12 reasons your page won’t rank – even though it’s optimized

What could be the matter if your perfectly optimized post isn’t ranking? Is the problem that your site is not on Google, or is something else going wrong? What is keeping your content from reaching that coveted #1 position? In this post, we’ll discuss many possible reasons why your page is not ranking, even though it’s optimized.

We’ve divided the possible issues you might be having into four sections:

Pro tip

Quick question: how’s your internal linking? If your content is optimized but not ranking, or Google is ranking the wrong pages from your site, it could be because you need to improve your site structure or fix your orphaned content. We’ve made some really neat SEO workouts to help you check and remedy these kinds of issues — check them out and fix those issues now!

Indexing and crawl issues

The first few points on the list all deal with indexing and crawl issues. Put simply, you can’t rank if your page or site is not on Google in the first place. If you find these topics confusing, you might want to read up on how Google works and how to start with SEO.

1. Your site/page is not on Google

If you need help determining whether your site is on Google, you can use the site: search operator in Google. Type site:yoast.com, and you’ll see a list of pages for that domain. If you type in the full URL of a specific article, you should see only one search result return. If you see your pages, this means that Google knows about your site and has put — at least some of it — in its index. Once you discover that your page is in the index, but you think it is not performing well, you might want to dig deeper.

an example of a site index search on google with yoast.com showing thousands of pages indexed
The site: search operator helps you find your site in Google’s index

How to fix it

Check your WordPress Reading Settings. For the Search Visibility option, if you’ve ticked the box ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’, that’s the most likely reason your site is not on Google. If that’s the case, uncheck that box and click to save your changes. If the problem is that only some specific pages aren’t showing up on Google, then you might want to review your Search Appearance settings in Yoast SEO. Go to the ‘Content Types’ tab and ensure your settings are correct.

2. Your site/page is still too new

If your site or page is new, it might simply be a matter of chilling out and checking back in a little while. There are many moving parts in getting your content crawled, indexed and ranked. Sometimes, it takes days or maybe even weeks for Google to finish its discovery process.

How to fix it

If you check and find your site is not on Google yet, you can install Yoast SEO and submit the generated XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help Google discover your website. You can also use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to determine how specific pages are doing. It tells you exactly how Google crawls and views your site.

3. Your content is noindexed

One of the most common reasons Google does not index your site or a specific page is that it has been noindexed inadvertently. Adding noindex meta robot tags to a page tells Googlebot that it can crawl the page but that the results can’t be added to the index.

How can you check if your page is noindexed? That’s easy; simply open the page and view the source code. You’ll find the code below somewhere at the top of the page. This tells search engine crawlers that the page’s content shouldn’t be added to the index, thus keeping it from ranking.

How to fix it

It happens! Even we occasionally make a mistake and inadvertently noindex a post. Luckily, it’s an easy fix. We wrote about how to set a piece of content back on the right track with Yoast SEO.

4. Your site/page is blocking Google with robots.txt

You might have told Google not to index your content, but it’s also possible you’ve told Google not to crawl your site at all! Blocking crawlers in a so-called robots.txt file is a surefire way never to get any traffic. Blocking robots is easier than you might think. For instance, WordPress has a Search Engine Visibility setting that does its best to keep crawlers out once set to Discourage search engines from indexing this site. Uncheck this to make your site available again.

this is the search engine visibility setting in wordpress without a checkmark
See that this option isn’t inadvertently checked

WordPress uses the noindex approach described above to handle the indexing of sites via the Search Engine Visibility setting. It does have a warning that it’s up to search engines to honor the request.

Besides telling WordPress to block search engines, it might be that other technical issues generate crawl errors, preventing Google from crawling your site properly. Your site’s web server could be acting up and presenting server errors, or buggy bits of JavaScript in your code trip up the crawler. Make sure Google can crawl your site easily.

How to fix it

If your robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling your website (or parts of it) and you want to change that, then you’ll need to edit the file. You can follow this guide to edit your robots.txt file.

5. You must enhance your index coverage

Ensuring that Google indexes your web pages is essential to succeed. Index coverage refers to the number of your site’s URLs included in Google’s search index. Even the most optimized content may not appear in search results without comprehensive index coverage.

To identify the issue, you must examine the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. This tool categorizes your pages into various categories and explains why pages are not indexed. If you notice many pages falling under “Error” or “Excluded,” it’s time to investigate further. One of the most common errors is ‘Crawled – currently not indexed’ in Search Console.

How to fix it

Ensure your XML sitemap is current and accurately represents your site structure. Please submit it to Google Search Console to help Google find your pages. Review and resolve any crawl errors such as 404s, server errors, or redirect issues. These errors can prevent pages from being indexed. Pages with low-quality or duplicate content might be excluded from the index. Focus on creating unique, valuable content that provides genuine user engagement. Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for crucial pages not yet indexed. This tool also provides insights into how Google perceives your page.

Google Search Console helps you understand why pages are not indexed

Technical issues affecting ranking

Is your page/website indexed but not ranking? Then, technical problems need to be checked.

6. You’re not ranking because your site has technical issues

Your website needs to meet certain technical benchmarks if you’re going to rank on Google! Loading speed, or how quickly your pages load, is important. Security and hosting quality are important too, and that’s not all. You can read about all the essentials in our article: things everyone should know about technical SEO.

If your post doesn’t appear in the search engines, technical issues could prevent it from appearing in the search results completely. You could have conflicting plugins causing problems, and we’ve also seen some themes that prevent Google from indexing your site. And, while Yoast SEO takes care of many technical issues under the hood, it should be set correctly to do that properly.

How to fix it

The fix you need will depend on the technical issues your website is having, and we can’t cover everything here. You might want to check the following points:

  • Ensure all your Yoast plugin settings are correct
  • Check that you’re doing things the right way to keep loading times down
  • Make sure your site is set to https:// and your security certificates are up to date
  • Upgrade your hosting plan
  • Check your plugins and/or theme aren’t causing problems.

If your technical SEO looks good and your site is indexed, you must dig deeper to discover the problem. Keep reading!

7. You’re being penalized for breaking SEO rules

If Google catches you using shady SEO techniques that it doesn’t allow — e.g., sneaky tactics like buying links or stuffing keywords into hidden text — your page or site can be penalized. When you’re already putting in the effort to make a good website and quality content, it’s counterproductive to try. Even when everything else on your page is perfect, if you’re doing something that Google doesn’t allow, you will have problems ranking (or appearing in the Google search results).

Most of these things are common sense, so you probably don’t need to worry if you’re not trying to trick Google or spam people. However, a few things used to be common SEO practices that can now lead to issues — check out our article about SEO myths for more examples of bad SEO practices to avoid.

How to fix it

You can check whether Google has flagged your page for these problems in the Manual Actions tab in Google Search Console (GSC). If you’re still new to using GSC, you might want to check out our introductory article. If you find an issue under the Manual Actions tab, read this help article to learn more about what it means and how to fix it.

Linking issues that affect ranking

A good internal linking structure and quality backlinks are important if you want to rank high. Google crawls the web, following each link it finds, so if your links are lacking, it can cause problems with ranking.

8. Your site doesn’t have a proper internal linking structure

Another reason your content doesn’t appear in the search results is that a crucial part of your SEO strategy is not in order. Don’t underestimate the importance of site structure – the internal linking structure – for your SEO strategy. Having a clear site structure leads to a better understanding of your site by Google. If your internal linking structure is poor, chances to rank high are lower – even when your content is well-optimized and awesome. 

How to fix it

Start adding those links! Make sure that your important posts and pages have the most internal links to them. But don’t randomly add links: make sure you add relevant, related links that add value for your users.

You can use the Yoast SEO orphaned content filter to find posts without incoming internal links. Yoast SEO Premium will help you even more by offering helpful linking suggestions as you write. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, you get various other AI features, like Yoast AI Optimize, that help you do the hard work. And if you really want to improve your site structure, check out our site structure training — which is also included in Premium!

Pro tip: Take care of your orphaned content and internal linking the easy way with our SEO workouts, available in Yoast SEO Premium.

Read on: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

If you just started with your website, your content won’t instantly rank. Not even if you have optimized everything perfectly and every bullet in Yoast SEO is green. To rank, you’ll need some links from other websites. After all, Google has to know your website exists. 

How to fix it

Creating incredible content is a good way to get links to your pages. High-quality content attracts clicks from readers who might share the content far and wide via social media. All this helps to get those links. Of course, you can do more to get links in a natural, non-spammy way: here are fifteen ways of getting high-quality backlinks.

