The importance of the structure of your website goes well beyond organizing content and content silos. It goes deep into SEO and might have different impacts on your website’s performance.
The properly organized system of folders can actually enable you to understand the reason for certain issues: why some products are not selling for some reason, whether changes in code have occurred over certain sections of your website, or whether some channel other than SEO has affected. Your folder structure can give valuable input on this.
However, it’s essential to note that ranking content doesn’t necessarily require a folder structure to be in the canonicalized (official) versions of the page. Both blogs and e-commerce sites can achieve good rankings without a rigid folder structure. However, when you expand your content or products into new niches, it may cause confusion for search engines to determine your website’s main topic or theme. In such cases, elements like schema markup, text optimization, and internal linking structures become crucial.
When a search engine struggles to grasp the central theme of your website and someone else’s site presents the information more clearly, the other site may receive priority in search results over yours.
This can be debated from various perspectives based on whether the method is right or wrong, but from what I have viewed to be particularly into effect, the more organized folder setup and other SEO practices tend to have more solid and positive effects on the ranking and performance of your website.
Benefits of Using a Folder Structure for SEO
Content and User Experience Benefits
The biggest advantages of implementing a folder structure for SEO are the creation of niche categories that complement the general theme of your company or blog. Categories are groups of resources, such as posts or product collections, and are extremely useful for users when they conduct some kind of non-specific search.
Because one post can’t cover completely the question of a searcher looking for information having relevance with some broad-term as “blue widgets,” if exact intent isn’t specified, then that itself is a challenge for search engines to depict relevant results.
Whereas the category page would become a relevant and coherent result, offering multiple ways to answer the person’s question. Category pages can be optimized greatly with titles related to their contents, H1 tags, featured images, schema markup, and cornerstone content about the sub-topic. This way, it increases the probability of grabbing users’ attention by supplying them with more detailed information.
It is without a properly structured system of folders that this traffic will not be harnessed with such ease and aptitude. Although there may be a place for a catch-all detailed guide, a category page allows the information in more bite-sized hunks, which minimizes having extreme digging within one page.
Further, such groupings of blog posts under optimized categories signal to the search engines that the blog posts come under the category’s topics and subtopics. It makes for better cohesion in topics, enhancing your on-site SEO.
Finally, a well-organized folder structure allows clear differentiation and definition of each topic covered by your website, further enhancing the user experience and making for easier navigation. Lastly, proper folder organization in addition to well-optimized category pages can greatly enhance the SEO performance and overall visibility of a website.
Business Operations and Analytics Benefits
Other benefits include the following, which come along with a well-structured category system of analytics and business operations: having such a category structure provides insight into traffic fluctuation in certain categories or pages.
From an SEO point of view, you can investigate the cause when a category or specific page experiences a drop in traffic. It might be due to the category being offline, incorrect meta robots deployment, or the need for updated content.
However, the advantages are not limited to SEO itself, since the whole company can benefit from this structure and identify and solve problems in other sections and departments, such as logistics, sales, finance, IT, and operations.
For example, if the sales of some product or product category are declining, then the category-based structure of your site is going to serve you a great deal in identifying the problems much quicker. You may start checking the traffic data in your analytics tool, contrasting the time period during which the sales fell off from the previous time period, and sorting traffic numbers by category. Thus, you easily identify which page received lower-than-usual traffic within a given category or on the whole site.
You can further speed up the troubleshooting process by adding referring channels to the analysis. This will help you swiftly see whether changes in social media ads or pay-per-click campaigns had an effect on traffic. This might also help you detect situations where pages have turned into 404 errors, detect changes within internal linking that have affected product visibility, or identify situations when SEO traffic dropped because of a meta robots update or an entire category being replaced by competitors.
By maintaining a folder structure for categories, you are able to identify whether the performance of a certain category has fallen, which channels it has low performance on, and quickly trace the causes of such issues.
Notably, the importance of category folder structure goes all the way from SEO through to company revenues and even translates to effective recovery methods in case of setbacks. Through well-organized categories, businesses can derive insights to make better decisions that will help in optimizing overall performance for continued success.
Consider Adding a Folder Structure to your Website
Having a folder structure in place can help your website in many ways. If you’re building a new site, or taking on a recovery project, I highly recommend implementing a folder structure if there’s little risk of losing present efforts.
However, for established sites with active traffic, one would need to evaluate the risk of making major changes. In case one stands to lose gold traffic, there is no need to make a change to your structure until one has a very valid reason to switch.
If you’re not sure whether to use a folder structure but think there may be some advantages to doing so, then you can easily experiment with the consequences. Take a set of topically related content pages that would obviously belong in a particular folder and move those as a test. Take ones that contribute very little to SEO traffic—very low or no traffic—so you don’t suffer from lost critical traffic as a result of the testing of the folder structure.
Before launching, ensure proper redirects are in place, canonical links are updated, the sitemap too, and any other precautionary measures. Also, remember to request indexing on different search engine webmaster tools for that new category and track its performance for a month or two.
You will then fully adopt the folder structure or adjust it to your comfort based on the results obtained during the test period. This gradual approach means less risk compared to making changes for the whole site at once.
In Conclusion
Considering how a folder structure is applied and running a test to determine how its impact could be one of the safest ways to find the best for your website without harming present visitors.
