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.

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Technical SEO Checklist: 10 Technical SEO Tips to Instantly Boost Your Traffic

Sandeep Mallya — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 07:03:43 +0000

Technical SEO is one of the most fundamental aspects of SEO. You may have the most incredible piece of content for a popular topic in your niche, but if your site has unresolved technical SEO issues, you’ll struggle to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).

As a result, it’s really important that you spend some time optimizing the technical SEO of your website.

In this article, I’ll explain the key aspects of technical SEO and share 10 actionable tips you can implement right away to improve your site’s search presence. Plus, I’ve also included a Technical SEO Checklist, downloadable in PDF format which will help you put these SEO tips into action.

But first, let’s cover some basics about technical SEO.

(Already know the basics? Click here to jump straight to technical SEO tips.)

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the crawling, indexing, and rendering phase of your website to achieve higher search rankings.

Neil Patel, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of CrazyEgg, has a simple definition for technical SEO: “Any SEO work that is done aside from the content. Essentially, it’s laying a strong foundation to give your content the best chance it can have to rank for relevant keywords and phrases.”

The team at Yoast summarizes this concept well:

In the most basic terms, technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website to help it rank higher in search results. It is a broad field that covers a wide range of SEO topics, including:

XML sitemaps
Crawling and indexing
Mobile optimization
Site speed
Site structure
SSL certificates
Image SEO
Internal and external links
Canonical URLs

Recommended resource: If you’re new to SEO, I’d highly recommend checking out the chapter on Technical SEO in The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz.

10 Actionable Technical SEO Tips

Now that you know the basics of technical SEO, here are 10 tips you can use to improve your site’s technical SEO and boost your search rankings.

1. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

Let’s start with the most basic technical SEO tip.

One of the major Google algorithm updates in 2015 was to give increased preference to mobile-friendly, responsive websites. In what was termed as “Mobilegeddon,” several top websites were penalized for not adopting a more mobile-friendly web template.

Fast forward to the present day, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever.

So how do you check the mobile-friendliness of your website? You can use any of the following free tools:

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will determine whether your website meets Google’s criteria for a mobile-optimized website.

HubSpot’s Website Grader and GTMetrix provide deeper insights into what you can do to improve the mobile-friendliness of your website.

BONUS: Check out this article by Startup Cafe Digital on how to make your website 100% mobile-friendly and download the mobile SEO audit checklist.

2. Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap

Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your webpages.

Luckily, it’s easy to create an XML sitemap. If you’re a WordPress user, you can generate it using free WordPress plugins such as Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps.

Once you’ve created the sitemap, submit it to Google via Google Search Console.

To do this, login to your Google Search Console account and navigate to Sitemaps -> Add a new sitemap and then hit “Submit.”

Once your sitemap is successfully submitted, follow these XML sitemap best practices:

If you block a page in robots.txt, it has no business being in your XML sitemap
Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap
If you’ve got a big site with over 50,000 URLs, use dynamic XML sitemaps

3. Speed Up Your Website

Site speed matters. Make no mistake. If your site is slow and takes a long time to respond, Google will place a small penalty on your website.

That means even if your content is the gold standard for that particular topic, your website will rank lower in SERPs than it would if your website had faster load times.

This is a technical SEO aspect that you simply can’t afford to ignore.

Use any of the following free tools to test your site speed:

Be sure to check your Core Web Vitals score provided by these tools. If your website fails the Core Web Vitals test on desktop or mobile, follow the recommendations offered by these tools to optimize your page speed.

If your site is taking a long time to load, it can seriously impact user experience. Follow these steps to speed up your website:

Optimize your site’s images – Use a compressed image format like JPG in majority of your posts. Use a tool like TinyPNG to further compress the image files. For more tips, check out Image SEO: 7 Actionable Tips to Supercharge Your Organic Traffic.
Enable browser caching – This lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your site.
Enable compression – According to Yahoo, enabling compression on your website can reduce HTML and CSS files by 50-70% and increase site speed significantly.
Reduce server response time – Google recommends keeping server response time under 200ms.
Use a Content Delivery System (CDN) – Use a CDN like BunnyCDN or Cloudflare to increase your site speed.

4. Fix Your Site Errors by Performing Weekly Technical SEO Site Audits

You need to fix your on-page SEO issues by running a weekly technical SEO audit if you’d like to rank higher in SERPs on a consistent basis.

So how to perform a technical SEO audit?

There are several tools on the market that can help you do this.

Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Serpstat are all great tools. But I’d highly recommend Semrush for this activity as it’s considered the industry gold standard and it offers the most comprehensive glimpse of the technical aspects of your website.

If you don’t have access to the tool, sign up for a 14-day free trial of Semrush Pro.

To perform a site audit on Semrush, click on “Add New Project,” enter the details, and select “Setup Site Audit.”

Select the number of pages you’d like SemrushBot to crawl and click on “Start Site Audit.”