To get (more) backlinks, you can reach out to other websites. You’ll need to do some PR or link building. Ask them to mention your site or talk about your product and link to your site. You can also use social media to get the word out! Learn all about link-building strategies in our All-Around SEO training!

Content and keyword issues affecting ranking

If everything else is as it should be SEO-wise, then your page or site is not ranking might be related to your content or keywords.

10. Your page is great, but there’s too much competition

Usually, a page doesn’t rank because there’s simply too much competition. If you optimize your content for competitive keywords and keyphrases, such as [cat behavior], [robot vacuum cleaner], or [real estate agent], chances are high that you won’t rank for that term. 

Check the results pages for your keyword to determine if this is the problem. Do high authority sites like Wikipedia or Amazon dominate the first page? Do you see many sites already firmly established themselves in this niche? Probably, your site doesn’t have the authority that these other sites have (yet). So you can optimize all you want, but unfortunately, that’s not enough to rank high in the search results if your niche is too competitive. 

How to fix it

If you want to rank for highly competitive terms, try a long-tail keyword strategy. Write content that targets related long-tail keywords and phrases before tackling the competitive keywords. If these long-tail articles start ranking, you can also rank for more competitive terms. Such a strategy requires long-term efforts, but in the end, it will pay off.

Read more: Why you should focus on long tail keywords »

11. Low-quality content or wrong type of intent

Another reason your content isn’t ranking is that it doesn’t match the intent of people searching for your keyword. Search intent is important for search engines: do people want to buy something, go to a specific website, or seek information? Even if you’re targeting a more long-tail keyphrase, if your content doesn’t match the dominant intent of searchers, search engines won’t show it in the results because it won’t be what people are looking for.

Let’s look at a few examples. Say you’re a dog trainer who wants to rank for puppy training services, so you optimize for [training your puppy], with transactional intent in mind. But if you look at the search results, you’ll see that there are informational videos, and all the results explain how to train a puppy yourself. So, searchers have informational intent. This can work the other way around, too. If you’ve written a step-by-step guide for your blog on making garden decorations, aiming to rank for [flower garland garden decoration], you may have trouble ranking for that term if people just want to buy that, not make it themselves.

Remember that not every search term has one dominant type of intent. Also, it isn’t impossible to rank with content for differing intent. Still, it can be worthwhile to look into this if your optimized content doesn’t rank in the search engines.

How to fix it

Unfortunately, you don’t have the power to change the intent of search engine users. But you can adapt your content strategy. If your optimized content isn’t ranking, look at the search results (use private mode) and analyze what you see. Is one specific type of result dominant? Are there images or videos? Which related queries are shown? This is where your opportunities are. If you find primarily informational intent for a query, you can write content to get people to your site, establish your brand as a reliable source of information, and stay top of mind when people want to buy something. If you find a lot of images in the search results, you may need to focus more on image SEO. Consider what you see on the results pages when determining your SEO strategy.

12. Your content lacks uniqueness

Even well-written and optimized content might struggle to rank if it doesn’t stand out. Search engines prioritize content that offers a unique perspective or provides additional value compared to existing articles on the same topic.

Check the search results for your target keywords and examine the top-ranking pages. Does your content offer something different or more insightful? If your page presents similar information in a comparable format, you may find it difficult to climb the rankings. With the advent of generative AI, we’ll see a wave of mediocre sameness appear in the search results. If you publish the same stuff, search engines won’t bother with it.

Generative AI can help create content but needs help maintaining quality and relevance. While AI can quickly produce large volumes of content, we should prioritize quality over quantity. You should make sure that the material is original and valuable to your audience. AI-generated content might be repetitive or lack diverse perspectives. It’s essential to refine it with your unique insights or expert opinions.

Additionally, the content should always align with your audience’s needs and search intent, as AI may not fully capture human nuances. Always comply with search engine guidelines regarding AI-generated content to avoid potential penalties or indexing issues. You can enhance your content strategy while preserving its integrity by using AI as a supportive tool rather than a standalone solution.

How to fix it

Quit simply; add unique insights and views. Add your own voice and incorporate original research, case studies, or expert opinions to set your content apart. Keep your content fresh with the latest information, trends, or data to maintain relevance and uniqueness. Encourage comments and discussions to build a community around your content, making it more dynamic and engaging.

Is your optimized content still not ranking?

Multiple reasons could prevent a post from ranking. Have you optimized your post correctly with Yoast SEO? Then, the most common cause is likely to be that the competition in a niche is too fierce. Unfortunately, SEO is a long-term strategy. You need to work hard and be patient. In the meantime, you can tackle many other aspects of your SEO (site structure, link building). Try to focus on all website optimization aspects and be the best result. It will pay off eventually!

Read more: Rank tracking: why you should monitor your keywords »

Coming up next!

Content clusters: What are they and do you need them?

Content clusters, or topic clusters, can be a great tool to show Google you have authority on a specific topic. When done right, a content cluster strategy can get you a higher position in the search results and grow your business. But what is a content cluster, and how do you ensure you’re doing it right? In this blog post, we’ll walk you through it so you can decide whether this content strategy fits your website!

Structuring your content into topic clusters can take time and effort. However, regardless of how new your website is, it’s worth your consideration. If you’re starting, this can be a great basis to structure the content you create for your website. If you already have content but need help with SEO, this strategy can help you organize your content and improve your rankings.

What is a content cluster?

A content cluster is a group of pages and posts focused on a particular topic. It has one page where the main topic is explained, also known as a pillar page, and loads of other pages on more specific parts of that topic. You can compare these pillar pages to cornerstone articles if you’re familiar with cornerstone content. These are your most important pages focused on a central topic that links to all your other content on that subject.

Although similar, content clusters and their pillar pages go one step further than cornerstone content. It’s a way to structure your content and pages with it. Structuring your content in the right clusters helps you establish authority on that subject. It shows Google and your site visitors that you have lots of knowledge on that topic. When you do this right, your content clusters will be a strong basis for your content SEO and help your rankings.

Most websites have more than one content cluster. You will probably want to show your expertise on a few different topics. These clusters will remain part of your content strategy, as you want to update its content and add new pages or posts. For example, when there’s a new trend in your field or when you encounter a new user question on that subject.

Examples of content clusters

Let’s make this concept a bit more tangible. We’ll show you two examples of websites that use content clusters to structure their content. The first example is the ultimate guide to remote work by Zapier. This page is an index for al Zapier’s different remote work content, categorized using subtopics. There isn’t any other content on the page, so it’s focused on giving you an overview of their content on remote work. You can click on the topic you want to know more about.

Screenshot of Zapier’s pillar page on remote work

We’d like to show you another example, as topic clusters come in many forms. This one is a page on fast fashion and why it’s bad by Good on You. This one is different as this website has chosen to already feature the most important content on the page itself. Below that (and throughout the text), they link to other pages where they dive deeper into a subtopic of fast fashion.

example of content cluster by Good on You
Screenshot of Good on You’s pillar page on fast fashion

When should you use content clusters?

As said before, you can use content clusters to structure content. Of course, there are other ways to structure your content that can also be a great choice for your website. So, how do you know if this is the way to go? Topic clusters are a great option for websites that still need building authority in their field. They make it possible to rank for less competitive, more specific keyphrases, also known as long-tail keyphrases. You might be tempted to focus on your main keywords, but these less competitive keyphrases will likely drive some initial traffic to your website.

When you’ve set up your most important content clusters and gained some traffic, probably through your long-tail keyphrases, you will also see your overall rankings increase. As a result, this will help you rank for your main keywords as well. Google is starting to see you as an authority in your field. Which will, in turn, help with the rankings of all your individual pages. In addition, using content clusters makes it easy for Google to understand the hierarchy of your website and how your content is connected.

Google wants you to show off your expertise

Google and other search engines want to provide users with the best content. The content will answer their questions and help them find what they want.

The more quality content you publish on topics in your field, the more different keywords you can be found for. The more content, the more Google can link to each other to understand your website. And the more authority you can build on that those topics. This is becoming more important, with Google focusing on E-E-A-T and helpful content guidelines when they judge website content. This acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and needs to be part of your content strategy.

How to create content clusters

So, knowing how to get started is good if you consider using content clusters on your website. The first step is figuring out what your pillar pages will be. What are the main topics you want to write about? Where does your expertise lie? To give you an example, at Yoast, our main topics are all in the field of SEO. So, our content clusters could revolve around keyword research, SEO copywriting, technical SEO, e-commerce SEO, and site structure. To name a few. Take the time to figure this out, as this will be an important part of your site structure.

