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

credit: Adam Riemer

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

“For the content clusters, is it helpful to have them grouped under a topic URL? For example, if you are talking about resources for caregivers, do you have mainURL.xxx/blog post name or mainURL.xxx/caregiver-resources/blog title? Does that impact SEO?”

That is an amazing question, and the answer is a big yes.

The folder structure of your website is important for SEO – but not just for content and content silos.

Your folder structure can help determine why a specific product isn’t moving off the shelf, when the code on a section of your website has changed, if a marketing channel outside of SEO has been impacted, and even used to support other teams within your business.

Before I jump into that, let’s go through your question first.

You can rank content without a folder structure being in the canonicalized (official) versions of the page.

It works for both blogs and ecommerce sites, but if you branch your content or products into new niches, you could cause confusion for search engines about what the new main topic or theme of your website is. That is where schema, text, internal linking structures, etc., all come in.

When a search engine cannot easily identify the topic and theme, and someone else makes it simple to understand, the other person’s site will likely have priority over yours in the search results.

It can be argued in many ways that this is right or wrong, so we will being researching some more definite answers so check back!

If you have any questions on content clusters call the experts at SPYDERwebmarketing.com at 877 377 9337 or email us at info@spyderwebmarketing.com