Structure: the boring detail that can double your shop’s sales.

Structure and architecture may not be the most exciting things when you are getting started with your new online shop.

But it is worth investing a little time in them from the start. Just look at this example from Moz (then SEOmoz) of how a change in structure led to a rise in visitor numbers:

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5 good reasons to get the structure right

1. It makes it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for
2. With a good structure you can optimise your content for search engines more easily
3. If people leave your site quickly, it can also harm your ranking in the search engines
4. It makes it easier to link/refer to your pages. You get more links, and visitors land on your site to a better start.
5. A good structure from the start means fewer changes later on, so you keep your investment in search engine optimisation instead of losing it to later, repeated restructuring.

How to build a good structure for your online shop

When you create your structure, there are two important ground rules:

• First and foremost, focus on your visitors
• Compare it with a keyword analysis to get as many visits as possible from search engines

An example of how not to do it

If you sell wine, as the shop owner it may seem natural to you to divide the wines by region or château. After all, that is where they start out. Then by type, such as red wine, white wine and so on.

Illustrated, the structure of the online wine shop could look like this:

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And now with the visitors in mind

But very few customers search for wine starting from a region. Most people probably think about whether they want a red wine, a white wine or something else. And after that, they may have a preference for a region or something else.

If you ask Google how many Danes search for “Bordeaux”, the answer is very few too. Quite a lot of people search for the word “rødvin” (red wine). That confirms we are on the right track with the structure – also when it comes to creating content aimed at the keywords that can bring the most visits from search engines.

So a structure for a wine shop that has the visitors in mind can be illustrated like this:

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Optimised for both visitors and SEO

Now the visitors can find their way around.

But which words do people use when they search more specifically for wine on Google, for example? Do they search for “Italy”? Hardly.

It is more likely that they search for “Italian wine”, for example.

So the end result, with both the visitors’ need to find their way around and search engine optimisation in mind, could be as illustrated here:

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