1. It’s time for keyword research

To figure out what your main topics are, we always suggest conducting proper keyword research. What’s great about keyword research is that it will also give you loads of inspiration for the other content in your content clusters, which you will link to from your pillar page. After deciding on your pillar pages, plan for your long-tail keyphrases and add a few to every pillar page.

2. Think about the layout of your pages

An optional step I want to mention here is involving your UX designer when you have a first overview of what you want your pillar pages and other pages to look like. Thinking back to the examples, you can choose many styles for your content clusters. Do you want to create pillar pages that give an overview of all the other content, or do you already want it to show content on the main topic? We would suggest having content on the pillar page as well, as you also want these pages to rank for your main keywords, but of course, that’s up to you. You might have another strategy in mind. Just think about design and UX to make these pages accessible for your site visitors. You’re not just doing this for our good old friend Google.

3. Let’s start writing

When you know what your content clusters will look like, it’s time to start writing. Don’t underestimate this part. Start with your main pillar pages and build from there. Prioritize which content clusters must be set up properly first and take it from there. Unfortunately, there won’t be a moment when you’re done with your content clusters. This will be a continuously evolving part of your website, which calls for regular updates to keep your content fresh and interesting. But there will be a moment when you can take a step back, look at what you have so far, and be proud of the content you’ve created. That shows your expertise on the topics closest to your business.

4. Don’t forget your internal linking

An essential part of this strategy is the internal linking. Internal linking means adding a link to one page on your website to another. This is how you form your content clusters and how Google knows what content is related to each other. Here are a few things you should keep in mind:

  • Always link to your pillar page from the other pages in the content cluster
  • Use the pillar pages to link to the (most important) pages in the content cluster
  • Avoid linking too much to other (pillar) pages outside of the content cluster

Internal linking is how users navigate your content. It’s also how search engines determine what content is related to each other and what the hierarchy is. If you handle this properly, Google will understand the most important content. This can prevent keyword cannibalization and the wrong page ranking for the wrong search terms.

Don’t worry about it too much; most comes down to common sense. Keep the clusters and hierarchy of the content in mind when you decide what pages to link to each other. Your pillar pages should be at the top of the hierarchy in their cluster, which should be reflected in your internal linking. Of course, other content in your cluster can link to each other and even to content in other clusters. Don’t go overboard with this; use it to strengthen your clusters, not link everything to each other.

Are content clusters for you?

That’s it for now! We hope this blog post has given you some insight into what content clusters or topic clusters are. But also whether they’re a good fit for your website and what they can do for your SEO. The main thing to remember is that your content should be structured in a way that’s helpful for your site visitors, and this is another way to help you do that. Are you considering using content clusters on your website? Or are you already using them? Let us know in the comments!

Coming up next!

Why you should use a focus keyphrase only once

Your focus keyphrase is the keyword(s) you want your post or page to rank for. If you’re particularly eager to rank for a specific keyword, you’ll probably be tempted to optimize many articles for that keyphrase. But, that’s not what a focus keyphrase is for! You should only use it once. But why? And what if you desperately want to rank for that particular keyphrase? Don’t despair: we’ll tell you all about it in this post.

Table of contents

Having an orange or red light for the previously used keyphrase check in Yoast SEO? Here’s what this check does and how to turn that light green.

Don’t compete with your own articles

Why shouldn’t you use your focus keyphrase more than once? Because you don’t want to compete with yourself for a position in Google. This phenomenon is also called keyword cannibalization. By optimizing two different articles for the same focus keyphrase, you’re telling Google two things: that both are suitable for people searching for that keyphrase, and both should appear in the search results.

While having two articles rank for the same keyphrase isn’t necessarily impossible, you’ll find that it’s still very hard. Your site needs to have a lot of authority, especially if you want your two articles to appear in the top ten search results for the same query.

What if you already rank with one article?

If one of your articles already ranks, you may have enough authority to try and rank with a second one. However, if you’re not already ranking for a focus keyword, never use it twice! Instead, update and improve your original article. Then write another post that covers a slight variation of the keyword.

Do you think you might be cannibalizing your own content? Here’s how to fix keyword cannibalization.

Ranking for your desired keyphrase

What do you do if you want to rank for a particular keyphrase? Imagine you’re starting an online store for horse feed. You probably want to rank for [horse feed]. Seeing as you’re just starting, that’ll be pretty hard. You might think you need to optimize all your posts for [horse feed], but as we’ve just seen, that’s definitely not the case.

So what should you do? Your keyword research will give you some ideas about which other terms to target.

Content for your blog

If you have a blog – which we advise you have! – you could write an awesome, long cornerstone article about all the different aspects of feeding your horse well. Next, you should optimize this article for the term [feeding your horse] using our Yoast SEO plugin, and mark it as cornerstone content in our plugin.

In the Yoast SEO sidebar you can mark your content as cornerstone content

You’ll need to write a lot of posts, each covering a different aspect of your ‘head’ term. For instance, you could write and optimize articles for focus keyphrases like [best type of hay for your horse], [pasture management], [feeding thin horses], [feeding sport horses] and so on. These are called long-tail keywords.

If you link from these long tail articles to your ‘head term’ article about [horse feed], you’ll be telling Google which of your articles is the most important. This will help you with ranking your most valuable article. At the same time, you’ll also be attracting traffic for those long-tail articles.

Content for your store

So, what if you have lots of product pages for a type of horse feed? Let’s say you have a big assortment: feeds for thin horses, fat horses, feeds for sport horses etc. Should you optimize all your product pages with feeds for thin horses for [feeds for thin horses]? Nope. In this case, it makes more sense to optimize your category page for this term instead of all your individual product pages.

Can you use a focus keyphrase more than once?

Of course you can, but in most cases it’s not a good strategy to achieve great rankings for a keyphrase. If you want to rank for a keyphrase, dive a bit deeper into a topic. See what questions people have. Could you write long-tail articles about those questions?

Also, look at the other search results. Who is your competition, and what do they show? How can you distinguish yourself from them? When you’ve written your content, embed your articles in a kickass site structure to increase your chance of ranking!

What does the previously used keyphrase check in Yoast SEO do?

One of the assessments of the SEO analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin is the previously used focus keyphrase check. This assessment checks if words from your keyphrase were previously used in another keyphrase for other posts or pages on your site. If you’ve used it for another post or page, you’ll get a red light. Why? Because you should optimize only one page for a specific keyphrase!

What to do if you already used your keyphrase more than once?

If you click on the link next to the red bullet, it will guide you to the other article you’ve written about it. Take a good look at the articles. Check which one performs best in the search engines, or gets the most traffic. Keep that article, or merge the best aspects of both articles in the one that ranks highest. The free Yoast Duplicate post rewrite and republish feature can help you with that!

If you just found out you’re aiming for the same keyword or keyphrase with multiple articles, it might pay off to audit your content to find possible cannibalization issues. Fortunately, Joost has written a step-by-step guide on how to find and fix keyword cannibalism on your website!

Want to learn how to choose your focus keyphrase well?

A solid keyword strategy is indispensable if you’re aiming for your website to rank high. You should investigate which keywords you’d like to rank for, research what the competition is doing, then write excellent copy about your focus keyword. If you want to learn how to thoroughly perform keyword research for your website, read our ultimate guide to keyword research, or try our keyword research training; it’s one of the many courses you’ll get access to with Yoast SEO Premium!

Read more: Why and how to export your focus keyphrases with Yoast SEO Premium »

Coming up next!

Make a great website menu for your users and SEO

Website menus are one of those things you take for granted — until you encounter a really bad one. In the ideal scenario, users get an instant overview of what a site has to offer, and they can reach all the important stuff with just one or two clicks. In the worst case, users end up frustrated and unable to find what they’re looking for. This post will walk you through the basics of menu design and help you understand which options will work best for your site.

Your website’s menu is important because it helps users navigate your site. Sure, sometimes a user will arrive on the page they were looking for straight from Google. But usually, your visitors will want to look at various pages on your site. Or they land on your homepage and will need to navigate to the right page from there. That’s why your menu should be available on every page, and ideally, you would even have a sticky menu. Meaning that it scrolls down with the content to make sure it’s always in view. That way it doesn’t matter where your users are: they’ll always be able to find what they need.

Besides the essential navigation function of a menu, it’s also a neat way of letting users know what your site has to offer. You can think of it like a banner on each page, saying “This is what we do”. Make the most of that opportunity!

