Do Categories & Structure Matter More For SEO Than Just Content?

 Short answer: The structure of your folder can help determine why a particular product doesn't appear on the shelves.

This week's Ask SEO question comes from Julie, who asks:

“For content collections, is it useful to group them under a URL? For example, if you're talking about a resource for moderators, would you have the blog post name/mainURL.xxx or/mainURL.xxx/caregiver-resources/blog title? Does it affect optimization? search engines?

This is a fascinating question, and the answer is a big yes.

Your website folder structure is important for SEO – but not just for content and content silos.

Your folder structure can help determine why a particular product doesn't hit shelves, when part of your website code changes, if a marketing channel outside of SEO is affected, or even used to support other teams within you. a job

Before I jump into that, let's look at your question first.

You can categorize content without a folder structure in the basic (official) version of the page.

This works for both blogs and e-commerce sites, but if you split your content or products into new areas, you can confuse search engines about the main focus of your new website. This is where schema, text, internal link structures, etc. come in.

When a search engine can't easily identify the topic and topic, and someone else makes it easier to understand, the other person's site will likely take precedence over yours in search results.

This can be said to be right or wrong in many ways, so I'll leave it at that and provide some more specific answers based on the work I've seen.

Benefits of folder structure for SEO

Content benefits and user experience

The first advantage of a folder structure for SEO is having specific categories that complement the main topic of your business or blog. Categories, by nature, are collections of resources (collections of posts or products) and are a useful experience for someone searching for a non-specific term.

If a searcher is looking for information about blue tools, but does not specify whether he is looking for the best, how to choose the right product, what sizes are available, or ways to use them, then the individual alone does not create a sense post. To display the search engine.

A category page makes sense as a search result because it is a result that is primarily relevant in multiple ways to answer a person's query. Categories can contain relevant subheadings, H1 tags, featured images, layout, and main content.

If you don't have a folder structure, you limit your site's ability to reach this traffic.

Yes, a comprehensive, detailed guide can provide that, but the category makes it more digestible with less searching per page.

By positioning blog posts based on that optimized category, you help search engines determine that the post is part of that category's topic and subtitle.

It also allows you to clearly separate and define each topic covered by your website. So yeah, I think this should help you.

Pro Tip: By having these directories, you may use breadcrumbs to improve the structure of your site and the user experience.

Analytics And Business Operations Benefits

Next is the Analytical and Business Processes feature. If you have a category structure, you can see when traffic ends on a specific category or page.

For SEO purposes, you can visit a category to see if it is offline, bots have posted the wrong meta, or needs to update the content. But more importantly, the entire company can detect and solve problems. This holds true for operations, sales, finance, IT, and logistics.

If sales are low for a particular product or product category, our category-based site structure allows you to identify the problem in minutes.

Go to analytics and compare the sales decline with the previous corresponding period.

Sort traffic numbers (not SEO, all traffic) by category with time period comparisons. It displays pages that have lost traffic in a specific category or the site as a whole.

Then we can go a step further and find the problem in minutes versus days by adding referral channels. This allows you to quickly see the following:

• If your social media ads stop or your PPC performance drops.
• The pages may now be 404'd and undetected. You can add the page title in some cases, and it will say “Page not found” or whatever your 404 title is (I've used it a few times in the past).
• Internal links may have changed, and traffic searching for the product through blog posts and navigation no longer points there. This is more common with URL migrations and structure changes, where internal links are ignored, and 3XX redirects are not updated or removed.
• It's possible that your SEO traffic has decreased since Meta Robot updated to noindex. Or a rival has taken over your entire industry.
• Google may have stopped crawling because robots.txt has now blocked the category, and it no longer seems important, so competitors have replaced you. (This is an extreme and unlikely situation, just as an example.)

Having a category folder structure allows you to see if this is a category being stored, identify low channels, and troubleshoot the cause.

Category folder structure is not only important for SEO. This is critical to the company's revenue and recovery.

On your website, consider using a folder structure.

There are many reasons why you might want to have a folder structure on your website, so if you are creating a new one or doing a recovery project, I always recommend using it if you don't want to lose existing efforts. The risks are minimal.

If your site is already built and you're at risk of losing traffic, stick with no folder structure unless you have a reason to change.

If you think this is the right thing to do but are nervous, try the quiz.

Basically take a group of pages with related content that are in a particular folder and move them first. If none of them are important in terms of SEO traffic (they have none or minimal), you'll be able to see if the folder structure has an impact.

Pro tip: Make sure you set up your redirects and edit your anchor links, sitemap, etc. before launching.

Ask the various search engine webmaster tools to set up the category, and leave it for a month or two.

If you gain or maintain an advantage, make the decision based on your comfort level.

This is a less risky option than flipping the entire site at once.

Great question, and thanks for asking. Hope this answer helps.