Here is the first rule of onpage SEO: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
Never change your site structure if you have a profitable website.
Keep this in mind as I tell you the optimal site structure for a website. My recommendations may be different from the way you are currently structuring your website. If you’re already making money, don’t follow my advice.
- Never drastically change content on a page that is ranking well.
- Never change the URL structure of a page that is ranking well.
- Never change the template on a website that is ranking well.
It never ends well. Don’t do it.
Do not interpret my recommendations below as something that should be performed on an already-profitable page on your website.
You can feel free to use the methods I recommend below to (slowly) change pages on your website that are not ranking well, or for the purpose of creating new content on your website.
How to Structure Your Website
I will perform, as a demonstration, every step of this process for datascraping.pro so you can see these steps in action.
Before I get into how to structure your website, I’d like to go over a few terms I’ll be using: siloed content, keyword clustering and cannibalized content.
Keyword Clustering
In SEO, keyword clustering is the process of grouping related keywords with similar search intent together into clusters. Instead of optimizing a single page for just one keyword, this strategy allows a website to create one comprehensive piece of content that can rank for multiple, related search terms, improving visibility and organic traffic.
In practical terms, you will start with a long list of keywords you wish to create content for. How should you handle creating content for those keywords? Should you have one article for each keyword? No — we’re going to let Google tell us which keywords belong to which pages by using keyword clustering. It will be a method of sorting keywords to pages which should all theoretically rank for the same thing. After keywords are clustered, we will create a new page for each keyword cluster, and each page will be optimized for each keyword in the cluster.
I have an article where I show you how to do this with data scraping. There are also services available to help you keyword cluster, such as Keyword Cupid. I highly recommend you take the data scraping and programming route, as it will enhance your skill stack.
Siloed Content
You’ve gone through the process of clustering your keywords. What is next? Next, you sort those keywords to pages, and then sort the pages to silo structures.