A great site menu should include links to the most important parts of your website. So it’s up to you to figure out what to put in it. But whatever content you decide to include, it’s essential to keep your menu usable.

One of the worst things you can do is overload your menu with too many links. This will make it look cluttered, and users will need to work hard to find what they need. Depending on your choice of menu design, some of the links could end up inaccessible if you have too many. For instance, if you’re using a drop-down menu, users might struggle to access links that appear off-screen.

Do: be selective or use alternative navigation options

The best option is to be selective about what you include in your menu, but for larger or more complex sites this won’t be possible. Luckily, there are lots of other solutions to a crowded menu. One solution is to create hub pages or categories, and add these to your menu instead. Then users can navigate to the relevant category or hub, and find their way to more specific content from there.

A second solution is to add sub-menus; these are additional menu options which only appear when the user hovers or clicks on a particular menu area. Sub-menus can be handy, but they can also become cluttered and difficult to use. So if you do use sub-menus, do so in moderation.

The third option is to include a search bar as part of your navigation menu. That way, if a user can’t see what they’re looking for in your menu, they can search your site for what they need. A search bar is a great feature to include, whether your menu is too cluttered or not. But do take some time to configure your search function well, because otherwise it won’t really help.

Tip: Yoast SEO Premium includes an Algolia integration you can use to improve your site search results. Using it will help push your most important content to the top of the results. Give it a go!

It’s easy to forget about mobile users when you’re using a desktop computer to build your website. But that’s the last thing you want to do, especially when it comes to your site menu design. A menu that looks good and works well on desktop might be completely unusable on a phone or tablet. Now that more and more people are using mobile devices to go online, it’s really important to consider menu design for both desktop and mobile.

There are two options for creating a menu that works on both desktop and mobile. You could add a responsive menu with a layout that adapts to the screen size being used. Alternatively, you can create a specific menu for the mobile version of your site. Whichever solution you choose, test it out on a few different screen sizes to make sure the end result is user-friendly.

There are loads of different menu styles to choose from. Hamburger menus, drop-down menus, and sidebar menus are a few well-known examples. There are also some very abstract and creative menus out there. However, the way that you implement these styles has a big impact on the overall impression and usability.

Here are some of the more standard options:

If you have a simple website and only one or two online goals, it makes sense to opt for a minimalist menu design. For example, Behance is a ‘network for showcasing and discovering creative work’, so it doesn’t need a complicated menu. They only include 3 menu options: ‘Discover’, ‘Livestreams’, and ‘Jobs’. This lets the user focus on the search field and the creative works being displayed instead.

Some sites use a more minimalist menu style to cater to their mobile users. A hamburger menu (which looks like this: ☰) is a popular minimalist choice for mobile sites as it takes up a very small amount of screen space. For instance, on the mobile version of Joolz.com there are three simple icons to help users navigate: search, shopping cart, and a hamburger menu. Clicking on the hamburger menu expands it to show a list of their product categories. Solutions like this work really well on mobile devices.

An image of a minimalist style site menu on Joolz.com

Classic menus are probably the simplest to work with. These focus on selecting the main categories or areas of the site and use buttons with text labels to guide users to the right place. A horizontal navigation bar is the most common type of classic menu. Sometimes menus like this have a few drop-down options below the main menu items, too. WordPress.org uses a classic menu design on its desktop site. Two of the menu items have a drop-down button to show more options: ‘Support’ and ‘Get Involved’.

An image of a classic style menu on wordpress.org

Another classic menu style is the sidebar. You can see this kind of menu in action on Google Maps. Usually, these kinds of menus can be opened using a hamburger menu button and closed again using the ×-button. This is a great way to offer full-screen content, as the menu is hidden most of the time.

An image showing the expanded sidebar menu in Google Maps

Mega menus are a kind of drop-down menu, but instead of having a single column of links under each main menu item, there is space for multiple columns. These menus are popular with larger and more complex sites, as they offer space for many more links than other menu styles. So in theory, you can be less picky about which links to include. Right?

Well actually, this supposed benefit can be the downfall of mega menus. Even though all the links can fit in there, including too much content in your menu can be overwhelming for users. That being said, if you limit yourself to a moderate amount of menu links, a mega menu can be a great option for your site.

On asana.com you can see they’re using a mega menu with a manageable number of links below each main menu item:

An image of the mega menu on asana.com

An example of a very full mega menu can be found on the World Food Program desktop site. In this case, the drop-down menu shows a list of countries, so users will still be able to navigate this menu quite easily. But just imagine if all these links were about different topics. Then users would struggle to find what they need, as if they were rummaging around in a messy drawer.

An image showing a very full mega menu on the World Food Program website

Other navigation options

You can do a lot with your site menu, but it’s not the only navigation option. Many sites add extra navigation links to their site header or footer. You’ll often see options to log in or change the site language in these spaces. However, if you do choose to add footer links you must disable infinite scrolling, or your users will never be able to reach the footer.

Another possibility is to create a sitemap page that users can access. This shows a structured list of all your site’s pages. These are becoming less popular than they once were, but they can still be a powerful tool for site navigation.

Does your site menu influence SEO? Sure it does! You’re unlikely to get a lot of internal linking benefit from adding items to your menu. But there are other ways your menu can benefit your SEO, and that benefit has to do with how users experience your site.

If users can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re likely to leave more quickly and not come back to your site again. Google can pick up on those kinds of signals. So a great menu can help your SEO, albeit in an indirect way.

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep your menu as simple as possible. Especially for smaller sites and those just starting up, a classic or minimalist-style menu should work great for you. If you have an enormous site you’ll need to think harder about what your users need to see, and how best to display that content.

Once you have a design you’re happy with, it won’t hurt to ask a few people to try it out and give you their feedback. If you’re really serious about making your site menu usable, you could carry out task-based user testing. Either way, make sure your website menu works for your users and provides them with a great experience!

Read more: Holistic SEO: Improve every aspect of your website »

Coming up next!

6 questions about redirects for SEO

A redirect happens when someone asks for a specific page but gets sent to a different page. Often, the site owner deleted the page and set up a redirect to send visitors and search engine crawlers to a relevant page — a much better approach than serving them annoying, user-experience-breaking 404 messages. Redirects play a big part in the lives of site owners, developers, and SEOs. So, let’s answer a couple of recurring questions about redirects for SEO.

1. Are redirects bad for SEO?

Are redirects bad for SEO? The answer is no; redirects are not inherently bad for SEO. However, it is crucial to implement them correctly to avoid potential issues. An improper implementation can lead to problems such as losing PageRank and traffic. Redirecting pages is necessary when making URL changes, as you want to preserve the hard work invested in building an audience and acquiring backlinks.

To ensure that redirects are implemented correctly and effectively, consider the following best practices:

  • Use the appropriate redirect type: The most commonly used redirect for permanent URL changes is the 301 redirect. This informs search engines that the original URL has permanently moved to a new location. By using a 301 redirect, you can maintain the ranking and relevance of the old URL and seamlessly redirect users and search engine crawlers to the new URL.
  • Update internal links: When you implement redirects, updating any internal links on your website that refer to the old URLs is important. This ensures visitors can navigate to the correct pages and search engines can properly index the new URLs.
  • Preserve user experience: Redirects should aim to provide a smooth user experience. Avoid excessive redirect chains, which can slow page load times and frustrate users. It’s also important to redirect users to relevant content that aligns with their intent. For example, if a page has been permanently removed, redirect users to a relevant alternative rather than a generic homepage.
  • Monitor and test redirects: Regularly monitor your redirects. Check for errors or issues, such as broken redirects or redirect loops. It’s also helpful to periodically test the redirects to ensure they function as expected.

2. Why should I redirect a URL?

By redirecting a changed URL, you send users and crawlers to a new URL, minimizing annoyance. Whenever you perform any maintenance on your site, you are taking stuff out. You could delete a post, change your URL structure, or move your site to a new domain. You must replace it, or visitors will land on those 404 pages.

If you make small changes, like deleting an outdated article, you can redirect that old URL with a 301 to a relevant new article or give it a 410 to say that you deleted it. Don’t delete stuff without a plan. And don’t redirect your URLs to random articles that don’t have anything to do with the article you’re deleting. Lastly, don’t 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage!

Bigger projects need a URL migration strategy. For instance, moving to a new domain or changing the URL paths. In these cases, you should look at all your site’s URLs and map them to their future locations on the new domain. After determining what goes where you can start redirecting the URLs. Use the change of address tool in Google Search Console to notify Google of the changes.

