Building site structure through keyword research

If you’ve dabbled in the world of SEO, you’ll already know that keyword research is important for understanding what your potential customers are searching for. Knowing this information helps you provide the right kind of content and address the right kind of questions on your website. You can create written content, video and audio around relevant topics found through researching keywords.

But one thing that can often be overlooked by beginners in SEO is how keyword research can influence the whole structure of your website. Let’s look at how.

Before you read through this guide, make sure you understand the basics and know how to do keyword research for free.

What is site structure?

Site structure is the different pages you have on your website and how they link together. The primary page of your structure is your homepage – the front door to your website that the majority of visitors will land on first.

Your site structure should be intuitive, which means it’s easy for visitors to find what they want. That can be through clear menus, links to related pages within the main content, and other elements such as breadcrumbs.

Your site structure should be clearly laid out via a sitemap, a basic list of pages and media that search engines (and occasionally real people) can use to understand the layout of a website.

Keyword research for site structure

When it comes to keyword research, you’re looking for topics of interest for your ideal audience. You’re looking for pain points, desires, and information requests. These will influence the kind of content that goes on your site, but can also influence the structure and help you plan your site layout to best serve your clients.

Select your keywords

Firstly, follow my guide for selecting the best keywords for your website. Create a list (its length will depend on your business and your goals) of all the keywords that are relevant to your audience.

Cluster keywords

From your research, you’ll discover a lot of keywords that relate to similar topics. Group these together into what are known as keyword clusters. These will eventually form some of your pages.

For example, if you run art classes, you might create a keyword cluster about painting with oil. This cluster may include keywords that relate to oil painting techniques and materials.

By clustering keywords into groups, you can decide what pages would be most useful to your users and can also decide on the structure of the individual pages. It also gives you the chance to see additional content opportunities where you can expand further on an existing topic.

You might also consider creating ‘sub clusters’, where you take more hyper-related keywords within your main cluster, and create a smaller cluster that focuses on a more niche topic.

Saying that, don’t niche down too much. There’s no need to create a new page for every single group of 2 or 3 keywords. Balance the number of monthly searches with the resources you have available and the amount of content you can create.

Turn clusters into pages

Once you’ve decided on your clusters, it’s time to convert them into pages. Start with the broadest clusters – these are likely to be your main menu items at the top of the page.

Unless you have a very large e-commerce site, your should only need a handful (maximum 5 or 6) top-level pages, including your homepage and a contact page. If you have more than this, look again and see if you can widen a cluster. You’re looking for a group of keywords that is broad enough to hold sub-clusters, but specific enough to summarise in one or two words.

A business that sells computers, for example, may have top-level pages called Computers & Laptops, Computer Accessories and Repairs & Maintenance.

Once you’ve decided on your top-menu pages, look at the more niche clusters and pick the most important of these. These secondary clusters will form your child pages. Remember that you don’t have to have sub-pages unless it makes sense for your business and website.

The computer equipment shop might look at the following sub-pages based on keyword clusters:

These pages can then be broken down further still, though I recommend a maximum of 2-3 levels in your main menu:

Page structure

Next, think about the structure of the individual pages. Here’s where you look a little deeper at your keyword clusters and – if you haven’t already done so – niche them down further. By doing this you can split your pages into different useful topics by using headers, influenced by your keywords.

A page from the computer shop might look like this, for example:

Create content

Now you can get down to creating the content. Each page needs to have a decent amount of helpful content, so don’t create a page for one or two keywords if you can’t provide an appropriate amount of relevant information. Instead, combine those keywords with another cluster.

Read my guide on how to write good website copy.

Grow and expand

The amount of clusters you initially turn into pages will depend on the amount of time and resources available to you. Remember, you can always start broadly and niche down as your business and website grows.

Start with the most necessary pages, and then create a plan to utilise more niche clusters in the future. Not only will this make your website more informative and help it scale, it will help you regularly create fresh, updated content – something that search engines love.

Conclusion

Keyword research is incredibly helpful for creating the content on a website. But it can also act as a useful guide for building a structure that provides users with an intuitive experience. Cluster relevant keywords into topics that will then translate into pages. Broad-topic clusters will form your top-level pages, and then you can create more niche cluster for child pages and page sections. Remember that, at all times, your goal is to be useful to your website visitors.