Menu
OFTEN for small business owners, the SEO process begins as an afterthought, long after their website goes live. When shopping for a new website, the platform that it sits on isn’t typically top of mind for the business owner. They are too busy running their business to worry about the technical detail of how their website is constructed and why that matters from an SEO perspective. The primary objective when purchasing the first website for your business might be getting the best looking website for the best possible price. But looks can be deceiving and prices are often deceptive too — especially when there’s more work involved to get it optimised for search engines and nowadays, large language models (LLMs) and AI. Tools like ChatGPT and Grok can and do query search engines for fresh data, so they should be part of your marketing strategy and how visible your website is in search engines will impact your ability to generate new business.
If you are a new business owner starting out, this article may help to prompt questions for your web designer / developer as you prepare to do a deal for a new website. The key thing you should try to avoid is having to reinvest in your website within months of launching it because SEO wasn’t a core consideration at the start. The website architecture is important — it influences the user experience directly and impacts search visibility through the efficiency of how your website is crawled by search engine crawlers. This will have a direct influence on marketing metrics and ultimately will impact how well your marketing performance supports your sales effort.
Silos in business decision-making are very often met with derision but in the SEO world, they are very important. When it comes to SEO, your site’s architecture is more than structure — it’s how you present your story to both users and search engines. Think of it as arranging your content like chapters in a book: every section should reinforce a clear theme, helping Google recognise your expertise and guiding visitors seamlessly. This is where SEO siloing comes in. The concept of SEO silos is more than a decade old now and it is a proven technique for better peformance, pioneered by Bruce Clay.
Silos help search engine crawlers to determine relevance and relationships between web pages. Physical silos organise a site into a directory e.g. /products/shirts/long-sleeve/ while virtual silos are supported by internal links which reinforce the silo concept. For thorough detail on this, read the article linked above.
The directory structure is an important foundation but your site should also make logical sense. Keeping a flat, clean site hierarchy reduces the likelihood of visitor fatigue (too many clicks to find what they want) and your site navigation should point them back to where they came from to help with this. Pages should ideally be no more than 3 clicks from your homepage; web URLs and categories should be descriptive (see example above) and should include breadcrumb navigation to show the user how deep into the site they are.
As a rule of thumb remember to:
Depending on which platform you choose, you may end up spending needless hours on manual workarounds to tick SEO boxes that are available out of the box on other platforms. This can be an unintended time drain you inherit after you purchasing a website that isn’t the best fit for your business. Every platform has it’s quirks. They all started out to solve different market needs and evolved differently, often retro-fitting SEO fixes to compete with other platforms.
Shopify has a user-friendly architecture but full control over URL structure isn’t easy in default themes. Editing robots.txt and the XML sitemap can also be tricky. With its AI code generation tool, you can quickly add breadcrumb navigation if it’s not default in your site’s theme. The AI code gen tool is a game-changer in this regard because manual workarounds are faster. Things like clustering content (via Collections) and internal linking are also easy on Shopify.
Given that URL flexibility is limited, it’s important that navigation menus, footer links and breadcrumb trails are used — especially on larger eCommerce sites which have thousands of products and variations.
WordPress has always been the most SEO-friendly platform (this site uses WordPress). With permalink structures, hierarchy controls and internal linking and breadcrumb plugins as well as default page-by-page SEO settings and XML sitemaps, all the key boxes are ticked by default. If you’re using WooCommerce for eCommerce, configuring breadcrumbs will be important for ensuring categories are clear and page depth is easily understood. Yoast and RankMath plugins are particularly useful in supporting the silo concept for content.
Wix has improved massively from an SEO stand point. It was once regarded as SEO-unfriendly but it has improved to include meta tags, automated sitemaps and mobile-first optimisation. However, URL paths are still quite limited and some (e.g. /store/) just can’t be changed and media-heavy templates can cause serious page speed delays which hurt performance in search results.
Cross-linking is a manual effort on Wix, so it’s important to create this as a routine when you create content if you are to build a site that has good organic search visibility.
Squarespace sites are cool with sleek, modern front-ends and built-in SEO tools including auto-generated XML sitemaps, searchable URLs and a responsive design. More advanced SEO configuration (e.g. detailed schemas or meta robots) may require embedded code blocks or plan upgrades and getting the folder structure right from the start is very important. Knowing your upfront need in technical terms isn’t simple, but a competent web developer should be able to explain how different platforms serve different needs.
WordPress with WooCommerce and Shopify tend to be the go-to eCommerce platforms for lots of small businesses starting out while Wix and Squarespace are commonly used for brochure websites. But there are a host of other solutions including Drupal, Joomla, Hubspot, Magento (Adobe) with pros and cons to using these. Web developers have their favourites too and some will try to fit a square peg into a round hole because it’s easier for them. Be wary of web developers that don’t explain the logic of their platform selection. If they say that any platform is uniformly “the best“, this should ring alarm bells. There is no one-size-fits-all web platform.
SEO is not the sole consideration when choosing your website platform. It may not even be the top consideration but it’s definitely something to think about before committing some of your learn early stage marketing budget and feeling disappointed by performance. The structure of your website is a strategic framework for relevance and authority and aligning the architecture to user intent will lay a solid foundation for organic search engine visibility.
Before buying your new website, there are universal considerations that apply to all back-end services. Be sure to ask your developer about XML sitemaps, canonical tags, mobile-first responsive design, CSS optimised for crawl speed and 301 redirect handling. This might sound like a foreign language but showing an awareness of what’s important when selecting your website platform will ensure your web developer factors these vital elements into your proposal. It may end up being slightly more expensive, but it’s better to do things right first time than having to revisit at a later date.