3. What is a 301 redirect? And a 302 redirect?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect informing visitors and search engine crawlers that the requested URL has moved to a new destination permanently. It is the most commonly used redirect for permanent URL changes. When implementing a 301 redirect, you signal that the old URL is no longer in use and that the new URL should be accessed instead. It is important to note that with a 301 redirect, the old URL should not be used again in the future, as it signifies a permanent change.

On the other hand, a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. This type of redirect is used to indicate that the requested content is temporarily unavailable at a specific address but will return at a later time. Unlike a 301 redirect, a 302 redirect suggests that the change is temporary and that the original URL may be used again.

You must consider the URL change’s nature when deciding which redirect to use. If the change is permanent and you have no intention of using the original URL again, a 301 redirect is appropriate. However, if the change is temporary and you plan on returning to the original URL, a 302 redirect should be used.

It is recommended to carefully consider the purpose and longevity of the URL change when selecting the appropriate redirect. If you are uncertain about which redirect you need, please read our article on which redirect to pick?

4. What’s an easy way to manage redirects in WordPress?

We might be biased, but we think the redirect manager in our Yoast SEO Premium WordPress plugin is incredibly helpful. We know that many people struggle to understand the concept of redirects and the work that goes into adding and managing them. That’s why one of the first things we wanted our WordPress SEO plugin to have was an easy-to-use redirect tool. I think we succeeded, but don’t take my word for it.

The redirect manager can help set up and manage redirects on your WordPress site. It’s an indispensable tool to keep your site fresh and healthy. We made it as easy as possible. Here’s what happens when you delete a post:

  • Move a post to the trash
  • A message pops up saying that you moved a post to the trash
  • Choose one of two options given by the redirects manager:
    • Redirect to another URL
    • Serve a 410 Content deleted header
  • If you pick redirect, a modal opens where you can enter the new URL for this particular post
  • Save, and you’re done!

So convenient, right? Here’s an insightful article called What does the redirect manager in Yoast SEO do, that answers that question. Or watch the video below!

5. What is a redirect checker?

A redirect checker is a tool to determine if a certain URL is redirected and to analyze the path it follows. You can use this information to find bottlenecks, like a redirect chain in which a URL is redirected many times, making it much harder for Google to crawl that URL — and giving users a less-than-stellar user experience. These chains often happen without you knowing it: if you delete a redirected page, you add another piece. So, you need to keep an eye on your redirects; a redirect checker is one of the tools to do that.

You can use one of the SEO suites, such as Sitebulb, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to test your redirects and links. If you only need a quick check, you can also use a simpler tool like httpstatus.io to give you an insight into the life of a URL on your site. Another must-have tool is the Redirect Path extension for Chrome, made by Ayima.

6. Do I need to redirect HTTP to HTTPS?

Every site should use the HTTPS protocol, but be sure to redirect your HTTP traffic to HTTPS. You could get into trouble with Google if you make your site available on HTTP and HTTPS, so watch out for that. Google prefers HTTPS sites because these tend to be faster and more secure. Your visitors expect the extra security as well.

So, you need to set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and you must plan this to ensure everything goes as it should. First, the preferred way of doing this is at the server level. Find out what kind of server your site is running (NGINX, Apache, or something else) and the code needed to add to your server config file or .htaccess file. Your host will often have a guide to help you set up a redirect for HTTP to HTTPS on the server level. Some hosts have a simple setting to manage this in one go.

There are also WordPress plugins that can handle the HTTPS/SSL stuff for your site, but for this specific issue, we wouldn’t rely on a plugin, but manage your redirect at a server level. Don’t forget to let Google know of the changes in Search Console.

Redirects for SEO

There are loads of questions about redirects to answer. The redirect concept isn’t too hard to grasp if you think about it. Getting started with redirects isn’t that hard, either. The hard part of working with redirects is managing them. Where are all these redirects leading? What if something breaks? Can you find redirect chains or redirect loops? Can you shorten the paths? You can gain a lot from optimizing your redirects, so dive in and fix them. Do you have burning questions about redirects? Let us know in the comments!

Read more: How to properly delete a page from your site »

Coming up next!

Site structure: the ultimate guide

Your site needs to have a defined structure because, without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.

Table of contents

What is site structure, and why is it important?

Site structure refers to organizing and arranging a website’s pages and content. It defines the information hierarchy within the site and serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers. A well-structured site facilitates easy navigation, enhances user experience, and helps search engines like Google understand and effectively index the site’s content. This, in turn, can improve the site’s performance by making it easier for users to find and engage with the content. Ultimately, an optimized site structure helps achieve higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates.

Importance for usability

The structure of your website significantly impacts the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, they’ll not likely become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.

Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to grasp what you’re writing about or selling instantly.

Importance of your site structure for SEO

A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:

a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site

The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site is mainly about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

b. It prevents you from competing with yourself

On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your content for high rankings. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you instead of against you.

c. It deals with changes on your website

The products you sell in your shop will likely evolve. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.

Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know the best strategy to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of the Yoast SEO academy. Access to Yoast SEO academy is included in the price of Yoast SEO Premium. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!

How to set up the structure of your site

So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure and then explain how to achieve this for your site.

What’s an ideal site structure?

Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: How should you organize your site if you’re starting from scratch? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with several levels:

  1. Homepage
  2. Categories (or sections)
  3. Subcategories (only for larger sites)
  4. Individual pages and posts

The homepage should be at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file your content under one of these categories. You can divide these sections or categories into subcategories if your site is larger. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your pages and posts.

An ideal site structure looks like a pyramid. On top, you’ll find the homepage and, right below, the main sections or categories, possibly followed by subcategories. On the ground, you’ll find all the individual posts and pages.

Your homepage

On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:

  1. Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
  2. You show Google that these pages are important.

Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which pages are essential to your business.

Beware not to link too many pages from your homepage, which will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, you can do many other things. Read our article on homepage SEO to find out what.

In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.

First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website, and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.

Furthermore, putting everything in just one menu is not always necessary. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, creating a second menu is perfectly fine.

For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and, in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that relate to the visitor’s account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.

ebay's top menu with a colorful logo, links to various sections on the site and a big search bar
eBay has multiple ways to start navigating from the homepage

Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. They will become less valuable for your users and search engines if you do.

Read about optimizing your website’s menu here, or enroll in our site structure training that includes many examples!

Adding breadcrumbs to your pages can make your site’s structure even clearer. Breadcrumbs are clickable links, usually at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve your site’s user experience and SEO, as you can read in our guide on breadcrumbs.

You can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins for your WordPress site. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.

Taxonomies

WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content; other CMSs have similar systems. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things — website pages, in this case — that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic can find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.

Categories

You should divide your site’s blog posts or products into several categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and sell shoes, you can divide this category into subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. These subcategories contain products, in this case, shoes, of that specific type.

Adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every page you write. Add your main categories to your site’s menu when implementing your category structure.

Read more: Using category and tag pages for SEO »

Tags

Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly concerns structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might interest a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.

Keep reading: What is the difference between tags and categories? »

Try not to create too many tags. You’re not structuring anything if you add a new unique tag to every post or article. Ensure each tag is used at least twice, and your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.

Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Ensure your tags are available to visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for visitors wanting to read more about the same topic.

Read on: Tagging post properly for users and SEO »

Contextual internal linking

Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, navigation, and taxonomies. On the other hand, contextual links are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.

Your most important pages are often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.

Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always uses the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to value and rank your pages properly. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.

Contextual linking for blogs

For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — your cornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.

The following metaphor might help you understand this principle:

Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. Some roads (links) lead to these smaller towns, but not as much as the big cities.

internal links metaphor roads

Keep on reading: Internal linking why and how »

Contextual linking opportunities for online shops

Contextual internal linking works differently on an online store with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.

There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to the product pages for your ecommerce SEO:

  1. link from a product bundle page to the individual products
  2. a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
  3. a ‘customers also bought’ section
  4. a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.

Learn all about setting up a great (internal linking) structure for your online store with our Site structure training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription. We’ve included lots of examples from real websites!

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your regular pages.

Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.

Search intent

When setting up your site structure, you must consider search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?

Consider different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.

When you have an idea of the search intent, ensuring your landing page fits your audience’s search intent is essential. Pages can answer multiple search intents, but you need a clear view of at least your most important pages.

Read all about search intent and why it’s important for SEO.

Cornerstone content pages

Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic; their main goal is not to sell products.

Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when discussing cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.

