Your Website Content Is Fine. The Structure Is the Problem.

If customers keep asking questions your website already answers, the writing is probably not the problem. The pages exist. People are not reaching them. That is a website structure problem — how pages are grouped, what they are called and how they link to each other — and no amount of rewriting fixes it, because the better copy lands on the same pages nobody opens.

It is also the cheaper problem to have. Structure can be tested in an afternoon with a plain list of page names and a handful of people, before a designer is involved, and fixing it is mostly moving and renaming rather than writing from scratch.

Is it the content, or the website structure?

In a monthly report the two look identical: pages with few views, a quiet enquiry form. They differ in one thing that the report does not show. A content problem is a page people reach, read and leave unconvinced. A structure problem is a page they never reach at all.

You can usually tell which one you have without any tools. These are the signs that the pages are fine and the routes to them are not:

• Customers ask for what is already written. A WhatsApp message asking whether you cover Seremban, sent by someone who spent two minutes on a site with a page listing every area you cover. Keep a tally for two weeks. Each one is a page somebody could not find, or did not think to look for.
• Your best page is only visited from Google. Open analytics, find the page you are proudest of and look at how people arrive. If almost every visit comes straight from search and almost none from elsewhere on your own site, the visitors already on the site are not being sent there.
• The menu is your organisation chart. Division names, product-line brands, “Solutions”, “Expertise”. That is how the business is run, not how a customer describes what they need.
• One question has three half-answers. A hint about pricing on the services page, another in the FAQ, a third in a two-year-old blog post, none of them complete. The information exists. It has no single home.
• Your staff send links instead of answers. If the sales team keeps a note of deep links to paste into chats, they have built by hand the navigation the website is missing.

Buried pages are one of the nine signs a website needs more than a refresh, and the one owners are least likely to spot. The reason is simple: you already know where everything is. Every route through the site looks obvious to the person who built it.

A well-written page nobody reaches does exactly as much work as no page at all.

What website structure is actually made of

Structure is three decisions, and each one fails in its own way. Getting one of them right does not rescue the other two.

Groups: what sits together

Pages should be grouped by what the visitor is trying to do, not by how the business is divided. An air-conditioning company that files its pages under Residential, Commercial and then each brand it services has grouped by department. Its customers arrive with “unit not cold”, “due for servicing” or “need a new one installed”, and none of those maps onto the menu. Google’s own starter guide makes the same case from the search side: it is worth organising a site in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site.

Names: what each group is called

Nielsen Norman Group’s second usability heuristic is the rule for every label on the site: use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. “Solutions”, “Offerings” and “What We Do” tell a visitor nothing about what is behind them. “Aircond servicing” does. In a market where customers switch between English and Malay mid-sentence, the right word is the one they type into your WhatsApp, not the one in your company profile. If they write “aircond”, that is the label, however informal it looks to you.

Links: how one page leads to the next

The menu is only one route. The others are the links inside pages, and they are where most small sites are thinnest. Google is plain about the minimum: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A pricing page reachable only from the footer fails that in spirit even if it passes in theory. So does a services page with six buttons all reading “Learn more”, because good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to. A button that says where it goes gets clicked by the people who need that page and skipped by the ones who do not, which is the point.

How to test your structure in an afternoon

There is a research method built for exactly this question, and a small business can run a rough version of it without software. Nielsen Norman Group defines a tree test as an evaluation of a hierarchical category structure, or tree, by having users find the locations in the tree where specific resources or features can be found. The tree is shown without any visual design or content — which is what makes it useful here. If people cannot find a page from its name and position alone, better writing on that page will not change the result.

• Write out the tree. Every menu item and every page under it, as an indented list in a document. No design, no colours, no page content.
• Write five or six tasks from real enquiries. Use the customer’s words and avoid the menu’s. “You want to know whether they can come on a Saturday”, not “find the Service Hours page”.
• Ask five people who do not work for you. Customers, suppliers, a friend of a friend. Read each task aloud and ask where in the list they would look first. Write down their first choice, not their eventual one.
• Look for the tasks most people get wrong. Where three of five go to the same wrong place, that group or that name is the problem, and you now know which one.

Be honest about what five people tell you. It finds the worst problems quickly; it is not a statistic, and NN/g is clear that quantitative tree testing needs a larger sample. The same applies to card sorting, the companion method, where participants place individually labeled cards into groups according to criteria that make the most sense to them. NN/g recommends at least 15 participants even for the qualitative version, which few small businesses will recruit.

There is a free substitute that gets you part of the way. Read the last three months of WhatsApp and form enquiries and write down the words people use and the things they ask about together. It is not a card sort, and it only hears from people who got as far as contacting you. But it is your customers’ own vocabulary, in their own groupings, and it costs nothing but an evening.

Fixing the structure without starting again

Start with a reassurance from Google, because it changes the order of work. The same starter guide says: Don’t drop everything and start reorganizing your site right now though, because search engines will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized. For a site of a few dozen pages, the case for restructuring is the visitors, not the rankings. That also means most of the fix never needs to touch a URL.

• Rename first. The cheapest change, and the one the tree test checks most directly. Replace every internal label with the customer’s word for it. No address changes.
• Regroup the menu. Rearrange items around tasks rather than departments. The menu changes; the pages and their addresses stay exactly where they are.
• Add links where the question arises. Each service page links to its price, the areas it covers and one example of the work, with link text that names the destination.
• Give each question one home. Merge the three half-answers into one complete page and point the others at it. Which old addresses to redirect and which to let go is a separate decision, covered in our guide to removing pages a website no longer needs.
• Change URLs last, and only if you must. Every changed address needs a redirect from the old one, so change them only where the old address is actively misleading.

Then run the same tree test again, with the same tasks and five different people. If the task most people failed now mostly succeeds, the structure was the problem and you have fixed it without rewriting a page.

Frequently asked questions

Where iRevamps fits

Many of the sites owners describe to us as needing new content turn out to need a new map. The pages are good; the menu, the names and the links between them were set up years ago around a business that has since changed. Our website revamp service starts with the tree test described here, run on your own menu with your own enquiries, so any rewriting that follows goes into pages visitors can actually reach.