Our SEO Reality Show is back and, in episode three, we’re putting site structure under the spotlight for Florida-based European bakery, Edelweiss. We tasked an expert agency with devising the best possible structure for the small business’ website to help it gain a competitive advantage and appeal to more customers.

The agency began by selecting competitors, narrowing down the list and selecting sites for placing links. Once complete, it was a case of preparing the site structure for the client and determining the number of new landing pages needed to attract relevant traffic.

Three data sources were utilized to prepare this structure:

• The current structure of Edelweiss’ site;
• The list of products provided by the bakery; and
• The structure of competitors’ websites.

The structure of the site in question can be found in a number of ways. You can: 

• Check the availability of an HTML sitemap and explore the sections contained within it;
• Assess the main navigational menu and/or tags or filters on the website itself; and
• Manually analyze the sections of your client’s and their competitors’ sites (remember that the structure of a competitor’s site might not be immediately obvious on its surface.

The main task at hand here was to optimize site structure so that every potential entry point was covered. The larger and wider it could be, the more opportunities the bakery would have to appeal to relevant users (but it was essential to keep it relevant, so the agency didn’t add pages or sections for the sake of it). Each of these pages were intended to be optimized for specific groups of queries, collected at a later stage. It is important to note here that the agency was transferring sections and not products.

1. That's how Edelweiss Bakery's website structure looks now

Let’s walk through the stages that were involved in creating the most suitable site structure for our client:

Step 1 — Analysis of the client's website and products

Firstly, it was necessary to move the existing structure of the client's site to a convenient place for subsequent editing. For the convenience and simplicity of visualizing information in this instance, the free program XMind was used.

The site only had one landing page, which would have been a suitable approach for an individual case in which a single landing page was required for one specific product. In our case, however, this simply wasn’t going to work because the number of goods and services provided by Edelweiss was much larger: 

2. Product list provided by the customer

With nothing to transfer but the main landing page, the agency needed to rely on the list of products and services provided by the client (above) to inform the sections to add to the XMind map. The process of creating the structure of the site via XMind can be seen in the screencast below:

3. The process of creating the structure of the site via XMind

Step 2 — Analysis of competitors' websites

Next up, it was time to check for HTML sitemaps amongst competitors and manually check menus, filters, and tags to spot the gaps in our XMind map, which helped bolster the potential structure of the client’s site and make it as comprehensive as possible. 

2. Checking a competitor's website structure

An example of a well-developed structure on the competitor's site buckheadbreadwholesale.com: a separate section has been created for each type of product, following the logic of site navigation.

4. Analyzing the site structure with Semrush's Site Audit tool

Once the structure was drawn in XMind, it was transferred to Google Sheets (to do this, go to the Outliner tab and copy the content for pasting), and then sent to the client for approval. 

Step 3 — Confirm the final site structure with the client

This stage involved analyzing the best site structure possible by whittling it down to the precise list of pages that reflected the products and services of the business in question. If there were pages or sections that weren’t relevant, they were removed to make the site structure more accurate and targeted. 

5. Our XMind map for Edelweiss Bakery6. Transferring the content of the XMind map to Google Sheets7. Determining category hierarchy in Google Sheets

The routes in the suggested list aren’t always entirely suited to the business, so it was natural at this stage to work collaboratively towards a shorter, more refined list, as you can see in the screenshot below:

8. The structure in XMind that the client agreed on

[Get Your Website Structure Template] 

The next stage takes us onto the preparation and development of the semantic core for the optimal site structure. Stay tuned for the next update in our SEO Reality Show series and recap on episode one and episode two! 

Infographic