Technical Foundations · 1.4
Site Architecture & Internal Linking
How easy it is to walk from your homepage to any other page on your site — for example, whether a visitor can actually find your lettings listings if they land on a sales page, without hunting through menus.
“Imagine the hallway layout connecting every room in a shop — if a customer can't easily find their way to what they're looking for, they give up.”
Why this matters
The customer’s side
Someone interested in renting who lands on your general homepage, with no obvious path to lettings listings, will often just leave and search again rather than dig through your site — you've lost them to friction, not disinterest.
The search engine’s side
Unreachable pages can't rank, period
A confusing structure makes it genuinely harder for Google to find and properly index your pages. A page Google can't easily reach can't rank at all, no matter how good it is — and this isn't just about your homepage. It could be something as simple as a landlord searching “rental valuation in my area” and Google being unable to find your enquiry page.
See it happen
Same listing, same site. One of these a visitor — and Google — can actually reach.
Buried — 4 clicks deep
The listing exists. Almost nobody finds it by clicking through.
Easy to reach — 2 clicks deep
Same listing, same site. Found in two clicks, from any page.
How to check yours
Method 1 — Sketch it by hand
quick, and forces you to actually think through the path a visitor takes.
- 1.Sketch your site as a simple tree, homepage at the top.
- 2.Count the number of clicks needed to reach your deepest page.
Method 2 — Screaming Frog crawl depth report
crawls every page automatically and tells you exactly how deep each one sits, rather than relying on a hand-drawn guess.
- 1.Download Screaming Frog, free, and crawl your site.
- 2.Click the “Internal” tab, then check the “Crawl Depth” column.
- 3.Sort by it — anything showing 4 or more is worth a look.
How to fix what you find
Pages more than 3 clicks deep
add a hub or category page linking to them directly, so they're reachable in fewer steps — a “Lettings in [area]” page linking out to every listing in that area, for example.
Genuinely related pages with no link between them
add a direct internal link — a local area guide linked to your listings in that area, for example. Do this yourself directly in your page editor, or note it as a task for a developer.
Keeping on top of it
Every new page you publish needs linking in properly — this isn't a job that finishes once. Worth reviewing every time you add a meaningful batch of new content.
How Reyse handles this
Done With You
we map your site and tell you exactly which pages need linking, and how.
Done For You
we build and maintain this structure directly, every time something new is published.