How to Design SEO-friendly Website Architecture and Layout in Melbourne  

Why we spend thousands of dollars from our own tight pocket to build our website in Melbourne?

You may answer get more money from our website. But how?

Higher website traffic and higher conversion rate (ROI) means more enquiries, sales and beautiful money notes: I’ve never seen any paper that is more attractive than money notes in this world. Perhaps my wife’s selfie photos are the only one beautiful thing than money notes: if she read this article one day.

A creative and fashionable website design can make the website look unique with good taste, but it will not necessarily bring success to your business.

In this complete SEO website design guide in Melbourne, I will emphasize on two things:

1. Creating solid and logic SEO friendly website architecture- Sitemap set up.
2. Creating better user experience on your website

If you can make these two simples things right on your website, your business would naturally get more organic website traffic and higher conversion rate overtime.

To get better SEO performances in Melbourne, there are many factors to be considered in terms of Google algorithm. Making every factor to be perfect is impossible due to time and financial constraints. You might end up trying lots of different methods and spending lots of time but end up getting no rewards from SEO investment.

This is because you forget the first and foremost important step- building a good and logical website architecture and sitemap. If you or your SEO agency Melbourne skip this important process, you may still be lucky to get decent organic traffics however you would have to pay double or even triple efforts comparing to your competitors in order to achieve the same rewards.

Now, let’s find out the most practical and effective way to build up your website architecture in a logical way.

The brief of website architecture and elements

A generic website or ecommerce website is normally constructed in the following hierarchy:  home page, category page, subcategory page, production page and blog (content page).

Let me quickly explain the function and purpose of each section.

Home page: show users (real people) and Google who you are, what are you doing, what service and products you want to sale in general.

Category page: also concerned as the landing page. Compared to the home page, the category page tends to be more topic focused. If your business does not only provide one type of service or production, you shall classify different important category pages to approach and cater to different users’ needs and desire.

Subcategory page: is a supplementary page, the subcategory page can be more specific than the category. The emergence of subcategory pages is due to the website having too many categories needed to be displayed and there is enough space to present in one page.

For instance,  for Amazon and eBay, their would have more than thousands of categories and it can be chunky to put all categories on just one page. In addition, users would feel overwhelmed when they see too many categories.

To provide better user experience and clearer site website architecture, we thus need to introduce subcategory pages to supply the major category.

The subcategory page is typically classified by geological and product or service attribution.

Geological:  For instance: if you are in Victoria mainly servicing as a Melbourne wedding photographer, however you also service Geelong, Mornington, Yarra Valley and etc. You then need to create those subcategory pages to supply your category page- Melbourne wedding photography.

Attribution: The subcategory can also be concerned as a service or production’s genre or attribution. For instance, natural and candid wedding photography or beach wedding photography.

We shall consider two things when you are creating a subcategory:

2. Whether there are enough traffics on the subcategory topics, we don’t want to waste time and money to create a subcategory page for a low traffic niche.
3. Whether it brings user’s intention, the subcategory page can be meaningless if the users do not search with this keyword. For instance, the solar panel can be popular keywords in NSW, Queensland, but it is less popular in Tasmania.

Because there is more resource sunlight in NSW and Queensland and less sunlit in Tasmania (and Tasmania has long winter and cold). So, we would prevail the NSW and Queensland subcategory page and put unpopular subcategory into one page. It would save our budget in creating the subcategory page.

Production page: under the category page. At this stage, users are aware of their specific needs, they would know the brand of production, model, and price point.

The production pages can be considered as the money page because the users typically share stronger purchase intention at this stage, we need to improve our conversion rate in order to make the sale. We can impulse users’ buying intention via emotion provoking techniques: for instance, creating personal, emotional production description.

And we can have more solid call to action (CAT) comparing to the home page and category (user would have initial intention or just wanting to gather information at earlier stages of buying journey, the CAT can be softer on the home page and category page)

The production reviews also act as a good parameter for both google and users. Users want to learn the production experience from other users, in addition, we can add hyperlinks at the words of reviews, it then becomes good anchor text to promote your category and subcategory page. In logic, the users incline to click links through review texts.

Blog page: Blog pages can be considered as the content page. Compared to the category page and production page (Money page), the blog pages share significant lower conversation rate. But you may wonder why we keep investing in blog or content pages?

