SEO-Driven Content Architecture — Whiteboard Friday

Does all of your content come together in a structure that allows it to be scaled? Learn how to accumulate organic traffic, clicks, keyword rankings, and drive conversions by creating SEO-driven content architecture.

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm really excited to talk to you today. My name is Adriana Stein. I am the CEO and founder at AS Marketing.

Today I would like to talk to you about how to build an SEO-driven content architecture.

So to put this into a bit of context for why this matters so much, SEO today is really about the entire website. So you have to think about how does all of your content really come together and is built up in a structure that allows it to be scaled so that you can accumulate organic traffic, accumulate clicks, keyword rankings, and then, of course, drive conversions or leads depending on the type of business that you have.

So SEO today is not just about one blog article or changing some metadata or something like this, but it's really about thinking how can I build my website or how can I structure my website in a way where all of the content has a home and you know where things go as you build it out over time so that you can really build that SEO-driven engine.

So now let's take a look at my best suggestion for how to set up this type of website structure. So to make things simple, there are basically three different levels that you will see here, and this can apply to basically any type of business. You can see there is a category here for services, also a category here for products.

So no matter whether you have a B2B business, maybe you offer consulting, or if you're in SaaS, then you might be either on the service or product side, or if you're just purely e-commerce, you might just have the product section. But whatever the case may be, the most important thing to remember is just to have a home for all of your content and know where all of that goes and then also the level that it sits at.

So in this particular example, I have a business that offers interior design services, and then they also sell products that go into their design business. So in this case, this business offers both a service and a product, and that's why they are built out in two separate places.

Primary navigation menu

Now in terms of building the website structure and the three different levels, then you'll want to really start first here, and this is where the primary navigation menu is.

So if you think about when you enter into a website, particularly on the homepage, then that's where you're going to find all of these menu navigation options. So, of course, things like About or Contact, but in terms of SEO, really the most important pages are how you build up your sales-type pages, your conversion pages, and then the categories beneath them and the content that is built up underneath that kind of pushes them up.

So you'll really want to start here. What do you sell? This is going to be the primary navigation menu on the front of the website, but then it appears across the rest of the website as well. So this is considered bottom of funnel, which basically means that it has the highest level of purchase intent from a user. So a user is going to this page primarily to buy stuff.

Category landing pages

Then, underneath, you have your category landing pages. So if you take the general concept of a service, and then in this case there is an interior design service, then you may want to break it out into, for example, kitchen design, bathroom design, bedroom design, etc. and continue on.

Then all of that content is built out to cover all of those different page types. The same here with the products. So kitchen products, bathroom products, whatever you are selling in terms of products, you just group those like things together and those become your primary category landing pages. So they're a category of content topics that are similar that are then the most important for purchase.

So when users come in from the SERPs, when they type in something into Google, they're looking for something, then these pages should be focused on targeting keywords that you exactly want to sell. So the keywords that someone types in that are related to kitchen design services or kitchen products, for example, then they would come into these pages directly from the SERPs here.

Then they're essentially only one step away from conversion. So these are going to be your most important pages for conversion or, i.e., sales generating revenue for your business.

Blog navigation

Once you have this stage set up, then you'll want to start building out the blog, which is basically a body of content that it has two primary purposes. So if you see this arrow I have here, there is a lot of power built up into these pages through internal links.

So these types of keywords here, they're probably high-difficulty keywords, as in a lot of competition because a lot of people want to rank for them, they want to sell for those type of terms, so a lot of people are targeting them. So the rest of the content within the blog basically serves through internal links to both, one, build up topical authority, which is a very important ranking factor in SEO today.

Basically how well do you talk about all of the breadth of the content and cover all of the keywords related to that initial topic here and you can drive users there through the internal links from the blog. But also it's important for Google in terms of your site structure as well. Because Google functions in a way that the crawlers, when they're trying to understand what content is about, how a website is set up to understand, okay, what are the priority pages, where do I go from here, then internal links are also a massive section for that.

