The Importance of Information Architecture for SEO | IA Checklist
Outline:
- What is Information Architecture?
- Why is IA Important for SEO?
- IA Checklist for Your Website
Determining the information architecture of a website is a hugely important process when designing and optimising the structure of a website. Making a website structure SEO-friendly in order to grow organically is a significant part of the preparation process. It should be well-organised in a way that facilitates both user navigation and accessibility to search engines. When there is a well-structured, logical and user-oriented information architecture, you’re likely to present the information you want in the best possible way for both users and web crawlers. On the contrary, if it is ambiguous and poorly organised, it can cause a significant loss in organic ranking positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages) whilst creating a bad user experience for your website, as well as other missed opportunities.
IA (Information Architecture) spans a very wide area of discussion but in this post, we’re going to give a short explanation of Information Architecture, its importance for SEO and a checklist, where we’ve provided useful tips and considerations to bear in mind whilst working on a website’s IA strategy. This checklist has been helping us out and reminding us of even the most basic considerations, that some website owners ignore as they focus on other website details.
So, let’s start with answering the very first question:
What is Information Architecture?
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Neurodiversity in SEO: How inclusive is your workplace?
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Have you ever experienced a time where you felt like you didn’t fit in? Take a few seconds, and think about that moment.
Now, imagine that moment happened every — single — day of your life. That is how life sometimes feels to me, and that is because I am autistic.
When I board a train, I see “normal” people sitting down in carriages –
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Introducing Travel SEO (UK) Report 2021
We’re very excited to launch our travel SEO (UK) 2021 report today. This has been a big project for us where we’ve put together:
- Trends and outlook of the travel sector in 2021, with insights from KPMG’s Associate Partner, Global Head of Leisure & Hospitality, Will Hawkley.
- In-house expert SEO views on the impact of Covid-19 – with a big thank you to Hannah Butcher (Re:signal), Sarah Wilhelmi (lastminute Group), Carys Kirkpatrick (Corinthia Hotels), Peter Myers (Avis Budget Group), Tahir Liaqat (APH), Felix Welckenbach (HomeToGo), Colin Carter (Weather2Travel.com) and Rob Kingdom (TravelSupermarket.com) for their contributions.
- Organic visibility winners/losers –
» Read more about: Introducing Travel SEO (UK) Report 2021 »
KPMG: UK travel sector trends 2021
Undoubtedly, 2020 has been a tough and unprecedented year for the travel industry.
In order to assess the impact and find out what is likely to happen later this year, I spoke with Will Hawkley (Associate Partner, Global Head of Leisure & Hospitality at KPMG), recorded in March 2021.
The key findings were:
- Government has launched a hospitality rollout plan alongside the progress of vaccines that gives some optimism to people.
- In Europe, the situation is still worrying, there are no allowances expected at least until the autumn.
- Pubs and restaurants clearly struggled, and it will be interesting to see how government support continues –
Launch of “It’s a good start” podcast
We are excited to announce that our podcast “It’s a good start” is live! Mike Lander, Chairman at Re:signal and CEO at Piscari and Kevin Gibbons, CEO at Re:signal, recorded 6 episodes for the first season of the podcast.
Learn from Kevin and Mike who share their experiences in entrepreneurship, running digital agencies / consultancies and looking at the buyer side perspective, so that you can take what’s useful and get off to a good start yourself.
The episodes include:
- Episode 1 – How did the Big 4 Consulting Firms become so big and successful
- Episode 2 –
Ecommerce SEO – Google core algorithm update impact
This month, Google has released the December 2020 Core Update.
Following this, we have updated our eCommerce SEO report to see how the 250 UK retailers’ visibility has changed and which brands have been impacted the most. Have a look at our interactive table showing the 52-week data (Dec 2019 – Dec 2020) based on SISTRIX Visibility index. Check how the core update influenced the other industries here.
Winners:
The brands who gained the most in organic visibility were eBay (both .co.uk and .com), Apple, Etsy, Currys, Smyths Toys, Next, John Lewis, Superdrug and SportsDirect:
Losers:
The brands who lost the most visibility were Amazon (.co.uk and .com), gumtree.com, argos.co.uk, asos.com, very.co.uk and others.
One to flag:
I’m always more impressed looking beyond the spikes and towards those who are achieving slow and steady continual growth. For that reason I think Boots and Tesco are worth a special mention too:
And at the risk of blowing our own trumpet a little, it’s great to see ASICS have the biggest YoY raw growth in the sports category!
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SEO landscape: everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed…
I’m very proud to have contributed to the SEO chapter of Understanding Digital Marketing by Damian Ryan – and now that the book is published I wanted to share with you.
The landscape of SEO
The one thing you can always be certain of in SEO is that the only constant is change! Ever since Google launched in 1998, they have kept us on our toes. They shook up the search engine landscape very quickly with their PageRank-based algorithm, which ranks pages in their search engine results based upon their link authority.
This development significantly increased the relevancy of search results. As a result, Google quickly started to build its market share to become people’s search engine of choice.
Fast-forward 22 years, and they’ve clearly cemented that position. As of January 2020, they have an 87.35% global market share (Statista 2020) and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.
Everything’s changed…
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Subscribe to our weekly SEO newsletter
During lockdown, we’ve been curating the best articles and discussions each week on all things SEO. This is for our in-house SEO Slack community, which has been very well received – so we’ve decided to make this public for everyone.
To sign-up for our weekly SEO round-up newsletter click here
Ross Hudgens (Siege Media) – top of funnel content marketing
Last week I had a great virtual conversation with Ross Hudgens, founder/CEO of Siege Media, to discuss content marketing approaches in order to drive organic growth:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_fn7hkvZy0Q
- Intro: 2:10
- Approach to identify top of funnel content opportunities: 3:49
- Venn diagram of making content marketing work: 5:52
- Combination of SEO perspective and what would attract links: 8:43
- “Campaign spike” vs evergreen content: 10:34
- When to have digital PR, media outreach approach: 14:19
- Potential differences between UK and the US market: 17:18
- Collaboration with in-house PR teams: 21:00
- Metrics to value content marketing activity in terms of business metrics: 27:54
- How to scale and build upon your content marketing: 32:50
- Agency growth / wrap-up: 37:32
» Read more about: Ross Hudgens (Siege Media) – top of funnel content marketing »
SEO strategy – how to get organic search results that really matter
Last week, I spoke with Christian Möllerström (Partner at Precis Digital) on the topic of how to create an SEO strategy to take your organic performance to the next level.
https://youtu.be/_MeMB_sNynk
SEO strategy – how to get organic search results that really matter from Re:signal on Vimeo.
This has covered:
- Why do I need strategic SEO? When do I know I’ll need it, and how do I quantify that?
- Real world examples of how and when a strategic SEO plan was created.
- Trial and error approach to continually learn and improve.
- 3 key components of organic growth.
Hope you enjoy!
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