Site architecture
Site architecture, the work that decides whether the rest pays.
I decide what pages exist and how they connect. Your services, your towns and your customers' questions, mapped into a structure Google can read, where every page has one job and every link has a reason.
Why structure beats effort
Most websites are a pile of pages nobody planned. A services page written at launch, a blog added a post at a time, a few town pages made from one template, an old campaign page nobody removed. Google reads them the way it finds them, as a pile, and gives none of them much credit.
Site architecture is the decision about which pages should exist, what search each one answers, and which page each one strengthens. It is done before the writing, and it decides whether the writing pays. That is why a site with fewer pages and less budget can outrank one with more of both: its pages are arranged to lift the ones that matter, and the other site's pages are arranged to compete with each other.
The four ideas the whole structure rests on
Every page gets a job
One page carries each service. The pages around it carry one thing each: a town, a price, a question, a variation, a comparison. If a page has no job, it does not get built.
One search per page
Two pages chasing the same search split everything between them. The map assigns each search to exactly one page before a word is written, so the site never competes with itself.
Strength flows up
Each supporting page links up to the service page it belongs to. Google counts those links, so every real answer you publish makes the page that earns the booking a little stronger.
One page earns the booking
For each service, the page that has to win the search is the one with the price, the proof and the button. Everything else in that part of the site exists to lift it.
A law firm rebuilt around its structure
A Las Vegas injury firm was being shown to searchers 556,000 times in three months and turning fewer than two in every thousand of those into a visit. The demand was never missing. The pages being shown were not built to be chosen, and they were not arranged to support each other.
I rebuilt it around one hub carrying the firm's core search, with every accident type as a proper page beneath it, and four surrounding communities each as a genuine hub with practice pages under them. The nineteen services on the Google listing were matched one to one with live pages, and titles were rewritten to win the click.
In the Ahrefs rank tracker the firm went from 9 top-three rankings to 44 by July 2026, ahead of the 25 to 40 the engagement promised. Pages accepted into Google's index went from 133 to 543, read in Search Console on 3 September 2026, and the share of impressions turning into clicks doubled from 0.1% to 0.2% across June to August.
A market nobody had mapped
An academy that certifies cloud and DevOps engineers had excellent teaching and almost no visibility: a handful of page one keywords, an average position in the twenties, and three separate web properties on the same brand that had never been told how they related to each other.
The structure came first. A hub told search which brand the addresses belonged to, the five courses that carry the business got proper course markup and a heading order that stopped competing with itself, and twenty six pieces went in, each mapped to a real search and linked into the part of the site it belonged to. In the first seven months on the rank tracker, the tracked set went from single digits to more than forty keywords on page one, the average position moved from 21 to 10, and two searches reached number one.
How I build the map
List what you sell and where
Your services in order of what they earn, and the towns or areas you genuinely work in. This sets the tops of the structure.
Collect the real searches
What people type on the way to buying each service: prices, timings, comparisons, problems, places. Taken from Search Console where you already have data, and from keyword research where you do not.
Give every search one page
Each search is assigned to exactly one page, new or existing. Searches that mean the same thing share a page; searches that mean different things never do.
Draw the links
Every page gets its parent and its link text. The service page links down to its supports where a reader would want them.
Check it against your site today
The map is laid over the pages you already have, so we know what to keep, what to merge and what to write, before anything is changed.
What the work produces
The page map
Every page the site should have, with its address, the one search it answers, the page it links up to and whether it exists yet. It is the single document every later decision is read from.
Decisions on the pages you already have
For an existing site, each current page gets a decision: keep, improve, merge into a stronger page and redirect, or keep out of Google on purpose. Written down, dated and reversible. Nothing deleted in bulk.
The linking plan
Which page links to which, with what words. Not a sitewide footer of fifty links; the specific links inside the pages that tell Google what matters.
A build order
The pages that will move the business first, then the ones that support them. So the first month of writing goes where it pays, not where it is easiest.
Built to be run without me
The best test of a structure is whether someone else can keep using it. An agency owner on the Canadian west coast asked me to copy a framework he had watched work in American agencies. It became a system: the offer priced in units, a roadmap, a diagnostic that returns the same answer whoever runs it, generators for service pages and topic maps, and reporting he can hand to his clients. It was proven across personal training, vape retail, publishing, BIM consultancy and pest control, and the agency has run it without me since handover.
Your site map is built the same way. It is a document you own, readable by the next person you hire, not knowledge that lives in my head.
Who this is for
Businesses about to build or rebuild a site, who want the structure decided before a designer or writer starts. Businesses with a lot of content that is not performing, where the problem is arrangement, not volume. And businesses expanding into new services or new towns, who want the new pages to strengthen the site rather than dilute it.
It is the service I would buy first if I could only buy one, because every other piece of search work, writing, local pages, links, lands better on a site that knows what each page is for.
The parts of site architecture, one page each
Keyword mapping assigns every search to one page. Content consolidation merges overlapping pages instead of deleting them. Internal linking puts the links inside the pages where they do the most good. For the idea in plain words, read what a silo is and why a worse site outranks yours.
Questions people ask about site architecture
Do I need to change my page addresses
Usually not. Google understands structure mostly from links and content, not folders in the address. On an existing site I build the structure in the links first and only change addresses during a rebuild, with redirects.
How many pages will my site need
As many as there are real searches with a real job to do. For a small local business that might be twenty. For a firm with several services across many towns it can be hundreds. The map decides, not a target.
Can you plan it if someone else builds the site
Yes. The map and linking plan are written for a designer, developer or writer to follow. Many clients hand them to their existing web team.
What happens to my existing blog posts
Each gets a decision. Good ones are linked into the service they support. Overlapping ones are merged into a stronger page. Very little is thrown away.
How soon does structure show results
Structure changes tend to move positions over weeks and months as Google recrawls and the links take effect. It is the base for everything else, so the sooner it is in, the sooner the rest pays.
Want to see your site's structure drawn out?
Send me the address. I will map what you have and show you where the pages are competing instead of helping.