This article explains what cornerstone content is and how to create it. Want to set up your cornerstone content strategy? Our Internal linking SEO workout makes the cornerstone content approach easy to implement!

Product landing pages

Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, whereas product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.

You want to rank with these pages, meaning they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up of thousands of words, a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.

Michiel listed all the essentials of your product landing page here.

Maintaining your site structure

Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority in everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you must do it, or your website might become messy. To prevent that from happening, you need to fix your site structure and keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should be part of your long-term SEO strategy.

When your business goal or website changes, your menu must also change. Planning things visually will pay off when you start thinking about restructuring your site. Make a flowchart.

Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid but don’t seem relevant to your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.

Read more: Optimizing your website menu »

Rethink your taxonomy

Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories, and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode.

Do your product categories and subcategories provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or you wrote many blog posts on one subject and very few on others.

If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.

If you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemapre-submit it to Google Search Console.

Keep reading: The structure of a growing blog »

Clean up outdated content

You might be able to update and republish some outdated articles to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated, but no one reads it anyway, you might delete it. This could clean up your site nicely.

What you should know, in that case, is that you should never delete a page or article without thinking. If Google cannot find the page, it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and, thus, bad for your SEO.

Be smart about this! You need to redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting properly so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!

Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.

Avoid keyword cannibalization

Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you optimize your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, making both pages rank lower.

You’ll have some work to do if you suffer from keyword cannibalization. In short, you should research the performance of your content and probably merge and redirect some of it. When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This allows you to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.

Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. This tool can enhance your site structure by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links! You can identify your cornerstones by finding them in the column with the pyramid icon.

Quickly see which posts have internal links pointing to them with the text link counter in Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!

internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO sidebar
The internal linking suggestions even include other content types

Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider cornerstone content on your site. Those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.

Read on: How to use Yoast SEO for your cornerstone content strategy »

The importance of site structure

As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. A good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top and keep your website from growing out of control!

Want to improve your site structure but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy, our Site structure training, and our SEO workouts!

Keep on reading: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

Coming up next!

The ultimate guide to content SEO

Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. Read on if you want to learn how to create content that ranks.

Table of contents

Quality content matters now more than ever!

Have you heard about Google’s helpful content update? From now on, the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings.

We know that creating high-quality content isn’t easy. But our Premium SEO analysis can help! It’s just as smart as Google, helping you create rich and helpful content in a natural way and improving your rankings!

Improve your content with Yoast SEO Premium

What is content SEO?

Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything, from writing to structuring the content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.

Why is content SEO important in the first place? Because search engines like Google read your website, so the words you use determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. But without quality content your site doesn’t stand a chance in the search engines.

1. Keyword research

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is basically the steps you take to create an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Every content SEO strategy should begin with keyword research, because you have to know what your audience is searching for if you want to generate traffic. Keyword research helps you to discover the terms you should be aiming to rank for.

Keyword research has four steps:

  • Write down the mission of your business;
  • Make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for;
  • Look at search intent;
  • Create landing pages for these keywords.

If you do your keyword research right, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms for which you want the pages on your site to be found. This overview will serve as a guide for writing content on your website.

Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

Why is keyword research so important for SEO content?

Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. At Yoast, we regularly encounter clients who use particular words when talking about their products, while their customers use entirely different words. Writing and optimizing SEO content for words that people don’t use doesn’t make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you are using the same words as your target audience, therefore making the effort of optimizing your website worthwhile.

Terms we use in keyword research

Keywords and keyphrases

We tend to use the word ‘keyword‘ all the time. However, it doesn’t have to be just one word. After all, ‘WordPress SEO’ is a keyword, as is ‘Google Analytics plugin.’ So you can have keywords containing multiple words!

Long-tail keywords

The longer (and more specific) a search term is, the easier it will be to rank for that term. Keywords that are more specific (and usually longer) are usually referred to as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and focus more on a niche.

How many keywords?

It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords you should focus on. You just need to have a lot – as many as you can come up with. More than 1,000 keywords is probably too many though!

Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to create pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can gradually add content. Think about what keywords you would like to rank for right away, and which ones aren’t immediately important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the creation of your content.

Head or tail?

Classifying your keywords is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), while others are long-tail. Decide which are your most critical, high-level keywords – the ones that generate sufficient traffic for your website and best fit your business. You’ll probably only have a few of these general keywords for your business, the rest will be more down the tail. In the next section, we’ll give more in-depth information on long-tail keywords (and the importance of these keywords).

Tip: Make sure your homepage and the pages one level beneath that are optimized for the most common keywords! Content that’s focused on long-tail keywords (and therefore more niche) should be on the tail end of your site.

Keyword intent and search intent

As you’re doing keyword research, it really pays off to think about the search intent of users. Are they looking for information, or do they want to buy something? What is their goal when they enter your keyword as a search term? This goal is otherwise known as keyword intent. For some keywords, it’s pretty clear, like [buy leather sofa], or [how to train your puppy]. But it’s not always that simple.

Four types of intent

There are four types of intent:

  • Navigational intent: People want to visit a specific website, but rather than entering the URL, they’re entering a term into a search engine.
  • Informational intent: People are trying to find an answer to a particular question or information on a specific topic.
  • Commercial intent: People want to buy something in the near future and are doing research before making a purchase.
  • Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.

Search engines are always trying to answer the exact needs people have, and they’re getting better at it too. So, put simply, if 95% of the people searching for [change car tire] have informational intent, and you’re optimizing for transactional intent to sell tires, you’re probably not going to rank.

Check the SERPs

You can get a wealth of information from the results pages when you’re doing keyword research. If you want to find out what the intent is of people using your keywords, simply google those keywords and take a good look at the search results. Then, try to create content that answers the specific need that you distill from the results for each keyword. Tip: Read more about how to use the search results to create content for the right intent here.

Keep reading: What is search intent? »

Keyword research tools you can use

There are multiple free and premium tools available to help you with your keyword research. Yoast SEO comes with a Semrush integration that gives suggestions for related keyphrases, including search volume trends. Of course, this is not a full keyword research tool. But it can help you gain valuable insights, and find high-performing keywords! For other tools, please check out our article about keyword research tools.

Adapting your keyword strategy

Your keyword strategy shouldn’t be static. It should change and evolve alongside your company and website. It should evolve and grow with you. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

Stay on top of the changes in your company, and adapt your strategy simultaneously. If your online shop starts selling new products, extend your list with more keywords. If you’re aiming for new markets, it’s vital that your keywords are aimed at these new markets as well.

There are several keyword strategies to adopt. One of them is to try and rank for long-tail keywords first, then aim at more general keywords. But you could also start by focusing on general keywords before aiming for more long-tail ones. You can zoom in and pursue more niche activities, broaden your approach, adding more content on different things, or you can do both simultaneously.

2. Site structure

The second important aspect of content SEO is the structure of your site. First, I’ll explain why site structure is critical, then I’ll show you what an ideal site structure looks like. I will also give you tips on how to (quickly) improve your site structure without completely disrupting the core of your website.

Why is site structure important for content SEO?

There are two main reasons why site structure is an important ranking factor and therefore imperative for building SEO content:

a. A good structure helps Google ‘understand’ your site

The way your site is structured gives Google significant clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good site structure will, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that has attracted links from others to help your other pages rank too. Your site’s structure will help spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, this means you can use high-quality content you’ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.

b. A good structure makes sure you aren’t competing with your own SEO content

You will probably have multiple articles about similar topics on your site. At Yoast, for example, we write about SEO. If we wrote eight articles about SEO, Google wouldn’t know which one is the most important. That’s why we used our site structure to clarify this. If we hadn’t, we’d be competing with our own articles for Google’s top spot. So if you solve problems like this by using a sound internal linking structure, the result will be higher rankings overall.

The ideal site structure

Ideally, you should structure your site like a pyramid. At the top is your homepage. On your homepage, you link to some other pages (such as category pages). These pages, in turn, link to even more pages.

In an effective content SEO strategy, your keyword strategy and the way you structure your site work together. In a proper keyword strategy, you’ll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as long-tail (and niche) search terms. You should make a similar dichotomy in your site structure. Pages that focus on common search terms should appear high in your pyramid, while pages that are optimized for long-tail keywords should appear in a lower part of your structure. And don’t forget to let the long-tail pages at the bottom link to the pages higher in the pyramid!

Read on: The ultimate guide to site structure »

Practical tips on improving your site structure

If you’re serious about content SEO, you’ll most likely already have a live website. So it may be a bit late to set up your site’s structure in an ideal pyramid-like way. Don’t despair – there are still plenty of things you can do to improve your site’s structure and your SEO content.

