A study recently carried out by Perficient Digital has revealed that blog structure can hinder search rankings and have a negative impact on site performance.

The issue is connected to link depth, which is how many clicks it takes users to get to blog/news content after landing on the homepage.

The research found that a staggering two-thirds of sites have an average link depth of more than five clicks. As we explain to our clients, having content that far away from the homepage is a problem for users and now Google.  Content can be well written, unique and engaging, but the chances of it ranking are slim if it is that far away from the home page and deep into the user journey.

Perficient Digital went on to report more stats, highlighting that 31.5% of the posts they analysed were TWENTY-ONE clicks or more from their respective home pages.

How do we learn from this?
Content makes up a large part of online marketing, and as we have said for a long time content is king. Quality content with a purpose needs to be found and read – having it easily accessible is key for this.  However, if you have got some great content that isn’t ranking well it might be worth taking a look at the user journey, how easy it is to find your content and how many clicks away it is from the home page.

Consider having the blog built into the top navigation bar of the website so users can jump to the blog section from any page.

Or get in touch with us and we can have a look at your site and user journey to feed back our thoughts and professional opinions.

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