How to structure an agency website for SEO

I've worked in SEO for over ten years.

From my experience working in-house at MADE.com (RIP! the fools), I fell in love with eCommerce SEO & set up NOVOS, an SEO eCommerce specialised agency.

Merging my three unique levels of experience, SEO + eCommerce + Agencies, I've created what (I think anyway) is the best SEO site structure for an agency website, taking inspiration from an eCommerce domain.

Note: These days, in SEO, you need to think user-first, so this structure is also UX-led.

I've screenshotted some of the images from my course below.

The typical agency website structure

So, this is how most agencies would structure their website. I've used the NOVOS service offerings as an example, which is an eCommerce platform. For The Living House, this is done by room (e.g., living room, kids' room, etc.).

As the slides say, there's nothing wrong with this structure.

From an SEO perspective, you'd want to improve the internal linking across the website to create a strong content hierarchy.

I like to take inspiration from an eCommerce website when creating a hierarchy. These websites are often mammoths. I've worked on websites with over 25m pages, so to get all of those products and categories in a structured manner that users and Google understand is a big task.

Thankfully, agency websites are way easier, but you can adopt the same logic and hierarchy. Here's a typical eCommerce site structure for reference:

You can see the hierarchy and how the mass page (in this case, the products) all have a parent and sub-parent structure. For an agency, these 'product' pages should be your blogs. You will likely write hundreds of blogs to acquire SEO traffic and raise awareness of your services; therefore, they need a strong hierarchy like an eCommerce website.

This is what it would look like using the same example above.

And this is how I'd approach it for The Living House: who does interiors.

Essentially, you want to create a solid hierarchy, so you have individual 'hubs' across the website, avoiding the siloed approach of the initial example.

Benefits of this approach:

• The area of the website with the highest quantity of pages (e.g. blogs) all links to the category pages; these should be your commercial service pages. Now you have over 50% of your website internally linking to these highly valuable, commercial pages instead of just to the blog.

• There's no need for the generic blog category pages; you can merge these with your commercial pages. So your 'Shopify landing page' also has a feed of your Shopify blogs.

• Requires tagging of all blogs, which is good practice to get into to manage and audit your content

• Ensures content isn't lost; an evergreen blog you wrote five years ago is much more likely to be resurfaced and re-referenced in this 'hub' approach compared to one massive feed of all the blogs you've ever written.

I hope you found this interesting; SEO is the second-best channel for acquiring consistent inbound leads behind referrals and partners.

If you did find it interesting, I explain it in way more detail in my course, along with many other SEO tactics for an agency to use: https://learn.theagnc.co.uk/