Decide upon cornerstone content

You should focus your efforts on cornerstone articles. These are the articles that you’re most proud of, and that fit the mission of your website best. You want to rank for these articles the most. Fun fact: This ultimate guide is one of our cornerstones!

If you haven’t decided which of your articles are the most important yet, start thinking about that now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.

Keep on reading: What is cornerstone content »

Once you’ve decided upon your precious cornerstones, make sure you link from all your ‘tail’ articles to those cornerstones. That way, Google will know which articles to rank highest. You can read all about this in our article about incorporating cornerstones into your site structure. Good to know: Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced internal linking tool that automatically suggests relevant articles to link from.

Pro tip: You can use our cornerstone content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to check on all your cornerstone content pages, see how many internal links they’re getting, and quickly add more if necessary.

Use tags (but not too many)

Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure – at least, Google will understand it better. They group your articles about similar topics. Don’t overdo it, though. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing and poorly-structured site.

Avoid duplicate content

The same SEO content can turn up at multiple places on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you still get the content you came for. But a search engine has to choose something to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice. And what about other sites that want to link to your product? Chances are that some of them will link to the first URL, while others will link to the second.

However, if you make sure that all these duplicate posts link to the same URL, your chances of ranking top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. In other words: Canonicalization is the solution to duplicate content. You can configure the canonical URL in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO.

Remove old SEO content

Should you keep old content? That depends. You have three options: update, redirect, or merge. If the content on a page is outdated, remove it! But what about the valuable links to that page? After all, you want to make sure that you still benefit from these links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore. That’s where the second option comes in: redirect.

Redirecting pages is easy if you have our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, which can help you take care of redirects. Preferably, you redirect the old URL (301) to the new and updated page or product. You can also redirect to a related page if there is no replacement. For example, the category page of the specific product, or, as a very last resort, your homepage. This way, the (outdated) page won’t interfere with your site structure anymore.

Deal with orphaned content

The term ‘orphaned content’ refers to articles that don’t have any links from your other articles or posts. Because of that, these articles are hard to find, both by Google and by your users. What’s more, Google will consider this type of content to be less important! So if an article is important to you, you should make it clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving the problem of orphaned articles in our article about orphaned content.

Pro tip: Use our orphaned content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to quickly find and fix pages with no incoming internal links.

Deal with content cannibalization

Once you’ve been writing content for a while, you might have dozens of articles on any given topic. If these articles are kind of saying the same thing, search engines and users might get confused. Not to mention the fact that your content might compete against itself in the search engines. This is called keyword cannibalization. It’s not inherently bad, but it’s something you need to take a look at. Are your articles performing as well as they should, or is the competition hurting the chances at a higher ranking? Luckily, it’s not hard to find and fix keyword cannibalization.

3. Copywriting for content SEO

The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. Two very important things to remember: Write articles that are attractive to read, and that will make your audience want to stay on your site. However, you shouldn’t forget to make your SEO content attractive for Google. Just don’t go too far by optimizing your content so overtly that it becomes terrible to read. At Yoast, we suggest optimizing your text for search without adversely affecting the originality of your idea or the readability of your text.

Read more: The ultimate guide to SEO copywriting »

Start with an original idea

The first requirement for high-quality copywriting is to write original content. Your post or article should be ‘fresh,’ new, and original. It has to be different from all the other posts and articles that are already on the internet. Plus, it should be content that people want to read.

If you did your keyword research well, you now have a long list of terms that you want to be found for. This list can be a guide for you to choose from. A keyword isn’t necessarily a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post – an idea in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.

But don’t worry! Original SEO content doesn’t mean brand new content. Giving your (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as original content. Because your personal angle to a story will make your content unique and original. Of course, if your story is completely new, that automatically means it’s original.

Think about your audience

If you want to write original content, you should think about your audience and who they are. Also, ask yourself:

  • What do you want to tell your audience?
  • What will be the main message of your article?
  • Can you tell the purpose of your article?
  • What do you want your audience to do after they’ve read your article? (Do you want them to engage, buy your products/service, or read more posts?)

Thinking about these questions will help you to come up with an original idea for your post or article.

Content design and content SEO

Content design is a process that helps you produce content based on actual user needs. It doesn’t just help you figure out what your user wants, but it also focuses on what the user actually needs. Thinking about your content in this way will help you create content in the language and format that your user needs.

However, content design isn’t just a technique to help you produce better content – it’s a new way of thinking about content. If you want to know more about content design, read our post on content design: a great way to make user-centered content.

Copywriting requires readable SEO content

A key requirement for writing high-quality content is to write content that’s easy to read. Readability is important both for your audience and for Google. After all, not only people read your articles but Google does too.

If your text is well structured and clearly written, readers will be able to clearly understand your message. And so will Google! If your main message is clear to Google, your post is far more likely to rank well in the search engines.

Readability is about many factors, such as text structure, sentence length and writing clear paragraphs. You can read all about the importance of readability in this post. For more tips on readability, you can read our post on how to make an article more readable.

Content, context and search intent

As Google is getting smarter, it starts to understand content on sites better — thanks to a lot of developments in the natural language processing sphere, like BERT. It’s no longer just about the number of times a keyword pops on a page. It also takes into account the context of those keywords, like co-occurring terms and phrases, related words and synonyms. On top of that, as mentioned before, Google is able to understand queries of users better: it tries to determine what the search intent of the user is. Are they looking for a product or just information? Which pages fit that intent best?

All these developments mean that you should focus on more than just using your keyword often enough. It means you should also think about the words you use around it: do they make clear what topic you’re discussing? And, do you have the purpose in mind of the post or page you’re creating? Does it just provide information or are you trying to sell something, and does that align with what your users are actually looking for? Yoast SEO Premium lets you optimize your SEO content with synonyms and related keyphrases, making it even easier to add context to your articles.

Keep reading: Blog or vlog, which one is better? »

Optimize content for search engines and readers

The final requirement for writing high-quality content is to make sure the content is optimized for search engines. You want your SEO content to be easily found. Findability has to do with increasing the likelihood Google will pick up your content for the result pages. It’s important that you take this final step after you’ve written an original and readable post.

Yoast SEO helps you tweak your text just a little bit more. If you’ve written your article, focused on that original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you should take a look at the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO. Red and orange bullets indicate which aspects of your findability need a little bit more attention. You don’t need a green bullet for every aspect though, as long as your overall score is good.

Yoast SEO will help you to optimize your snippet preview as well. These tweaks can vastly improve your chances to be picked up by the search engines. Read more about optimizing your post in our article on how to use the content and SEO analysis.

Conclusion on content SEO

Content SEO is such a huge part of SEO. It encompasses every aspect of writing and structuring content on your website. Content SEO is essential. No one will read your content if it’s crappy. Like visitors, Google reads and scans your website text. Google’s algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. And we all know content is king. So, you need to write awesome SEO content, focus on the right keywords and structure your website in such a way Google understands it. It’s a lot of work, but it will pay off in the long run.

Read on: Blogging: the ultimate guide »

Find out how SEO fit your content is!

As you’ve learned from this guide, there’s a lot you need to do to keep your site’s content SEO fit. Take this short test and find out if there are some aspects of content SEO you may need to improve!

Coming up next!

What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?

Breadcrumbs are an essential part of almost every good website. These little navigational aids don’t just tell people where they are on your site, but they also help Google work out how your site is structured. That’s why adding these helpful little pointers makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a look at how breadcrumb navigation works.

Table of contents

What are breadcrumbs?

A breadcrumb is a small text path, often located at the top of a page, indicating where the user is on the site. On yoast.com, the path to our Keyword research guide is Home > SEO blog > Content SEO > Keyword Research > Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide. This trail immediately shows you where you are. Every step of that path is clickable, returning to the homepage.

An example of a breadcrumb path on Yoast.com

But why is this navigational help called a breadcrumb? When Hansel and Gretel went into the woods, Hansel dropped pieces of bread onto the ground so they could find their way home if they got lost. These crumbs eventually became the model for the ones we see on websites.

breadcrumbs in the google search results, showing the path for an article on yoast.com
You can see the breadcrumb clearly in Google

They also appear in Google search results, and you can take advantage of this if you use Yoast SEO or add the correct form of structured data to your site. Breadcrumbs in search results give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site.