Because most business in the same niche would have similar contents on their home page, category pages. It highlights at the ecommerce website. Could you find any fundamental difference between Amazon and its competitors and eBay category pages? The only differences would-be website colour themes, font and layout designs.

Due to the limited space on the category pages, it would limit us from making too much content on the category page to sale our service in Melbourne. Ironically, too much content would even reduce the ROI on the category page.

Thereby, we do not have too much space to optimize our category page, it seems that websites with high domain authority have consistent advantage to gain organic traffics and hence leave little space for new websites and small business to compete the keywords.

It is quite a challenge for website design to fill immense content (text) on the home page and category page while keeping the balance of aesthetics layout.

The blog page is one practical solution for newer websites. There is no doubt that Google is unlikely to show new websites to user because it thinks they are not trustworthy, new websites also do not have any advantage to battle their home and category page with sophistic top ranked websites who rank the website in a long run.

However, blog pages can produce  valuable and informative content to users, if Google find users have longer dwelling time on your blog, then Google would give you a better result on those long tail keywords.

Though we cannot get high ROI on the blog, however we can improve our DA (domain authority) via producing informative and helpful blogs. Great blogs can be considered as website’s cornerstone and we can lead the traffic flow from the cornerstone into our home category, subcategory page.

This traffic flow is a good sign to rank our home and category page higher. However, I do not suggest leading the traffic directly into the product page, because smaller businesses don’t have enough budget to rank every individual products page. Meanwhile, seasonal and unpopular production can be discontinued one day and the link from the blog would make 404 error and it would waste your crawler budget even more the Google would reassess your credit due to 404 error.

The SEO website pages hierarchy

When you set up the website architecture and site map, one thing we shall keep in mind which is the website hierarchy.

As a website designer, SEO expert, sometimes one people can hold these two roles, but most of the time it can be different person who is in charge of website design and SEO experts. I suggest if you are hiring two people to work on your website, it is better that both website designer and SEO experts who understand each side and have a good communication.

To begin with, we shall have a good setup on the sitemap. When we design a good website architecture, Google would know which pages is the most important (normally home page and category page) and which page is less important.

Logical and user-friendly website design give the user better experiences when they browse our website.

To achieve that, we shall hence set up the website’s hierarchy, if the home page priority is 1, the category page can be 0.8 and subcategory page can be 0.6 and production page can be 0.4 and the blog page can be 0.4.

One thing we need to know is Google will not crawl our entire website, particular a new website. We need to introduce a concept: crawler budget.

The importance of Crawler budget for SEO website architecture

Google allocates different crawler budget for different website. Apparently, Google would give more crawler budget for websites which have high DA and long running history.

The website hierarchy is a perfect solution to tackle low crawler budget for newer websites. Because we can tell Google which page we want to rank firstly.

After Google bot crawl and scan our page, that does not mean our website page and content would be shown on the SERP (Google organic search), the next step is indexing, after our page is indexed, our websites then have chance to show up on SERP.

Google would decide whether to index our page or not, based on our website DA and the quality of the content.

If Google and user do not like our website and content, for instance the pages share high bouncing  rate and low dwelling time. Our website would be allocated with less crawler budget, vice versa.

As a Website designer and content creator, our job is to provide valuable content with a better user experience at the same time.

The relationship Keywords and website architecture

As we know: keywords consist of head keywords and long tailed keywords. Before we start, let me give the head and long tail keywords definition and explanation.

The head keywords would mostly occurred on the home page and major category. For instance, if you are a wedding photographer in Melbourne. T ‘Wedding photography Melbourne’ or ‘wedding photography’ is your head keywords.

There is no doubt the head keywords are the most competitive keywords. You shall use your home page to rank your head keywords. In general, the home page has the highest DA score compared to other pages. Most of the category, subcategory, production and blog page’s traffic would flow into the home page in the end.

At the same time, the home page would receive most of the external links, we can get backlinks from other websites.

The long tailed keywords (3-5 phases) would occur frequently among the production and blog page. The long tail keywords are less competitive, such as production model, Nike M2K Tekno Light Bone Metallic Silver Orange and Wilson Federer Open 100 Tennis Racquet.

The other type of keywords can also be considered as long tail keywords- non-commercial keywords.

To understand that, firstly what are commercial keywords?

