Website Planning and Structure

SUPSTAR
Nov 25, 2017
6 min read

How to plan and design a new website structure in 8 steps

Proper website planning prevents poor performance

It is so tempting to dive straight into a front end design tool or start customising a website template.

Don’t do it.

A friend of a friend launched an ecommerce website a few weeks ago so I had a quick look at the website they created.

48% duplicate page titles
30% missing page descriptions
51% duplicate descriptions

The website does not rank in Google for any keyword phrases at all.

Then I did some keyword analysis for the website.

24,000 searches a month for one type of product; easy to rank topic.
5,300 searches for another product type; easy to rank.
2700 searches for another product type; no competition.

She dived straight into photography and the Shopify content management system without planning the website around the most important aspect; potential customers already searching.

You would not pay to rent retail space without an estimate of the passing traffic or previous store footfall.

Planning a website is no different because location and access to people interested in your types of services is crucial to your success and avoiding a poor performing website.

Planning a new website or re-designing and developing an existing site ?

The planning process works for both new and existing website.

Planning and structure before or after website contract secured

As a web professional you can charge clients for discovery work to give them an outline of the search volume, traffic potential and recommended pages that should be incorporated.

When you charge for planning you can identify if there is enough search volume and click potential to help reach the client’s online goals.

Doing this planning work as a separate project can also help you estimate the

price to charge for the website.

You can determine the market value of traffic and clicks and price your proposal according to market value as opposed to charging on a time and labour basis.

Imagine charging £2000 for a website when you could have invested in planning and charged 3 times that amount.

Alternately, secure the website project deposit and then start planning.

Whatever your methodology, failing to plan and structure a website will do you and your client a major disservice.

Website owners can be very impatient; who isn’t.

So if you can demonstrate results promptly after the website has been launched then you have the potential for ongoing work and even testimonials and referrals.

Putting together a basic sitemap is not enough.

When I worked in an ecommerce agency over a decade ago, the account team would add a sitemap image as an afterthought to client proposals.

This sitemap is useless with planning and research first.

With proper planning your design, content and development team will know exactly:

The structure of the website to build
The pages to create
The content to produce
The meta tags including the title tags and meta descriptions to write.

You will not need to chase the client to ‘please supply content’.

You should not have unnecessary billing and payment delays because ‘we are waiting on the client to write and supply page content”.

Website planning requires keyword and competitor research

I am frequently commissioned by web designers and agencies to do keyword research for some of their website projects.

I mapped out for an agency the structure, the pages and the content required for a brand new website for a manufacturing company in Canada.

A web design agency in Manchester, England were looking to redesign an existing website and decided to include my work as part of their process.

Keywords, site structure and website architecture are the foundations of a website

An architect and builder always put strong foundations into a building or house; a website also needs strong foundations.

Very rarely will a builder just start building a new house or extension.

They hire an architect who provides them with a blueprint and the likely materials required.

This blueprint also services as a guide towards pricing the project.

Planning a brand new website

When I start a new website project, I like to identify the keyword search terms that are the easiest to rank for.

This will give the client the best opportunity to rank in Google and get organic search traffic.

It is not wise to use the most popular search terms when you are planning a new website.

You will end up giving the client unrealistic expectations of organic traffic.

A new website with almost no domain authority will find it difficult to compete with established websites with lots of authority and backlinks.

Start the planning process with keyword research

I will ask about the client’s business, the industry they are in, what they sell, what price they sell at.

I ask who are their competitors and what the alternative solutions to their product that people use.

First of all this gives me a grasp of their market in advance of the keyword research process.

I tend to start my keyword research process with a simple Google search.

I’ll Google the main term.

Perhaps, I'll use the Google Adwords Planner.

But I would avoid this tool as Google aren't providing organic search traffic and organic competition; they are providing search "estimates" and advertising competition.

Plan with keyword research tools

In the previous version of this guide I used an alternative paid for keyword planning tool.

In this updated guide, the next thing I do is jump into Ahrefs and use their keyword explorer tool and look at the search volume for a couple of search queries.

I’ll look at the search volume for that query.

This is what you will typically see and find when you look for keywords with Ahrefs.

You’ll be posting loads of engaging content, so be sure to keep your blog organized with Categories that also allow visitors to explore more of what interests them.

If you see a keyword and there are only 50 or so related keywords it’s probably not a good topic to plan content around; the topic is too small.

Look at all the same as search queries.

At a minimum, I am looking at the UK market for search queries with 1000 plus searches a month and keyword difficulty less than 20.

For the US market, I’ll look for a larger search volume.

There’s no hard rule to this; just some insights you pick up from experience.

View all search queries

I filter these search queries down to a keyword difficulty of under 20.

Jot down keyword or page topic ideas

Now I like to use a text file or spreadsheet to start jotting down page topic ideas like this.

You can download the spreadsheet as part of this website planning guide.

Look at the top 10 results in SERPs

Specifically I’m looking at the traffic of the pages in the top 10.

If the traffic to all the pages is low, under 100, then this is perhaps not a topic with good search potential.

If 3 or more of the top 10 pages in the search results have decent traffic to their pages, I will examine their websites.

I will avoid non commercial looking pages eg: The Guardian.

Avoid non commercial and entertainment related keywords

Frequently you will see non commercial websites in the top 10 that get a lot of organic traffic, a lot of their organic traffic is non commercial and entertainment related.

So I avoid analysing these pages.

I can hover over each page and see the website’s total traffic and other data like their domain rating

Analyse top pages and competing websites

I want to see what other pages these websites rank for and to find page topic ideas to help plan my site pages and content.

Take the first part of the domain and paste it into the site explorer search box and hit return.

This will give me their top ranking pages, the organic traffic for the page, number keywords the page ranks for, the top keyword, search volume and their position.

Think about service pages and blog posts.

Now look at the above page URLs and consider if these pages and top keywords are what a potential customer would search and look for.

what a copywriter does ? - this query has limited commercia intent and the user would be a long way off looking for copywriting services.
write shorthand - not a query a customer looking to outsource copywriting would search for.
interview someone - not what a customer outsourcing copy would search for.
how to write a brief - the 5th page result this could be interesting - “how to write a brief for a copywriter”

Someone searching for "how to write a brief for a copywriter" is in the frame of mind that they want to communicate their requirement to an external writer.

So this query definitely has commercial intention and I shall add to my spreadsheet.

Look at competitors top organic keywords

After I have looked at the top pages reports for ideas then I look at organic keywords reports.

Now I click on organic keywords.click your country flag eg: UK