Yagmur Simsek says “My additional insight will be revisiting your website information architecture strategy so that it can support you with technical and on page SEO improvements and prioritization in your SEO tasks.”

Superb. Okay, well, I think there's a lot to unpack there. So first of all, what do you mean by your website's information architecture’s strategy?

“So basically, in our SEO world, I would say that your information architecture strategy is the process that you are defining how the user are reaching your important pages or to your categories and products, if your ecommerce, or to your contact form, or the page that you generate leads on your B2B site. So, this is the process that you kind of strategize those actions and then try to put yourself into your user’s shoes, and then try to give them like a direction in between your website, using your menu navigation, footer menus, internal linking from different pages, and filtered navigations, etc. So it's like a whole combination of the things that you need to, you know, start thinking and considering from the stretch, and then from the start of your website, and improve accordingly, and in years, probably.”

So just staying on that for a second, what's actually your process and your system for coming up with a website information architecture strategy? Do you have software, for example, that you can use to help you do that and visualize what currently exists, and how to improve it? Do you take it offline to use a big flip charts and get together in a boardroom and decide what the optimum strategy should be? What's your process?

“Yes, so I assume this is for like a new website, if I had to create a new website. For that process, I was recently in that place. Me and my ex-colleague, we were trying to create, like a side project for ourselves. So this was actually a very painful process, because I can swear that my friend sent me like, at least hundreds meeting invitations to discuss and brainstorm about our main navigation and URL structure for categories and products. So, you need to really spend time on it. I mean, I do it this way, I first checked my competitors’ websites and what they are using on their main navigation, how they structured their website.”

I'm sorry, do you just check manually? Or do you use software to crawl the competitor websites?

“Yes. So, there are lots of SEO tools that you can use to actually reach and kind of discover your organic competitors as well. So if you kind of know of your industry and the intent in your industry, let's say, I want to focus on these keyword groups, I want to be discoverable in these kinds of search online, you can use them as a start point, and then go to those tools, and discover your organic keywords, and also discover your competitors, organic competitors, when you search for those keywords, as well. So you may have different kinds of competitor in mind, you may have your brand competitors, but you also have your organic competitors. So, it's like a process that you need to combine and then analyze them, which ones are really, you know, close to your intent and what you want to achieve. So from there, I kind of get the data and then start analyzing their current structure either using crawling tools or like free version of Screaming Frog when I was doing a like startup search. Those kinds of tools that you can crawl the website, even if you don't have paid membership, and then get some ideas about competitor’s URL structures in their titles and how they focused on their anchor texts, on the main menu or in the different places’ navigations. So, from there, you can actually get some ideas and write those things down.

This is actually a manual step for me because I'm a digital person, but I'm also old school, I'm taking lots of notes, you know, trying to match them on my table and notebooks and then come up with like a wireframe sometimes and then a sitemap, if it's for main menu. So after that, I kind of put all these into spreadsheets just to make it clear, and then work on it with different approach. So, after that I conduct my keyword research for sure, because if you have specific categories and specific product range, if you're an ecommerce website, or if you're a B2B, you still have different categories on your website for your solutions, the solutions that you provide or services. And then I conduct the keyword research specifically for those categories to find the best relevant anchor text for my main menu navigation, and then kind of name my URL structure as well, in terms of the directories and folders, subfolders and URL. So after that, I kind of match these things and doing the mapping and kind of achieved the latest version. But I'm sure I will be revisiting my information architecture, like in three months and six months, because our competitors are not stopping and doing updates on their website, or new trends may be emerging from different users perspective. So we need to be aware of those changes and updates. And then we need to be closely tracking our competitors positions too. That's what I do and how I approach information architecture audit for my website.”

There are many follow up questions that I can ask. I'm not going to major in, there's too much, but I'm going to ask one more follow up question. You actually seem to indicate that you prefer to create some kind of wireframe approach for your architecture to begin with. And then after that, do your keyword research. So does that mean that your initial structure is based upon what your competitors are doing, and what products you offer? Before you actually do any keyword research?

“For me, it is much, much easier because if I first start with the keyword research, I may get lost in the big ocean, from my point of view, so I first gather ideas and what they are doing the best and what they are doing the worst, or it could give me like more options to extend my keyword strategy, like because I don't want to copy my competitors, but I want to be better than them. So, if I want to be better than them, I first need to make the best of myself or my website, while they are doing the best on their website. So, I need to match those performances and then add more on it like, this also allows me to see what my competitors are doing wrong on their website. From there, I'm kind of like, “oh, wow, this can be important for me”. So maybe let's first focus on that category, because they are not really doing great, so I can get some opportunity from there. And then also add more to my existing categories. So those kinds of things, gave me some insights in the beginning, and then kind of helped me prioritization on my category, keyword research as well, because it's like a huge process. And you need to be careful, while selecting your focus area too.”