For example, men shoes is a typical commercial keywords, users who use this keyword would have intentions to buy  shoes, even though the user is still at the earlier buying stage. Nike M2K Tekno Light Bone Metallic Silver Orange also represents an example of commercial keywords, users already known the exact the brand name and model name.

Now, let us discuss non-commercial keywords.

For examples, topics like how to clean your shoes, the colour trend of shoes in 2021. Those keywords are non-commercial, users do not have intention to buy any shoes, but they only want to gather information.

We can use blog pages to rank those keywords. Generally speaking, there are large numbers of non-commercial keywords and they are much less competitive then commercial ones. Though we cannot get good conversion rate from the non-commercial keywords. But we can get decent organic traffic from non-commercial keywords.

As mentioned before, when users are searching non-commercial keywords, they normally are at earlier buy stage. If your brand name occurs frequently during this earlier buying journey, you would take advantage from the brand recognition at the comparison and decision stage.

The rich content on the blog post can lead organic traffic to the category and home page. Sometimes, we can use several rich content blog pages to support our category or subcategory page. Google would then give these certain subcategories better ranking after the subcategory receives juicy traffic from our blog pages.

We can consider building up a traffic hub. The subcategory pages are the traffic hubs. Personally, I like to use subcategory pages as traffic hub, because the traffic hub has to compete medium competitive keywords and these keywords have higher search volume than long tail keywords contain at the blog and production page.

The traffic hub (subcategory) can centralize the traffics to the upper page- the category page as well as leading traffics to bottom pages (production page), particular some dead page (unpopular production page)

Sometimes, the subcategory pages are considered the backbone of SEO tactics.

Furthermore, let us discuss the relationship between the home page, category, subcategory and production page.

Before we discuss the next section. I want to induce another concept- SEO Silo.

Silo is group of keywords, when we determine our head keyword, we then need to get a group of relevant keywords to support the head keyword. For instance, if one of our category pages is cloth. The man cloth, women and kid cloth can be the silo of keywords under the cloth category.

On our website, we can have lots of silo, each silo would be one category. Under each silo (category), we have series of subcategory.

Now, back to the topic.

The home page can be our parent page, category and subcategory pages are plural, they can be ourselves and our siblings  and the production pages and blog pages can be our children.

The homepage does the talking to Google, who are we, what is our family doing and our family DNA. Categories inherit the home page’s DNA but in a more specific way. As we discuss the silo earlier, each category can be a silo, the silos reflect the website character.

When we have several silos, Google will then get a good sense of what is about the website. Every silo can also consider as brother, sister, and cousin, that means each category can give links to cousin page. Meanwhile, the production page can give PA to the category page.

However, one silo of the production page is not good to give the link to another silo of category page. Because the one silo category can be another silo of product page uncle. It can be no relevance if the one product page and one category page is not in the same silo unless you can prove the certain production page has direct and clear relationship with the certain category page in different silo.

Google likes relevant, logical, and clear website architecture, same are users. People will get confused if you lead them into unexpected region via internal link.

A healthy website architecture shall be clear, logic and meaningful. We can build up relationship between home page, category and production page by settled navigation or internal link.

Now, let us introduce a new concept- breadcrumb.

The relationship between breadcrumb and SEO website architecture

The breadcrumb is an indicator which normally stay between the navigation bar and website content.

There are two benefits to bring in the breadcrumb to your website.

Firstly, the breadcrumb would give user better experience. People would feel lost if they don’t know which page they are currently located on . We would get lost easily when we are shopping at the Coles and Woolworth supermarket if we cannot find labels to each category, thus we can’t easily find milk, sugar, meat and etc, then we would go to another supermarket.

Likewise, user would get confused if they have little clue about your website. I need to highlight in here, home page is NOT the only entry point where user start browsing your website, people can enter the website through home page, category, subcategory, blog or landing pages.

The breadcrumb is a good indicator to show users where they are, what is the upper page and the next page. For instance, if the users land on the subcategory and also want to see more option, the breadcrumb can bring them to the upper page which it would be the category page.

Though, we all know we can use click the home icon to the home page or navigation can check the website category. But if it is the user’s first visit to this website and particular for puzzle-like ecommerce websites, the breadcrumb can give user clearer mindset and good UX.

The breadcrumb is not only giving good user experience to your users, but also Google crawlers. Through the breadcrumb, Google would know your website’s silo, category, the relationship between category and subcategory. The breadcrumb is the best method to give a Google bot crawl the website.

