SEO Strategy and Site Architecture
This domain asks you to connect SEO work to business outcomes and to build a site structure that lets crawlers and users reach the right page in as few clicks as possible. Expect questions on topic clusters, internal linking, URL design, and how architecture choices such as faceted navigation or deep category trees affect indexation.
Strategy before structure
An SEO strategy starts from a business goal - demo requests, qualified leads, signups - and works backward to the queries that precede that action. Segment those queries by funnel stage and decide which page type should rank for each: product pages for commercial intent, educational articles for informational intent, comparison pages for evaluation intent. Architecture exists to make that mapping unambiguous: one primary topic per URL, and no two URLs competing for the same query.
The pillar-and-cluster model
A pillar page covers a broad topic in depth and targets a head term; cluster pages cover subtopics and target long-tail variants. Every cluster page links up to the pillar, and the pillar links down to each cluster with descriptive anchor text. This concentrates internal link equity on the pillar and signals topical coverage.
Rules that earn marks
- Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
- Use a readable, keyword-relevant slug and keep it stable; changing URLs without 301s loses equity.
- Breadcrumbs reinforce hierarchy and make the site eligible for breadcrumb structured data.
- Orphan pages - indexable but unreachable through internal links - rarely rank.
- An XML sitemap lists URLs; it is not a substitute for internal linking.
Worked example
A software company has 40 blog posts on marketing topics, each ranking for one long-tail phrase, and no page ranking for "inbound marketing." The fix is not another mega-article but a pillar page on inbound marketing plus grouping the 40 posts into six clusters. Each post gains a link to the pillar, and the pillar links out to six cluster hubs. Clicks to the deepest posts drop from four to two. The pillar accumulates links and rankings for the head term while the clusters hold the long tail.
Traps
Treating the sitemap as a substitute for linking. Stuffing every keyword into navigation. Building silos that never link sideways. Redesigning navigation without checking which pages just became orphans.