Semrush will scan your website for errors, warnings, and issues, and then subsequently provide recommendations to fix these errors to improve the overall technical health of your website.

To learn more about performing comprehensive SEO audits, we recommend that you refer to our Semrush SEO audit guide for detailed guidance and insights.

Side note: Semrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that can help you with more than just technical SEO site audits. Read my full review of the software to learn more.

5. Optimize Internal Links

An internal link is a hyperlink that points to another page on the same website.

While internal links may not have the same influence on search rankings as external links, they still play a critical role in helping search engines understand the information hierarchy for your website and establishing an SEO-friendly site architecture.

So what’s the easiest way to optimize your site’s internal links? Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the keywords the source page is trying to target.

You can also transfer link value to a newly-published blog post by linking to it from a top-ranking page on your site.

Just make sure the links are contextual and add value to the topic.

To learn more about optimizing internal links on your website, check out this in-depth guide on internal links.

6. Include Your Main Keywords in Image Alt Text

Google can’t see what’s in an image. Rather it uses metadata such as the image file name and image alt text (alternative text) to determine what’s in an image.

Alt text is used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.

Typically, the best practice for alt text is to keep it descriptive with sufficient use of the main keywords that you’re targeting. At the same time, make sure you’re not stuffing it with keywords.

There’s more to image SEO than just adding alt text. Image optimization can lead to improved performance of your site in search engines. Here are seven actionable image SEO tips you can implement right away.

7. Use Canonical URLs to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

Your first priority should always be to delete the duplicate content on your site. Once again use an SEO tool like Semrush to scan and fix duplicate content issues on your site.

That said, there are some cases where having duplicate content on your site can’t be avoided. In such cases, use canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs come in handy when you’re replicating a blog post from one website to the other. They are especially useful if you’re running an eCommerce website with hundreds of identical pages.

So in order to avoid content duplication and a Google penalty, set up a canonical URL using the rel-canonical tag. You can add the rel-canonical tag via Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

Just navigate to advanced settings on Yoast, then go to Canonical URL and enter the URL of the original article.

8. Install an SSL Certificate for Your Website

Google confirmed back in 2014 that SSL certificates aka HTTPS encryptions are now a ranking signal.

So if you’ve been thinking of getting an SSL certificate for your website, now is the time to upgrade, not just for enhanced security, but also for SEO.

I recommend SSL certificates from Namecheap if you’re looking at cheap, yet effective SSL implementation.

Pro Tip: Though there are several web hosting services that provide SSL certificates, I highly recommend you try Namecheap SSL certificates. They are reliable and highly cost-effective compared to other SSL providers.

9. Check and Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console

Check for crawl errors in Google Search Console once a week and fix them promptly as these are serious technical issues that may hinder the performance of your website and hurt your rankings.

While you’re at it, check your robots.txt file as well to make sure you’re not blocking pages that shouldn’t be blocked.

10. Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Site

Broken links are not just bad from an SEO perspective, but they can also harm the user experience on your site.

You wouldn’t want any of your readers to land on a “404 Not Found” page. That just creates a bad first impression and the user may never return to your site again.

Which is why you need to check for broken links on your site on a regular basis and fix them as and when they appear on your site.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix to this problem if your site is run on WordPress. Just install the free Broken Link Checker plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, it will scan your entire website every 72 hours for broken links. You’ll receive email notifications when the plugin finds broken links on your site and you can go about fixing them promptly.

To learn more about this tool and for a step-by-step guide on Broken Link Checker, watch this video tutorial below:

Bonus Tips & Resources

Technical SEO is a vast topic that requires constant diligence and updation. While I’ll keep updating this article to provide you with deeper insights into SEO, here are some more tactics you can use to optimize the technical SEO of your site:

Use Google AMP – AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These pages are designed to load super fast on mobile devices. While Google has not made an announcement on AMP being a search engine ranking signal, Google has been pushing publishers to use AMP. If you’re a WordPress user, it’s super easy to implement AMP. Just download the Google AMP plugin and you’re all set.
Use Schema.org structured data – Click here to learn more
Check and minimize the number of 301 redirects for your site – You can use a tool like Semrush or Broken Link Checker (see #10) to check and reduce the number of 301 redirects on your site.
Always prefer subfolders over subdomains – This is a long, on-going debate, but most SEO experts agree that subfolders rank better in SERPs than subdomains.

Here are some more technical SEO resources you should check out:

Technical SEO Checklist & Summary

Technical SEO often takes a backseat to on-page and link building aspects of SEO. But it is equally important to fix technical issues on your site to perform better in SERPs.

To summarize, here’s the 10-point technical SEO checklist to increase your website traffic:

#1 Optimize your website for mobile devices
#2 Create and Optimize Your XML Sitemap
#3 Boost your website’s speed
#4 Fix site errors and warnings with weekly site audits
#5 Optimize internal links
#6 Include your main keywords in image alt text
#7 Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues
#8 Install an SSL certificate
#9 Check and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console
#10 Find and fix broken links on your site

Which is your favorite technical SEO tweak? Let us know in the comments section.