In addition, we can also add keywords at the breadcrumb and each word of breadcrumb can be used as internal link and anchor text, it is the safest way to put keywords on our website.

The internal link and website architecture

The breadcrumb can be considered as default website structure and skeleton. The internal link shall be done by manual.

Firstly, internal links represent a good way to transfer traffics to different pages. Except the traffic, internal links also pass page rank or page authority. As we discuss in earlier chapter, the home page has the highest PA (Page authority), thereby we can pass the PA from the home page to category, subcategory page via the internal link.

That means, if we have a high margin of category or a new product wanting to rank up within a short time, we can give the PA from the home page or viral blog content to some page which we want to rank.

But one thing we need to keep in mind is, the effect of PA transfer decreases as it passes down pages. Also, the page would receive different PA through internal links. generally speaking, if we build up an internal link at the beginning of page, that means the receiver page would get high PA contribution.

It is easy to be understood by both the Google bot and also users. The user would have less chance to click the internal link from the bottom of article or buried internal link.

If we want to rank the niche keywords via anchor text, please make the internal link at the very beginning. According google guidelines, the Google bot tend to only crawl the first 10,000 pixel, that means Google might not scan our internal link if the anchor text is located at far bottom of the page.

Home page for SEO friendly website architecture

One thing we need to know before we are creating a home page for the website.

• What is the purpose of us designing our home page?
• What kind of impression we want to leave for the users when they are browsing our home page via organic search, pay-ads or social media?
• Also, for Google bots, how shall we make Google bot understand our website more effectively via our home page.

Once we get the answer above the question or at least we get a direction, we can start designing our website.

As an assumption, I’m guessing a great amount of the users (unique visitor, first time visitor and exclusive return users), they are first time visitor of our website. According to the relationship between keywords and the home page, the user is at early stage of buying journey. They normally search broader keywords, such as fishing rod, bicycle or etc.

Therefore, they don’t know who we are, we don’t have any credit to them, and they even don’t what service or production can solve their problem. Thus, at the home page, we shall consider dwelling time more than the conversion rate.

You can imaging how you shop normally. Do you make a purchase at the first time visiting a website that you do not know its company name nor their branding? How often do you make the purchase or sending an enquiry on the home page?

The home page implies broader keywords, and lower conversion rate, if we can’t get too much conversion rate, we can change our goal to dwelling time or lead the traffic to category or production page (category and production page is our money page)

Why home page has low conversion rate versus category and production?

If we imply the home page as GP (general practitioner) doctor and category as specialized doctors. When a patient said he is unwell, yet he does not know which part of his body is causing the problem. He might meet a GP, however being unwell is too broad, the GP can’t give the patient quite effective solution.

Once the patient knows where he felt unwell, head or arm, the socialized doctor can even find what reason cause the problem and then give the patient effective treatment.

So we know our home page can’t give different users with the same solution, because every user is different, their intention and problem is different. General page (home page) can not answer all different questions.

It is impossible to write all solutions, services and productions on the home page, even though we list all solution on the home page, how the user finds correspondent answers from overwhelming information.

Unless we only want to sale one production at a narrow niche, otherwise the home page would have low conversion rate due to the its nature.

From the Google bot’s perspective, we shall solve the thin content issue on our home page. Indeed, we shall avoid thin content on all of our pages if we have enough budget to create content on all category and production pages. But the home page’s thin content problem must be solved with the highest priority.

The home page would be considered as the most important page and the Google bot always crawl our home page first and it give us DA (domain authority) which relies on the home page heavily. If we have thin content on our home page, it will not  give Google bot a good first impression.

Also, we need to know home page is not the only entry point, users can reach our website via landing pages, category, production and blog pages, if they like the first page which the way they found us, they would go back to home page to check our credit and get more insight who we are and what we are doing.

We still make call to action (CAT) on our home page but comparing to our money pages, we shall make it softer. And, the home page is the biggest traffic hub which it links to category and subcategory (bring traffic and PA to category), while every single page can be linked back to home page.

Keywords on the home page

Home page is your head keyword’s major battlefield. We can make a simple audition on our home page. We can use tools to check our keyword’s density, if our head keywords are not taking highest density, we shall be alerted.

The keywords density reflects the website character from Google bot’s perspective. However, we shall not abusively overuse the head keywords. Overusing head keywords is an old school way, Google won’t give a good rank if we stuffed the head keywords blindly on home page.

