How Website Structure & Information Architecture Should Mirror Your Business Goals

Information Architecture & Getting Inside Your Prospect’s Mind

Too often, businesses structure their corporate website based upon the business’ organization. This is often out of sync with a client’s needs, causing the business to lose money.

Your ideal prospect visits your website to see if you’ll help find solutions to her problems – not to read a self-serving brochure about your business.

Keeping this in mind, your information architecture must be based on the best ways to serve your visitor, based on an intimate understanding of ‘user logic’.

Let’s take a hypothetical case of a young couple planning a holiday to Norway. She looks at him and says, “Let’s stay at this hotel in Oslo, honey!”

And with that initial spark of desire, the journey of online exploration begins. They type the name of a hotel (or maybe just “Oslo hotel”) into Google and click the Search button.

Will they find your hotel’s website ranked on the front page?

Findability is only the first step. The title and description of your listing must address their specific problem – Where to stay on our trip to Oslo?  If you win the ‘click’, that delivers a prospective guest to your hotel’s website.

Now on your landing page, the couple wants more information. About their stay. About your facilities. Your pricing. Room availability. Tourism assistance. And more.

If your landing page copy and content matches their desire for knowledge and satisfies their needs, you’ll create trust and boost your chance of getting a sale.

This logical sequence – desire, findability, information, trust – is more or less constant across industries and niches. In one form or another, it exists in your field too. And your business website must match the flow, tap into the conversation that’s going on inside your prospect’s head, and join it to engage, inform, entertain and convince.

Before getting into the nitty gritty of content hierarchy and website structure that will help create this trusting relationship with prospects, I’ll take a step back to address another overlooked facet of the strategic SEO process.

Internal Link Structure & Information Architecture

Think about information architecture in the same light as planning and building a house. You would draw up a blueprint, then lay a firm foundation, construct a framework, and only then add on the layers that turn the scaffolding into a full fledged building.

Constructing an SEO optimized website that is strategically designed to fulfill the business goals of your enterprise follows essentially the same process.

When done correctly, a website’s information architecture can offer context for your content, present it in a manner that is friendly to search engine spiders and yet easy for human visitors to navigate, and ideally set up in a way that gives access to any section with just 3 clicks – or less.

The Myth Of “Home Page Focus”

Very simple, logical website structure (like I’ve explained before) that is based upon a user’s intent behind search keyword phrases will turn every category, sub-category and topic page into a “home page”.  This is awesome, because:

• Your visitor will click fewer links (remember the 3 click rule?) to reach other sections of your website – something every usability expert and designer intuitively values, and website owners must consider seriously since it impacts the way Web search works.
• You have less need for ongoing SEO to improve and/or defend rankings, and can focus it instead on growing your business with scalable solutions that last longer.
• You’ll become more authoritative on each level of your URL structure, as new topic pages added into your silo will bring additional value to the pages higher up in the hierarchy because of your strategic internal linking.
• You’ll have the freedom to sculpt PR and pass link value to handpicked relevant pages or topics outside the silo. For example, if you sell red shoes, you could link to related items like red belts (which may reside in another silo) and achieve higher sales conversions.
• You can control and direct the way search engine spiders and Web crawlers find, interpret and understand your URLs before indexing them.
• The strategic use of navigational breadcrumb links lets users zoom in to get a close up, or zoom out for a broader context.
• Such logical structuring is not vulnerable to algorithm changes and shifts in the future.
• Each level in the URL structure hierarchy becomes “almost a business or niche” in itself. Visitors get a great first impression about your business when they land on such a page, and will view your site as a place to go when they need help, knowing they’ll be able to easily find other related choices to select from.  This boosts your image and builds your brand.
• It is easier to get links from other niche blogs, forums and social networks. External links pointing to a sub-category page bring link value, leading crawlers to your site from relevant ‘authority’ sites that might have already established trust.  If you woke up one morning and search engines no longer existed, these sources of traffic would still be valuable.

Achieving the technical elements of SEO is easy even using free tools like Magento and WordPress. Combining elements of SEO and design into the best possible strategy will increase sales. A silo structure for Web content is not just about keyword stuffing. This has nothing to do with spamming, and your intention behind siloing your content shouldn’t just be to get more traffic. Your SEO goal is ultimately to maximize your business and profits.

Layer On Design – But Only At The End!

With the framework of your content website solidly in place, and a silo layout combined with good URL structure defined in consultation with an SEO specialist, you can now team up with a usability expert and a good designer to build a user-friendly, information-rich, self-sustaining website.

• Your site will now become the best salesperson in your organization, working day and night to generate leads and close sales, while serving as a brand manager too.
• The silo structure upon which it is based will order your content in a way that is easy for users to find what they are looking for, just like it is to locate books in a library. This brings order out of chaos.
• Each time you add fresh content or include a new product to your catalog or store, the carefully planned URL structure will build an internal link site-wide to other pages in the category, and up one level in the silo.
• Your information architecture will ensure that link value is passed along effectively and ensures maximum crawlability by search engine spiders.
• You won’t be stuck with time-consuming SEO efforts on an ongoing basis.  All new content added to the site automatically fits into its optimized structure, resulting in “auto-pilot SEO” as you enjoy content growth.
• Your website structure and layout will help search engines define context and theme on a very granular level.

But this happy result requires a preparatory SEO strategy because, if not done correctly, it can land you in trouble with a nightmare of duplicate content issues. It is not something you can plan to splash on top, like chocolate syrup on an ice-cream sundae! You must take these steps well ahead of the site building effort, in order to have everything working together in synergy to explode the impact on your business.