When people are looking to have a website created they immediately get caught up in the visual layout. They tend to place a huge importance on the colours, graphics, and images without really putting too much thought into how the website is going to be organized for flow. Yes, all of those things are important for a website, but without a strategic sitemap it won’t matter how visually appealing your digital presence is. Thankfully, you have your friendly web designers here to keep you on the straight and narrow!
Sitemaps are a listing of all of the pages on your website, they tell both humans and search engine web crawlers what your website is all about and the kinds of information (or content) that it contains. A well-organized sitemap will help with your organic ranking on search engines and it will help optimize your site for conversions. Unfortunately, all too often we see websites where it is clear that the map was a hurried afterthought created after the website was already halfway built.
Your website is the backbone of your marketing efforts and a huge investment, a solid sitemap is incredibly important for a variety of reasons.
Clarity
By developing a sitemap in the early stages of web design, you are helping bring clarity to your long term web goals. Bring all of your departments together to find out their overall goals for your digital presence and narrow those down to three major wants. It’s almost guaranteed that your primary goal will be to convert your audience, so design your sitemap to make that the priority. Of course, your friendly website design company can help you narrow your focus and get your map developed flawlessly.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the holy grail of marketing these days. Everyone wants to show up organically on the first few pages of Google. Having the proper on page SEO will help you get there, so will having a clearly laid out, sitemap will also help search engine crawlers understand what kind of information is on your website and help them understand any changes as they happen. Essentially, having a proper sitemap is web design best practice, so search engines are expecting your map to be accurately engineered or your Google ranking will actually drop.
Flow
Yet another huge benefit to sitemaps is that they significantly help the user flow of your site, which in turn helps to convert your audience into loyal customers. By being intuitive and easy to navigate, and having strong calls to action, your website will be able to guide potential customers exactly where you want them – making your whole site worthwhile!
If you are having a hard time figuring out what your sitemap should look like or the best way to engineer an accurate map, give us a call! We are a website design company with over 10 years of experience, we can build you a map and a site that will keep you in the black for years to come.