Improve Website Structure (and Search Rankings)

If your site structure is messy, your rankings pay the price. Search engines and users both crave clean architecture: logical hierarchies, crawlable paths, tight internal links, and fast, stable pages. The good news? There are battle-tested tools that make structural fixes faster and a lot less guessy. For IT support services for small businesses in London, having a well-organized, efficient website structure can significantly improve user experience and search visibility. Below is a practical, modern stack—six tools that, together, surface the right problems, quantify impact, and help you ship improvements that move the needle.

“Our research shows that 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.” Google Help

“Organic Search figure at 53% is up from the 51% found in the 2014 research.” BrightEdge

Those two stats capture the whole story: speed and structure influence behavior, and organic search still drives the lion’s share of trackable traffic. If you fix the scaffolding, you earn more of it.

The Short Version (What “structure” actually means in 2025)

“Website structure” isn’t just your nav bar. It’s everything that helps a crawler (and a human) understand, reach, and trust your pages:

• Crawlability & indexation: no orphan pages, clean status codes, accurate sitemaps. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are your x-ray. Screaming Frog+1

• Information architecture & internal linking: sensible hubs, smart anchor text, meaningful relationships between pages. Audits in Ahrefs and Semrush reveal gaps and broken chains. Ahrefs+1

• Performance & stability: Core Web Vitals (INP, LCP, CLS) and overall speed. PageSpeed Insights (and Lighthouse) translate field and lab data into fixes. Google for Developers

The 6 tools (and when each one shines)

1. Google Search Console (GSC) — Your canonical truth for coverage, sitemaps, and internal link discovery. Use it to validate that changes actually get crawled and indexed. Coverage and Page indexing reports show what Google sees (or doesn’t).

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Crawl your entire site like a search engine, at scale, and extract anything: titles, canonicals, hreflang, robots directives, internal link counts, and more. It’s the fastest way to map your structure and find contradictions. (Capable of crawling millions of URLs with sufficient hardware.) Screaming Frog

3. Sitebulb — A crawler that visualizes architecture beautifully (graphs, crawl maps) and explains issues in plain language. If you’re presenting to stakeholders, Sitebulb’s visual outputs help tell the story.

4. Ahrefs Site Audit — Beyond backlinks, its Site Audit surfaces internal link opportunities and thin content clusters. Their internal link index is huge (tens of trillions), which helps you spot patterns quickly. Ahrefs

5. Semrush Site Audit — Excellent at thematic technical reporting (crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals grouping) and trendlines so you can show progress over time to non-SEOs. Semrush

6. Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) & Lighthouse — PSI blends real-user CrUX data with Lighthouse’s lab audits to pinpoint why CWV fail and what to fix first. It also encodes Google’s current CWV thresholds (INP, LCP, CLS) and pass/fail logic. Google for Developers+1

How to stack them (a sleek weekly workflow)

• Mondays: Crawl & compare. Run Screaming Frog/Sitebulb, export pivotal columns (status, canonical, robots, inlinks, depth, indexability).

• Tuesdays: Focus on. Drop the exports into Ahrefs/Semrush audits, group issues by lasting results (crawl blocks, duplication, thin hubs, redirect chains).

• Wednesdays: Ship fixes. Tidy sitemaps, repair canonicals, consolidate duplicate parameters, add or remove noindex, and shore up hub pages with internal links.

• Thursdays: Speed pass. Hit PSI/Lighthouse on the top 20 URLs by traffic and revenue; tighten LCP/INP/CLS.

• Fridays: Verify in GSC. Re-submit sitemaps, inspect clave URLs, and annotate changes so you can tie improvements to coverage and CWV deltas later.

The proof (metrics that show structure is working)

• Index Coverage: “Crawled – currently not indexed” should shrink after duplication fixes and content consolidation in clusters. Confirm in GSC.

• Internal link equity: Inlinks to money pages should rise; crawl depth to those pages should drop. Verify in Screaming Frog and Ahrefs. Screaming Frog+1

• Core Web Vitals pass rate: Aim to push the 75th-percentile of INP, LCP, CLS into “Good” across your origin. PSI tells you where you stand. Google for Developers

Google Search Console → Your source of truth (Action plan)

• Inspect Coverage and Page indexing reports; export “Discovered – currently not indexed” and “Crawled – currently not indexed.”

• Fix sitemap mismatches: only list indexable, canonical URLs; remove 404/301/soft-404s from XML.

• Use URL Inspection on your top 50 revenue URLs after changes; request re-indexing for critical fixes.

• Track Internal links report to ensure hub pages and key product/category pages accrue links over time.