However, we can use surrounding keywords to support head keywords at ach headers (H2, H3), it is advisable to make the surrounding keywords on H2 or H3 have direct or close relationship with the head keywords. It makes sense for both Google bots and users.

Call to action on the home page

Google like rich content on our home page. On the other side, we can set Call to action on our home page, lots of business place the Call to action on the cover image on the home page, we can use call it hero image.

However, alongside reading through the home page, lots of website design forget to add more call to action. If we really have a great content and long reading on our home page, we can set several more call to action  but make them more logical and reasonable.

You can ask user to subscribe our newsletter, sending enquiries or book a consultation and etc, you could try to make different call to actions with different reasons.. But be aware to keep this in a good frequency.

Home page images and text

Google put heavy priority on text than images. We can try to write more text words if you can keep a good balance on the typography and aesthetics.

Sometimes, a chunky block of texts is not good for user, even though the text provides a good signal for the Google bot. But if users do not have good experience from the blocky text, it will then lead to high bouncing rate which is SEO’s enemy.

We can combine texts and images together. One of the good examples, we can write a 50-100 words description under the display image. If there is not enough space on the home page, you can introduce the ‘read more’ option for those users who want to read the entire text while saving space at the same time.

I have to say neither solely image or text will provide the best experience to user.  The image would catch users quickly, 0.5-1 second, however the text would explain the whole story more clearly and logically. We need to understand the relationship between image and text.

The ALT text of image:   when we hover our mouse cursor above a image and the text shows above that image is ALT text, unfortunately, Google won’t index ALT texts of images, but the ALT text would help Google bot know the context about the home page.

The footer on the home page

In the old SEO era, lots of SEO farmer put lots of keywords at the footer area together with lots of internal link.

Google won’t give the home page too much authority if you put too many keywords or internal link, anchor text on footer.

Whilst the footer shall not blindly contain repeated keywords from the website navigation menu, we can create group of keywords phase to supplement the navigation menu on the top of website.

Sometime, the navigation menu cannot list all options on a small bar. Perhaps, the navigation menu only can list major website categories. We can put more subcategory at the footer area.

When users can’t find the proper answer on the navigation menu, sometimes they can try to find answer from the footer. The footer has more space than the navigation menu.

If your service and production want to sale to different locations, such as Melbourne, Sydney and etc, you can even list the landing page links on the footer area.

How to design category and subcategory

The category and subcategory are correspondent to medium competitive keywords or we call those keywords more specific keywords comparing to the home page. As well, the user has more intention to make the purchase when they land on our category.

Regarding to category page, we have several challenges needed to overcome to make this page succeed.

• Avoid thin content
• Make easy navigation feature on the category page
• The category page shall have clear relationship with another category, subcategory page

Avoid thin content on the category page

In the category page, lots of ecommerce website want to get high conversion rate, thereby it displays many productions underneath the navigation. And all products are presented by image. We can add ALT text on image which we can let Google bot know something about our category page. However, Google doesn’t index ALT text on image, so we have little authority from the image.

In the future Google AI might be capable of reading the image information, however the text words take more account than image at this stage.

Some ecommerce ranks its category and subcategory page solely on the image but not much text, it is really difficult to get a good rank unless you are ranking within a narrow niche or the websites has high DA and strong backlink strategy.

There are some simple solutions for ecommerce website, a lots of ecommerce website write rich content after the productions; therefore, it is a solution to balance the conversion rate and thin content.

However, it is still not the perfect solution for category. As I mentioned in earlier chapters, Google would give high priority on the first 10,000 pixel, if the rich content place at this lower part of page, the page gets less contribution from the text words.

Some ecommerce websites write some brief descriptions, normally 50-100 words above the production image and make internal links towards blog, guide, tips content page, if user want to read the rich content, they can click this internal link.

It seems a good way to solve the thin content problem on the category page and reduce bounce rate on the category page. At least, it is a good signal for Google to assess the category page.

However, when the user clicks through the internal page, it will then decrease the dwelling time of this current category page.  Therefore, we need to find a better solution to improve the SEO performance.

We can add the tag feature on the category page, the tag feature can integrate with other filter feature, if user want to read some information or guideline when they browse on our category page, they can click the tab feature, it is not like the internal link, when user click the tab, they will still stay on the same category page.