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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on Aug 18, 2016 and has since been updated for relevance and comprehensiveness.

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Site Structure and SEO: 5 Ways to Create an SEO-friendly Site Structure

99signals Editorial — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 04:14:32 +0000

When it comes to SEO, on-page SEO factors, link building, and keyword research always take precedence over technical SEO factors such as site structure.

Surprisingly, site structure is often overlooked by SEOs because they believe it has very little to do with SEO. On the contrary, having an organized site structure is incredibly important for ranking high in search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are several ways in which site structure affects your SEO. While these issues may seem complicated at first, more often than not, they are easy to fix.

In this article, we’ll help you understand the importance of site structure in SEO and examine some of the ways you can create an SEO-friendly site structure.

Why Site Structure is Important for SEO

Without having an organized site structure, all your SEO efforts may amount to nothing. Here are some key reasons why site structure matters for SEO:

1. A Good Site Structure Improves Site Crawlability

Site Crawlability is a search engine’s ability to crawl through your website’s entire text content to ascertain what the website is all about.

According to Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, site crawlability is the number one factor for preventing indexing problems on Google.

Web crawlers like Googlebot crawl a website’s structure to add its pages to search engine index. Their whole aim is to crawl and index the content for search results. Having a good site structure will make it easier for crawlers to crawl and index the pages on your site.

Image Credit: Moz

2. A Good Site Structure Provides Your Site with Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links to website subpages that appear under certain Google listings in order to help users navigate the site.

Here’s how sitelinks look like:

Sitelinks are awesome from SEO perspective. They improve the navigability of your website, point users to cornerstone content within the site, and even enhance your brand’s reputation.

But how do you get sitelinks?

You can’t add any sitelinks on your own. Google uses secret automated algorithms to generate sitelinks for your site. In other words, Google’s algorithms award websites with sitelinks. One of the factors which Google takes into consideration while awarding sitelinks is a site’s structure.

If your site’s structure is strong, chances of your site getting sitelinks are quite high. On the other hand, if you have a poor site structure, it’s highly unlikely your site will ever receive sitelinks.

3. A Good Site Structure Enhances User Experience

A good site structure provides much-need clarity to users and makes them stay on the site longer. An organized structure improves dwell time and reduces bounce rate, resulting in good user experience which is an important ranking factor on Google.

A bad site structure, on the other hand, results in bad user experience which can have a negative impact on your SEO.

5 Steps in Creating an SEO-friendly Site Structure

Now that you know the importance of having a good site structure, let’s examine some of the steps in creating an SEO-friendly site structure for your website.

1. Plan Your Site Hierarchy

If you are starting your website from scratch, it’s a good practice to plan out your site’s hierarchy before you start creating your pages.

Here’s an example of a site hierarchy:

Image Credit: Yoast

Keep your site hierarchy simple and organized. Make it easy for crawlers as well as users. Don’t have too many main categories (2-7 would be ideal) and balance the number of sub-categories within each main category.

2. Optimize Internal Links on Your Website

According to Moz, internal links are important for three reasons:

They allow users to navigate a website.
They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

You cannot build an SEO-friendly site structure without internal links. The basic idea of internal linking is to have every page on your website include a link to another page on the site.

Several websites make the mistake of hiding their most important links in ways that web crawlers can’t access.

Image Credit: Moz

Internal linking makes a web crawler’s job easier by pointing out what pages are important on your site and how you can get there.

Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the topic or keywords the source page is trying to target.

3. Create a URL Structure that Matches Your Site Hierarchy

You should ensure that your URL structure matches your site hierarchy. The ideal URL structure should be like this: Category -> Sub-category ->Product.

If you use a CMS like WordPress, then it’s quite simple to create search-engine friendly URLs. Go to Settings -> Permalinks within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL.

By default, URLs in WordPress sites look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123

Select the option ‘Post Name’ to make your URL look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/sample-post/

This will make your URL SEO-friendly, allowing you to include your target keywords.

4. Create Your Site Navigation in HTML or CSS (Avoid Javascript and Flash)

Keep your coding simple by creating your site navigation in HTML or CSS. Avoid coding in Javascript, Ajax, and Flash as this will make it difficult for search engines to crawl your website.

5. Create a Shallow Depth Navigation Structure

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of having a good site structure is creating a shallow website.

But what exactly is a shallow website?

According to marketing expert, Sujan Patel, a shallow website is “one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page and is far more preferable than a deep website which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site.”

Ideally, the navigation structure of your site should follow the site hierarchy. As such, you need to make sure that all the important pages are easily navigable to users. Having a shallow depth navigation structure is good both from user experience and SEO perspective.

Conclusion

Site structure is an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of creating an SEO-friendly website. The better your site structure, the better your chances of ranking high in SERPs. So make sure you spend enough time in creating a site structure that search engines will love.

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