How to structure your local business website for SEO

You'd think by now you could just build a site willy-nilly and not have to plan every little detail outright? I mean the search engines are all-knowing and they can just go to the sitemap to understand your website, right? Or maybe you are thinking "what's a sitemap?"

The truth is, most small business owners would never think of using local search engine optimization tactics to rank their sites. Getting your business to rank on the map and the organic results starts with an organized website structure.

Structuring your local business website

Web crawlers hit your website and with lightning speed jump from page to page recording the information for their index. The search engines prefer well-organized sites because they indicate a better potential user experience.

That's why businesses with a clean and logical website hierarchy will win out over those who don't. It enhances user experience, and since the Google algorithm uses user experience (how much value a site visitor gets from your website) for ranking, it has a direct impact on your site's SERP performance.

Planning your search-optimized website structure

Now that you know why it's important, you need to learn how to create an optimized structure for your website.

Fifteen years ago, it was thought that a flat site structure was preferred. That means every page exists at the same level as the home page. However, structures like that have a hard time indicating how the pages are connected.

A typical local business website structure looks a little something like this:

• Homepage
  • Services
    • Individual service pages
  • About Us
    • Our team
    • Our mission
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
    • Blog Categories
      • Category-specific posts
  • Case Studies and Reviews

While not always possible, we try to keep every page within three clicks from the home page. Here's an example of one of the plans we made for this website's site structure.

Our Managed SEO service starts with an audit of your site. If the site structure isn't solid, we will take measures to clean things up. Find out more and contact us today.