The tab can contain 300-500 words and the tab is an option when the user wants to read and click this button, so it will not affect users who only want to see the image.

The 300-500 words on the tab area is only briefing of content, we can add internal link, if the user want to read the complete guide, blog and tips, they can then click the internal link.

When we create the rich content on the category, it is not only getting a better SEO rank, but at this same time, we can also increase ROI if the user wants to learn more specific information from the category.

The content written on the certain category shall be matching with the page theme, meta and description. For instance, if the category is about mountain bicycle, our content and guide shall focus on the bicycle for mountain environment but not a generic guide for all types of bicycles.

Relevance is always important for SEO rank; Google want to provide users with more specific answer. Sometimes, even you provide great contents to users, non-relevance will still let you make little result.

We need to carve our content according to user and image what they want to read at every stage of buying cycle.

FAQ on category page

FAQ questions are also good idea to get richer content while also improving the conversion rate of the category page. However, the FAQ questions shall not be identical on every page. Our FAQ shall answer the question which users would really question at this certain page.

The users would have generic question when they land on our home page, for instance, deliver time, warranty and etc, but users would give different questions on certain category, the user intention would switch more on the products, how to use the production, the production benefits on the category page, thereby we shall design the FAQ for each category page according to the user real desire and problems.

Make easy navigation feature on the category page

Website, particular ecommerce website has lots of productions and have complicate logic relationship, but for a general user who might be doing the search for the first time and have no clue on a huge website.

The navigation play as an essential factor that we must concern when we are designing our category page. The breadcrumb, navigation facet, search bar are some of the options, we can provide users with better UX when they hang around on our category page.

I have mentioned the breadcrumb at earlier chapter. In here, I quickly repeat again, the breadcrumb can tell the user which page they are located on and user can access upper and lower page through the breadcrumb.

The search bar is normally placed under the navigation menu, the user can search keywords, so they can find the accurate information or production immediately. One thing we need to keep in mind: we shall set similar search feature if the user would search the keywords that do not match the exacts product on our website or wrong spelling.

The navigation facet is always placed on the left side of category. When the category has lots of option or subcategory, we can list the navigation facet to assist the user to find the product faster and accurate.

A rule of thumb, we will put important filters on the top and less important filters at the lower part of navigation facet.

For instance, the type of production can be put on top of navigation facet. The colour, brand, price can be list on lower part of navigation. But the order of filter of navigation will depend on your business mode, sometimes the business owner think the price is a more important factor to consider on the certain category, then we can make the price on the top of navigation facet.

Likewise, the colour is always a less important filter or options for the navigation facet, however if majority your ecommerce customers are female and your products are shoes and bags, the colour would then be an important filter which can be listed on the top.

Normally, we can group 5-10 categories as one filter option, but if the group has more than 10 options that means the options are too much for one subcategory and user would feel overwhelmed if they see too many options to choose.

We can add the load more options for the user. Likewise, the popular subcategory listed on the top and less popular subcategory at the load more area.

Also, we can create other further subcategories for the subcategory if you find this subcategory is more important to the website and have more specific options needed to have deeper pages.

No follow link on the category page

Some giant websites have lots of productions and the each product has different, size, colour, price and texture. However, the attribution has quite similar content.

The filter can create the new links and more filters would create furthermore links. For instance, the size has 3,4,8 and etc, and the colour has yellow, green, white, red and etc. If all the possibility makes a new links, our category can make millions of links. Because the filter option and the number of links have exponential relationship.

The more options and filters give users a better experience, they would get more accurate results from the navigation facet. However, it would cause Google bots a heavy burden. If the Google bot crawl duplicate content or near duplicate page, Google would give us less DA in the future.

For such as colour, size, price is good for users, however, Google would feel those high similarity links are not worth to be crawled.

For the solution of a practice, we can give the code ‘NO follow’ on those links and told to Google not to crawl those links.

It would save our crawler budgets, as I mentioned in earlier chapter, every website has certain crawler budget. Particularly important for new websites, we want Google bot to crawl our important pages, so no follow link is a solution if we have too many links which share high similarity. .

The category page shall have clear relationship with another category, subcategory page

All the categories can be considered as traffic hub and silo. We can lead the category traffic to home page and subcategory via internal links and navigation menu.

At the same time, subcategories and blogs can reward the traffic and PA to the category.