Yoast SEO automatically adds the necessary structured data — a BreadcrumbList — in JSON-LD format. Just flip the switch in the settings, and you’ll see the relevant lines appear in your source code — although, depending on your theme, you may need to add a small piece of code to your theme. Find out more about our breadcrumb structured data in our documentation. You can use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add them to individual posts or pages quickly.

Remember that Google uses the structured data on your site to understand its structure and contents fully. So Google uses breadcrumbs both for crawling and rich results.

location of the Yoast breadcrumbs block in the WordPress block library
You can find the Yoast breadcrumbs block in the WordPress block library

Different types of breadcrumbs

You may have noticed that there are different types of breadcrumbs. These are the three most common ones:

Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs

These are the most common, and it’s how we use them on our site. They tell you where you are in a site structure and how many steps it takes to return to the homepage. Something like Home > Blog > Category > Post name.

Best Buy gives you a good idea of where you are in the store

Attribute-based breadcrumbs

Attribute-based breadcrumbs are seen most commonly when a user has searched on an e-commerce site. The trail comprises product attributes – for example, Home > Product category > Gender > Size > Color.

Office Depot shows every selection in the breadcrumbs

History-based breadcrumbs

History-based breadcrumbs do precisely what they say on the tin; they are ordered according to what you have done on the site. Think of these as an alternative to your internet history bar, so you get something like this: Home > Previous page > Previous page > Previous page > Current page. It’s also possible to combine these as Macy’s does in the screenshot below.

breadcrumbs history
Some follow you around

Advantages of using breadcrumbs

There are several advantages to using these helpful little pointers on your site. Let’s take a quick look at them:

1. Google loves them

Your visitors like breadcrumbs, but Google does too. They give Google another way of figuring out what your website is about and how it’s structured. Google uses them as a way to crawl your content. But, as covered earlier, Google may also use them in the search results, making your results much more enticing to users. To increase the chances of your them appearing in Google, you need to add structured data like Yoast SEO. Google Search categorizes information from a web page in search results using proper markup within the page’s body.

2. They enhance the user experience

People hate being lost. When confronted with a new location, people often search for recognizable objects or landmarks – the same is true of websites. You need to keep visitors happy and reduce friction as much as possible. Breadcrumbs can help your user experience since they are a common interface element that instantly shows people a way out. You don’t need to click the back button!

3. They lower bounce rates

Hardly anyone enters a site via the homepage — It’s all about organic search. That means any part of your site could be an entry point. You must develop a way to guide these visitors to other parts of your site if the selected page doesn’t meet their needs. Breadcrumbs can lower bounce rates because you offer visitors an alternative way to browse your site. Don’t you think sending visitors to your homepage is better than returning to Google?

How to add breadcrumbs

There are several ways of adding breadcrumbs to your site. Firstly, if you use WordPress, you can use one of the many plugins or Yoast SEO. If you use a different CMS, the process will be different. It is also possible to add them to your code by hand. If you also want them to appear in Google results, you need to use structured data in a way that Google understands. You can find more information on this in Google’s developer documentation. For SEO, Google doesn’t care where you add them — as long as you add them if that makes sense. Visitors will prefer them in a logical spot, though.

Yoast SEO has breadcrumb support built-in

Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. It will add everything necessary to prepare them for your site, not just for Google. Some themes come with support for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs baked in. In that case, you only have to activate them and set them up how you like. In case your theme doesn’t support our breadcrumbs yet, you need to add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:

' ); } ?>

This code can often be placed inside the single.php or page.php files just above the page’s title. Some themes want it at the end of the header.php file. It’s not a good idea to add it to functions.php since this could cause problems.

After adding the code, you can go to the advanced settings of Yoast SEO and switch on breadcrumb support. You can also control how their structure will look and what prefixes will be used. Find out more in our document on implementing breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO.

shows the location of the Breadcrumbs settings in Yoast SEO
You can find the settings for breadcrumbs in Yoast SEO > Advanced > Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs with a WordPress block

You can use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add breadcrumbs to individual posts and pages using the block editor. This is helpful if you don’t want to touch code or if you only want to add to a specific page. Adding them is incredibly easy — hit the big + icon to add a block. Then, find the Yoast SEO breadcrumbs block by entering the name in the search bar or scrolling down to the Yoast section. Alternatively, you can type /yoast breadcrumbs in an empty paragraph.

A breadcrumb path added via the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block

Conclusion

Despite using breadcrumbs, Hansel and Gretel still got lost in the woods. Don’t let that happen to your visitors! Breadcrumbs provide an easy-to-grasp way for visitors to navigate your site, and they instantly understand how your site structure works. Google loves them for the same reason. So use Yoast SEO to add them to your site easily.

Read more: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

Coming up next!

Where SEO and UX meet on your site

At Yoast, we believe that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach. With a holistic approach, SEO has a lot of “teammates” that have to work together. Simply optimizing your page titles isn’t enough. You also need to work on aspects like site speed, great content, and user experience (UX). In this post, we’ll focus specifically on the areas where SEO and UX meet. Why? Because both are vital topics to pay attention to if you’re running a website.

Common page elements that influence both SEO and UX

If you look at the basic elements on a page that influence your SEO, you’ll find a close relationship between SEO and user experience (UX). Below, we’ll discuss a few of these elements.

Page titles and headings

In general, understanding how to use the headings on your site is quite important. Why? Because they benefit your SEO and your users. An optimized page title and a related, visible

element will tell Google what your page is about. But the page title and

 element also inform your visitors what the page is about. In addition, subheadings such as

 also help both Google and your visitors to scan a page and grasp the general idea of that page’s content.

What about external links? They’re great for SEO, because they tell Google that you respect your sources. Plus, external links can increase the odds that your sources will link back to you in their content. For your users, however, external links provide a way to access background information. They also give you credibility, because external links show visitors that you’ve done your research.

Great content

If you provide quality content, people want to link to you, and visitors want to read what you have to say. Plus, they’re more likely to stay on your site. That’s great, because these incoming links and time-on-page are things Google will notice. In fact, Google could even start to consider your content as the main source of information on a certain topic. So focus on creating that quality content! For example, you can add images and videos to your posts and pages, which will make both Google and your users happy.

Site structure

Let’s say your post or page hasn’t fully answered the user’s question, then it’s great to point them to another page on your site. Why? Because you want to prevent users from clicking back to the search result pages. This is otherwise known as a bounce. A high bounce rate can have a negative influence on your SEO. It indicates to Google that you may not be answering your visitors’ search query.

One way to prevent a bounce is to make sure your site structure is clearly reflected on your page. In other words: No matter which pages a user visits, they know where they are on your website. It’s especially important that visitors know there’s more to explore on your site. So, how do you achieve this? Partly by creating (and maintaining!) an optimized menu, but also by making sure your website has a good structure. You can show your structure by using breadcrumbs, but you can also think along the lines of related posts and products. If you want more in-depth information, take a look at our site structure course!

And there’s another benefit to having a nice, hierarchical site structure: You make sure that Google can efficiently crawl your pages!

Site speed

You might already be familiar with site speed. Still, it’s good to address the topic again, because it heavily influences your SEO and UX. How? First, visitors don’t like waiting for your content to load. Just think about it: How long do you want to wait for a page to load? A few seconds at most, probably.

Second, Google only wants to spend a certain amount of time on your site to crawl it. That’s why it’s important to optimize your site speed. Try different techniques, such as lazy loading images. In addition, you can defer parsing of JS and CSS files where possible. That way, you make sure your page will show something as soon as possible.

Mobile experience

Nowadays, having a good mobile experience is extremely important. Luckily, the same rules that apply to your website also apply to its mobile version. It should be fast, well-designed, and have an easy-to-use navigation. After all, you want both users and search engines to quickly find what they’re looking for.

So think hard about the mobile version of your homepage! Does it cover the main areas of your website? Does it invite your visitors (and any search engine) to explore the rest of your website as well? Even button sizes could influence a user’s experience. You can always ask Google’s opinion on your mobile website via their mobile-friendliness test, or read our post on how to improve the mobile version of your site.

Conclusion: SEO and UX go hand in hand

As you can see, there are many areas where SEO and UX meet. It’s probably fair to say that almost every optimization that benefits your users (UX) will also have a positive effect on your SEO. And it’s the other way around too! If you deliver a poor user experience, you might see this reflected in the search result pages. Obviously, the impact may differ from optimization to optimization. But SEO and UX are clearly a great match in our larger concept of holistic SEO!

If you want to learn more about user experience (UX) and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!

Read more: What is UX (and why bother?) »

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