Website architecture is all about how a website is organized, and it matters a lot in digital marketing. Most digital marketers focus more on the content, but taking a step back to look at the website architecture as a whole can bring great rewards. Here’s why.
Being able to navigate through a website to find the content you’re looking for makes the difference between whether you stay on a website or leave. This fact is confirmed by a swathe of research, which shows that at least half of website visitors leave a website after visiting just one page.
Also called ‘bounce rate’ to people who look at website analytics for a living, people only leave a website for one of two reasons. Either they think the website is not relevant to their needs, or they can’t understand how to navigate the site to find the website content they’re looking for. Often these two reasons are the same. Finding yourself on a particular website is not usually a mistake, and someone thinking a website is not relevant to them often really means they don’t understand how to find the information they need.
This all relates to website architecture. Often referred to as information architecture (IA), this is the backbone of the website, and IA identifies, defines and logically organizes the site content. The IA informs the user interface (UI) and navigation, which helps users find the information as it has been organized by the IA.
Some digital marketers don’t pay as much attention to website architecture as they should. Many think that if you have good content and have put enough effort into search engine optimization (SEO), the architecture itself becomes less relevant. In fact, website architecture is just as important even if you do all the other elements of digital marketing very well.
Here’s what to focus on when it comes to website architecture so your website starts performing better and retaining more visitors.
Simple Navigation
The first step towards better website architecture is to keep the top-level navigation, or menu bar, as simple as possible. This means not having too many top-level menu options, and labelling each menu item clearly so users know exactly what to expect when they click on it. You’ll probably need to do some user testing to check you’re using the right labels. Having a simple menu also helps you focus on what the most important landing pages on your website are. Once this has been identified, it is worthwhile working with some landing page optimization specialists to ensure these pages perform well in terms of SEO.
Look At Competitors
Many businesses look at their competitors to understand their product offering in depth, or the markets they are reaching. But most do not think about looking at competitors’ website architectures. This can tell you a lot about how they organize their information and thus how they structure their business. From a digital marketing perspective, if your competitors are getting a lot of website traffic and conversions from that traffic, their website architecture must be effective. Learn lessons from how they structure their site to gain meaningful business.
Look at Maximum Clicks
Another important aspect of website architecture is to ensure that information is never more than a few clicks away. Ideally users won’t have to click more than three times from the home page in order to find the information they are looking for. If there are any more clicks than that, you run the risk of users becoming frustrated and leaving the website. Even for a complex or large business, it should always be possible to organize content in such a way that doesn’t involve a lot of clicks for users.
Breadcrumbs
An explicit way of showing users exactly where they are in the website architecture, breadcrumbs appear at the top of every page of content. They show the parent pages that sit above the current page in the navigation, with all pages showing in the breadcrumb clickable too. When breadcrumbs are clearly displayed on a page, many users now prefer to use these instead of main site menus.
Create Sitemaps
Some websites have great website architecture and navigation menus, but they fail to publish html and xml sitemaps. These types of sitemaps help to make websites crawlable by search engines such as Google. This becomes part of a self-reinforcing process, because if search engines can see through this process you have a clear website architecture, your website will do better on search engines overall.
A number of users also use the html sitemap (usually published under the link ‘sitemap’ in the website footer) as a way of navigating websites too. It is essentially a list of all a website’s pages and can make content even easier to find for some users. The xml version of the sitemap is not usually public facing as this is what search engines need to find in order to crawl a site. However, both are essential to success in website architecture, and therefore digital marketing as a whole.