Each different category is cousin of another category, we can use the internal link to build up the parallel relationship between each category, but we shall make the internal link with logic mind.

For instance, if the relationship of two category does not have direct or close connection, even we forcibly make the internal between two categories, but the users will not click through the internal link due to the human nature.

Sometimes, if we can’t rank well on some competitive category (keywords), we can consider using the subcategory as the traffic pillars to support the DA to the category. As well the production and blog can also do the same job.

In the long run, if we want our category keep in a good ranking at the certain niche, we need to make a great UX on the category, also pillar subcategories and relate rich content to support the category page.

Landing page

I would consider the landing page as another type of category page. The landing page is used quite often in Google ads. Marketing agencies like to create the landing page for their clients to improve the ROI at the certain niche.

For instance, the users might want to buy a family SUV, the other type of car’s information would then be useless information and even worse those irrelevance can reduce the conversation rate for the users who have clear mindset and goal to buy a SUV.

The landing page also works on organic searches. Sometimes, if we cannot compete on some broad competitive keywords but we can find a more targeting and narrow market niche.

Likewise, it also works for some business who focuses on different regions of the market. For instance, a South Melbourne based floristry shop also wants to promote flower delivery business in other suburbs. It is almost impossible to rank all suburb with just one page.

Thereby, we can create some different landing page which focuses on different regions. However, those landing page would have duplicate or near duplicate content, we need to add some unique content for each landing page to make it seem different from the Google bot and user’s point of view.

The simplest way is to mention local landmarks and maps. Or we can add in tailormade FAQ on the landing page.

How to get a better performance on production page

It would be the last chapter about the SEO website architecture. On the website hierarchy, the production pages have the lowest hierarchy while they  are normally the deepest pages on the website. However, the amount of product pages are immense and also they stand as significant money pages.

The users would have strong intention when they visit our production page, they would know brand name, mode, how much they want to pay, and production comparison.

The keywords occur on product pages are normally long tail keywords and commercial keywords.

In the production pages, we have several challenges need to tackle :

• Improve the productions ROI
• Create reviews to induce user emotions to complete the purchase
• Introduce related productions to make upsell

Improve the production page ROI

On the production page, we shall write clear and detailed description about the productions. For the skill of SEO copywriting about the production page, you could see our other guideline.

Regarding the production description, we can list the highlight of the production and major feature, benefits of production. The bullet points is a good way to showcase product highlight to the users.

The clear and brief highlights would lead the user to read the description body. Thereby, the highlight of production can be seemed as the header or open statement. A good highlight of production is good start point for a successful production description, so we need to spend a good amount of time to write highlights and encourage users to read our major content.

Reviews on the production page

We can encourage users to leave reviews on the production page. The users would mention the production feature and benefits, it can be a great content snippet and help new users to understand previous users’ experiences on the productions. As the group effect and production credit, it would increase the chance of purchase.

Reviews also provide unique and fresh copy to improve the SEO performance. Because lots of production descriptions have similar content with other competitors’ production page. The review would bring fresh contents to our production pages.

We can also add internal links (anchor text) on the copy of reviews, the link can lead to relevant subcategory and category pages. It is not considered from the Google bot’s perspective; the users also have higher chance to click those links.

Related production page

We can create related productions to increase the chance of upselling and dwelling time on our website. For instance, the user would buy a tennis racket on our production page, when the user make the purchase, that means they trust our website which now they have chance to buy other productions.

For those users who do not make any purchase on our production pages, perhaps the production does not fit perfectly with the users’ intention, or just not at a good time. The related product page would lead the users to browse our other productions.

Apparently, the dwelling time is always good signal on our website from Google’s perspective. On the other side, when the users spend more time on our website, that means the users would have less time on our competitor’s websites, thus we would have more chance to win the game.

The related products can be similar products, supplementary items or our popular productions (best sellers).

Conclusion： the SEO website architecture

In the complete guide the SEO website architecture. You have learnt:

• The sitemap of SEO website and elements of the website
• The definition of website page hierarchy, crawl budget, breadcrumb and internal link
• The relationship between keywords phase, keywords group and on the different page
• Use the FAQ and reviews to promote category and productions page respectively
• The relationship between the home page, category, production and blog page
• How to build up the home page, category, subcategory and production page.

If you have any questions on website SEO architecture or affordable SEO Copywriting in Melbourne, you could book a free consultation with TREE Studio today.