So there are two big purposes here for internal links, and when you have it set up this way that, okay, you have blogs that maybe focus on inspiring bathroom products and you can start a little bit higher up in the funnel. So someone who they're not quite ready to purchase, but they're just interested in something, and maybe once they're ready to buy some products, then they can be driven up to these pages.

Or same here for the design services. Maybe they're looking for 10 modern kitchen inspiration design ideas, and then you can send them from a blog article related to that up to the kitchen design page. So if we look at this holistically, then this is really the best practice in terms of ensuring that all your content functions together to build a really powerful revenue- driving engine from SEO and you can scale it basically indefinitely.

So the next step from this though, because you have to do some research to really understand how do I set all of this up, because there's a lot that goes actually into this. It's not straightforward to understand directly how to set up a content architecture like this.

So you need to start really first with keyword research. So in terms of keyword research, you can look at it from basically two different ways.

One is to start with two-word keywords. So if you see, for example, here "kitchen design," okay, that can be a primary keyword. But the intent behind that is a little bit vague, i.e., it's difficult for Google to understand from such a short phrase that's not very specific, it's difficult for Google to understand what to show there.

Also they're probably going to have high search volume and making it a lot more difficult to rank for. So rather than starting with two words, it's better to start, if you can here, either three to four-word keywords or long-tail keywords because then you can match the search intent behind that keyword much better.

You have a much stronger chance of ranking for that even with a brand-new website. It's also much less competitive, and you can match that search intent over time as trends change as well. So when new things come up, then it may not impact you as much because you've matched that search intent so well.

Keyword mapping

Then lastly, the best way to apply this keyword research into getting this sort of structure is to also split things into a keyword map.

So this is a very, very, very summarized and condensed version. For most websites, it's going to be a whole lot bigger. It depends on the size of your website. But I strongly suggest to do this because it kind of helps you organize your sense of your content strategy really for the duration that you're working on it because you have a database of where everything goes.

So this may be in the form of a spreadsheet, and then it will have columns that are based on the content type. So whether it's a product page, or a blog article, or some sort of conversion landing page for another purpose, you'll also have the title of the page or the H1 so you know what is this content about.

You also have the URL slug. So this is basically every page on your website should have a URL specific to it that focuses on some certain topic so that it's not going all over the place, and then it's mapped out here. Then the keywords that you've researched from over here, that's where you start to organize them here.

So, ideally, you have a focus keyword, which is the most important keyword that you want to rank for within your content, and then you also have some related keywords. You can start to build your topic and your content piece based on that, and it may be a little less likely that you rank for them. Maybe you have to move them later over with some optimization.

That happens when you keep track of your progress over time. But your goal really is to pick one primary keyword, and that's the main thing that you're targeting throughout your content. So once you have this built from your keyword research and you know where all your content goes, then you also know how to build your website based on that.

You know from this type of content, okay, here's what goes into my kitchen product pages. Here's what goes into my bathroom product pages. Here's what goes in the blog, for example, and then you just continue on.

I want to say lastly one really important thing that has changed quite heavily in SEO, especially over the last year, is this emphasis on zero-search volume keywords.

So SEO in the past predominantly was focusing on purely doing keyword research within an SEO tool. While that is still incredibly effective and I strongly suggest to use that in terms of informing yourself or your keyword research, I also strongly suggest for you to look deeply at your target audience as well. So look at other platforms that they use.

So it could be Reddit. It could be LinkedIn. You can find also great information in Google Trends to look at what people are talking about. You'll also see that seasonality can quite heavily affect listed search volume in keyword tools. So if you're in e-commerce fashion, for example, you'll have very different search volume for summer versus winter.

So things like that are not so well listed in keyword tools, and that's why it's good to really understand it from both perspectives. So look at what your audience is searching for, both from your own research of them, your own understanding of them, as well as what's listed in the SEO tools, and then you are most likely to really drive traffic to your website from both places in a very targeted manner and then structure it like this.

Then you have basically a very clear roadmap to driving you to SEO success and, of course, generating conversions, generating revenue over time driven by SEO. So thank you so much. That's it for me. If you'd like to discuss things further with me, then I'm also available on LinkedIn.

See you later. Bye.

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