Can Someone Find Their Way Through Your Website?

You can have useful content, good products or services, and pages you have spent hours creating.

But there is another question to ask:

Can someone actually find their way through your website?

That matters to your visitors. And it matters to search engines too.

In Course 1, we looked at the fundamentals of SEO and how search works. In Course 2, we are going to start applying those fundamentals to the website itself.

And the first place to begin is not with keywords.

It is with structure.

What do we mean by website structure?

Website structure is simply the way the pages on your website are organised and connected.

Imagine a visitor arrives on your homepage.

Where can they go from there?

Perhaps your website has pages that connect like this:

Home → Services → Individual Service → Contact

Or:

Home → Shop → Product Category → Product

Or:

Home → Blog → Article → Related Guide

The exact structure will depend on your website.

What matters is whether people can move between the important parts of it in a way that makes sense.

Search engines also follow links between pages as they discover and understand content on a website.

Your menu is only part of the picture

When people think about website structure, they often think about the navigation menu.

The menu is important.

But it isn’t the whole structure.

Pages can also be connected through links inside your content, buttons, category pages and related resources.

For example, imagine you have written an article called:

How Long Does SEO Take?

Someone reading that article might naturally want to understand how to measure whether SEO is working.

If you already have a useful page explaining that, linking the two gives the reader somewhere relevant to go next.

This is called an internal link — a link from one page of your website to another page on the same website.

Internal links aren’t just there for search engines. They can also help your readers continue exploring a subject without having to work out where to go next.

Start with three simple questions

You don’t need to draw an enormous technical site map to begin looking at your website structure.

Choose an important page and ask:

1. How would someone reach this page?

Can they get there naturally from another relevant part of your website?

2. Once they arrive, what might they reasonably need next?

Is there another page that would help them continue what they came to do or learn?

3. Is the page part of the journey — or simply sitting there?

A page can exist on your website without being easy to discover through the links people normally use.

That’s the problem we’re trying to spot.

Think beyond the individual page

When you create or review a page, it is easy to concentrate entirely on what is on that page.

Its title.

Its words.

Its images.

Its keywords.

Those things matter.

But now add two more questions:

How does someone get here?

And:

Where might they need to go next?

Those questions make you look at the journey around the page — not only the page itself.

Your goal isn’t to add links everywhere.

It is to make useful connections where they genuinely help someone navigate your website.

Try it yourself

Choose one important page on your website.

Not ten.

Just one.

Now follow these four steps.

Step 1 — Start at your homepage

Try to reach the page as a new visitor would.

Is the route obvious?

Step 2 — Look at the page itself

Once you arrive, can you quickly understand what the page is about and what it is there to help you do?

Step 3 — Look for the next useful step

After reading the page, what might someone reasonably want to do or learn next?

Do you already have another page that could help?

Step 4 — Check the connection

Is there a clear and relevant way to reach that next page?

Now write down the route you followed:

Homepage → ______ → ______ → Important Page → ______

Your route may be shorter than this. That’s fine.

You are not trying to create a perfect website structure in one exercise.

You are simply making the route to and from one important page visible.

One thing to remember

A useful page shouldn’t have to do all the work by itself.

People need to be able to reach it, understand why they are there and, when appropriate, continue to something useful afterwards.

So the next time you create a page, don’t ask only:

What should go on this page?

Also ask:

How will someone reach it — and what might they need after it?

That small change in perspective can help you build a website that is easier to explore for both visitors and search engines.

Lesson takeaway

Don’t review a page only by what is on it. Look at how people arrive and where they can go from there.

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A quick check before you move on

Pick one important page on your website and complete this sentence:

People can reach this page from ______, and from here they can go to ______.

If you can’t easily fill in one of those blanks, you’ve just found something worth reviewing.

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Next lesson

In the next lesson, we’ll look more closely at what job an individual page is supposed to do — because before you optimise a page, you need to be clear about what you want that page to achieve.

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