That's a great point. So essentially, if you dive into your keywords too early, then you're possibly in danger of actually missing out on massive keyword opportunities, because you might get focused in on a particular niche or angle, and you don’t see every big picture opportunity. So how does this information architecture strategy support a business with technical and on page SEO improvements?

“So I would say, this is also a very big topic to discuss, but briefly with analyzing your information architecture, because if you're an existing business, what I'm suggesting here is revisiting the strategy, from there, you can discover your duplication issues, discover any issues with crawl budget, and discover any issues with crawl depth on your website. And maybe you've worked hard on the on-page optimizations for some specific categories, even created a huge content or you know, created your FAQs, created your subheadings and metadata and any content on the website or on the product page. But if you are not making those pages discoverable by user or if you're not directing user with the relevant anchor text, which meets the intent, you are also missing that opportunity too. So, there are two ways here, first you need to also consider your technical perspective on those fields, like filters, maybe your filters are creating duplicate URLs, but you're not aware of it. So and once you discover it and once you solve it, you may want to make sure that you are linking to the latest tutorial from your main menu or footer menu or from different internal linking, and URLs in your different page, like informational pages, etc. So these kinds of technical process of this site, but also, since you are also doing some on page optimizations and content creation, so you may need to merge those efforts together because your effort may be missed, if you are not dealing with your technical side of SEO. So, it's kind of a two-way street. But you need to be doing them in the same period, making sure that all going well in different sides of the process.”

And obviously, we could be talking about tens, hundreds of categories in your website and potentially thousands of pages. So how do you prioritize? How do you decide what needs to be done first?

“First check, obviously, the potential traffic and revenue approach and kind of do the forecasting in the way that I feel it's reasonable for my website and with the existing data I have on my website. But also, I may think changing or updating my main seasonally if it's fit my KPIs, and maybe campaign plans for marketing campaign plans, because for summer, your product range and categories could differ. And you may want to highlight some other collections and category pages, but for winter, it's different or maybe for specific period, like holiday season, or like Black Friday campaigns, or different sales and campaigns that you are thinking. So, all these kinds of things should also be considered in this process. And you may want to create yourself, let's say, quarterly mini plans, saying, “okay, this quarter, we will be focusing on this, this” and then it's actually good to include these on the main menu and then track the performance from there, and how many clicks and how people are searching on the search bar, and then reaching your categories as well. So, all these queries that you need to be clustering, and acting accordingly.”

So, talking about seasonal pages, say we're talking about Christmas pages, and you're an ecommerce site that sells item all year round, how much ahead of time do you need to actually start bringing your links up for your Christmas items, to give yourself the best opportunity to get ranked highly in Google?

“I would suggest at least three or four months before, because I know in different client side, of course, there are options, but I know that once you start recommending strategies, and doing your ideation, it's going to be a new page. Of course, if you have an existing page, you can just update it, even after the first year, and then you can just update the years and the content inside and the products, maybe a month or two months before but for any page, if you are creating new, I would say like four or five months because I know that it's going to be a process for keyword research, process for content briefing, and product selection, category selection in the merchant side. And at the same time, you will be working with copywriters, with SEO team on the client side. Or if you are already in-house, you will be working with your product team and marketing team accordingly. And it's going to be like a decision-making process, it's going to go, get back and then you will receive feedback. So, it's the process. And I would say that it's really easy and quick process, I will just start as early as possible. And then keep those pages live and evergreen for the next year. Because you can't do it every year. Then it's like a waste of time, effort, and also at the end, waste of potential revenue and traffic.”

Interesting stuff. So essentially, if you are going to be publishing new pages for new items for the winter season, then ideally, you need to be creating that content and publishing the pages in the summertime and encouraging your team to do that. Well, you've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So, what's something that's productive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“It's a good question. I would say that we shouldn't be ignoring our existing and current roadmap in terms of the technical fixes and strategies, while we are trying to focus on the new algorithm changes and features and maybe technological developments, then try to utilize them in our strategy because they may not be fitting our existing strategy as well. So, because in SEO, as we already are hearing, everything is changing very quickly. And every month we are discussing new stuff, new technological development and how it's going to change our lives as SEOs and how in our job we are getting more but at the same time, we are sometimes ignoring or shifting our focus to different areas rather than focusing on our existing issues. But if we can't fix the existing issues, especially in the technical side, we can't even go further even if we apply the new strategies on our website. So, I would say just not ignoring the existing things that were already on it and purely focusing on new changes, and try to get on with the page and then see what else we can do with the new technologies, I guess.”

Yagmur Simsek is an SEO strategist at Re:signal. You can find Yagmur over at yagmursimsek.co.uk.