In the first lesson, we looked at a simple question:
Can someone find their way through your website?
Now let’s go one step further.
If someone lands on your homepage, can they understand how the different parts of your website fit together?
That is where website structure comes in.
What is website structure?
Website structure is simply the way your pages are organised and connected.
Imagine walking into a supermarket.
You expect similar things to be grouped together. Fruit and vegetables are in one area. Cleaning products are somewhere else. Signs help you move from one section to another.
A website works in much the same way.
Your homepage sits near the top.
Below it might be your main sections:
Home
→ Services
→ Products
→ Blog
→ About
→ Contact
And within those sections, you may have more specific pages.
For example:
Services
→ SEO Audit
→ Keyword Research
→ On-Page SEO
Or:
Blog
→ SEO Basics
→ Keyword Research
→ On-Page SEO
The exact structure will depend on your website.
The important thing is that related pages have a logical place to belong.
Why does this matter for SEO?
A clear structure can help in two directions.
It helps people understand your website.
And it helps search engines discover pages and understand how they relate to one another.
That does not mean Google needs every website to follow one particular structure.
It means your important pages should not be difficult to find or disconnected from the rest of the site.
A useful question is:
If this page matters, how would someone reach it from another relevant page?
If the answer is “They would need to know the exact URL”, you may have a structure problem.
Does every page need to be in your main menu?
No.
This is where website structure is sometimes misunderstood.
A clear website does not mean putting every page into the navigation menu.
If you have 100 blog posts, you probably do not want 100 links in your main navigation.
Instead, your navigation can point people towards the major sections of the website.
From there, categories, related content and internal links can help them move deeper.
Think of the menu as a set of signposts, not a list of everything you own.
How deep are your important pages?
Here is a simple exercise.
Start on your homepage.
Now try to reach one of your important pages by clicking through your own website.
How many useful steps does it take?
There is no magic rule saying every page must be exactly two or three clicks from the homepage.
But if an important page is buried behind several unrelated pages—or has almost no internal links pointing towards it—it may be harder for both visitors and search engines to discover in context.
The question is not:
“How many clicks is Google allowed?”
It is:
“Have I made an important page unnecessarily difficult to reach?”
Group related content where it makes sense
Suppose you run a gardening website.
You have articles about:
- growing tomatoes
- choosing tomato varieties
- tomato plant diseases
- growing roses
- pruning roses
- rose diseases
Putting related material into sensible sections makes the website easier to understand.
The same principle applies to a small business website.
If you offer several services, make it clear how those services relate to the main service area.
If you publish educational content, help readers find other useful material on the same subject.
You do not need to invent complicated categories simply for SEO.
Structure should make the website clearer, not create complexity for its own sake.
Internal links are part of the structure
Your menus and categories are not the only things connecting your website.
Links within your content matter too.
If you write an article about choosing keywords and mention that the next step is using those keywords on a page, linking to your on-page SEO guide gives the reader somewhere useful to go.
That link also helps establish a relationship between the two pages.
The important word here is useful.
Do not add internal links merely because someone told you that SEO requires them.
Ask:
Would following this link genuinely help someone continue what they are trying to do?
If yes, it probably belongs there.
Try this on your own website
Choose five pages that matter to you.
They might be:
- an important product
- a service page
- a useful article
- a course page
- a contact or enquiry page
For each one, ask:
Where does this page belong?
How would someone find it?
Which other pages naturally lead to it?
Where can someone go next from this page?
If those questions are difficult to answer, don’t start by redesigning the whole website.
Start with one important page and make its place in the site clearer.
The takeaway
Good website structure is not about building the perfect hierarchy for Google.
It is about making relationships between pages easier to understand.
A useful structure helps someone answer:
Where am I?
What else belongs here?
Where should I go next?
If your website can answer those questions naturally, you are already doing something valuable for both visitors and search engines.
Before you move to Lesson 3
Choose one important page on your website.
Write down—in one sentence—what that page is there to do.
Because in the next lesson, we are going to look at something that sounds simple but can change the way you think about a website:
What job should this page actually do?