• Compare Mobile Usability/CWV status to PSI; if a page fails PSI in field data, annotate in GSC and monitor over 28-day windows. Google for Developers+1

Crawlers (Screaming Frog & Sitebulb) → Find structural blockers (Action plan)

• Crawl the full site; filter non-indexable URLs by reason (noindex, canonicalized, robots blocked).

• Surface duplicate content (hash/near-dup) and consolidate with canonicals or merges.

• Map internal link paths: raise inlinks to commercial pages; flatten architecture by reducing depth to ≤3 where feasible.

• Export redirect chains; collapse multi-hops to single 301s; kill loops.

• Audit hreflang/robots/meta robots for consistency; ensure canonicals align with hreflang targets.

• For large sites, configure storage correctly—Screaming Frog can handle millions of URLs with sufficient RAM/SSD. Screaming Frog

Site Audits (Ahrefs & Semrush) → Focus on fixes (Action plan)

• Run Ahrefs Site Audit to identify orphaned pages, low inlink counts, and cluster gaps; use their internal link data to propose new pathways. Ahrefs

• Run Semrush Site Audit thematic reports (crawlability, HTTPS, CWV) to create a single prioritized backlog for dev/design/SEO. Semrush

• Track trendlines: issues over time should fall; keep screenshots for stakeholder updates.

• Build content hubs: turn scattershot posts into 4–8 hub pages with clear child links; re-write anchors to be descriptive, not generic.

• Monitor broken links/5xx spikes weekly—these hide ranking potential and waste crawl budget.

PageSpeed Discoveries & Lighthouse → Pass Core Web Vitals (Action plan)

• Test top templates (homepage, category, PDP, article) with PSI; prioritize LCP elements (hero images, headers), then INP (JS input delays), then CLS (layout shifts). Google for Developers

• Ship media wins: compress/resize hero images, serve AVIF/WebP, lazy-load below-the-fold.

• Trim JavaScript: defer non-critical bundles, limit third-party tags, and use code-splitting.

• Stabilize CLS: set explicit width/height for images and ads; use font-display: optional with preloaded fonts.

• Validate in Lighthouse locally (lab), then confirm CrUX field data in PSI for a true “pass.” Google for Developers

Why this stack works

• It’s comprehensive without being chaotic. GSC shows how Google actually treats your pages; crawlers show what’s technically there; audits tell you what to fix first; PSI proves the UX side meets Google’s thresholds. Google for Developers

• It’s measurable. Every fix maps to a report you can screenshot: fewer duplicates (crawlers), better CWV pass rate (PSI), more indexed pages (GSC).

• It aligns with user reality. Faster, cleaner sites reduce drop-offs—remember that 3-second cliff. Google Help

• It follows the money. Organic remains a dominant traffic source; structure is a force multiplier on what you already publish. BrightEdge

Pro maxims (that separate good from great)

• Keep sitemaps boring. Only canonical, indexable 200s. Anything else is a mixed signal.

• Name hub pages like humans talk. Don’t “/solutions-alpha/”; do “/solutions/email-automation/”.

• Build internal links where decisions happen. Add “Related guides” blocks mid-article; link up to the hub, laterally to siblings, and use a website audit tool down to details. Ahrefs

• Flatten smartly. Bring revenue URLs closer to the root by reducing click depth, but preserve topical clusters so relevance stays tight.

• Treat PSI like triage, not a vanity score. Fix the heaviest templates first; your pass rate jumps faster. Google for Developers

FAQs (quick hits you can act on this week)

How often should I crawl my site?

• Weekly for sites with frequent changes; monthly otherwise. After big deployments, crawl same-day.

What Core Web Vitals thresholds matter right now?

• Pass when the 75th percentile of INP, LCP, CLS is “Good.” PSI shows pass/fail at the page or origin level. Google for Developers

Which tool finds duplicate content fastest?

• Screaming Frog’s exact/near-dup filters are quick; pair with canonical checks to decide merge vs. keep. Screaming Frog

Do internal links still matter?

• Absolutely. They’re how crawlers understand importance and topical relationships. Big link indexes (like Ahrefs’) help you spot gaps at scale. Ahrefs

Helpful resources (bookmark these)

• PageSpeed Insights & CrUX codelab — hands-on with field data and APIs. Google for Developers

• PSI docs on CWV — current definitions and pass criteria (INP, LCP, CLS). Google for Developers

• Semrush Site Audit guides — how to read the issues and build roadmaps. Semrush

• Screaming Frog user guide — scaling crawls to very large sites. Screaming Frog

The takeaway

If you remember nothing else: crawl → focus on → fix → verify. Use GSC to confirm how Google sees you, Screaming Frog/Sitebulb to show what’s broken, Ahrefs/Semrush to plan and track, and PSI/Lighthouse to make pages not just fast, but stable. Structure isn’t glamorous, but it’s compound interest for rankings and revenue.