Technical SEO & Site Architecture: Visualization Tools
Site architecture, or how the website is laid out/structured, is crucial in SEO.
A well-structured site allows search engines to efficiently crawl (find) and index (make it searchable online) the content, ensuring optimal visibility in search results. It also helps users find information quickly and easily, which improves engagement.
In this article, we’ll cover some tools you can use to improve your website’s architecture.
Tools
There are six major tools you can use: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, DYNO Mapper™, Slickplan, Gephi, and GitMind. We’ll cover all six in detail below.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Pricing: $259/Year, Free Version Available With Limited Capabilities
Screaming Frog can crawl your website and provide an overview of its structure, including URLs, broken links, redirects, metadata, headings, internal and external links, canonical tags, and other crucial information. The tool also offers visualizations, including crawl tree graphs and force-directed diagrams. By detecting common SEO issues, you can optimize your site for better search engine rankings and user experience.
With Screaming Frog, you can also export data for further analysis and integrate the tool with Google Analytics and Google Search Console for a more holistic view of your site’s performance.
More info:
Sitebulb
Pricing: Two Plans Available: Lite, $13.50/Month (Per User), or Pro, $35/Month (Per User)
Sitebulb offers comprehensive website auditing and visualization features, including crawl maps, directory tree diagrams, and link graphs. These visualizations help you easily spot patterns and trends, such as orphan pages, broken links, or improper redirects.
There are no crawl limits, so you can keep crawling websites until all your issues are resolved!
The visualizations in SiteBulb are easier to follow compared to Screaming Frog. If you’re a small business or running your own website, the Lite plan may be better. If you’re a professional agency that helps other clients identify and fix site structure issues, the Pro plan will offer the most value to you over time. In addition to visually showing issues with your site’s structure, you can integrate SiteBulb with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
More info:
Sitebulb's Website Visualization Documentation
DYNO Mapper™
Pricing: Three Available Plans: $49/Month (Starter), $99/Month (Standard), $360/Month (Organization)
DYNO Mapper™ creates interactive visual sitemaps of your website that you can use to analyze its architecture. It also offers insights into URL structures, broken links, and other SEO-related data, and you can integrate it with Google Analytics for more in-depth analysis.
Using visual thumbnails for each URL in the map (see above) helps you easily recognize the site’s content as it relates to the structure.
More info:
DynoMapper XML Sitemap Resource
Slickplan
Pricing: Four Available Plans: $10.79/Month (Basic), $31.49/Month (Pro), $62.99/Month (Team), $103.49/Month (Agency)
Slickplan is a user-friendly website planning and sitemap building tool you can use to create visual sitemaps, flowcharts, and diagrams to plan and manage your website’s structure effectively. By offering a clear representation of your site’s hierarchy, you can identify potential issues, such as poor navigation.
Slickplan also integrates with popular SEO tools like Google Analytics and offers content planning and collaboration tools, allowing you to better plan, optimize, and execute your website strategy.
More info:
SlickPlan Content Planning Resources
Gephi
Pricing: Free
Gephi is an open-source graph visualization platform that can be effectively integrated with Screaming Frog SEO Spider to create custom visualizations of a website’s architecture. By importing crawl data from Screaming Frog, you can generate complex network graphs that reveal patterns, clusters, and trends within your site’s structure to identify broken links, orphan pages, poorly structured navigation, and other issues that could impact SEO performance.
More info:
Arimetrics: Viewing Internal Links with Gephi
GitMind
Pricing: Free
GitMind is a multifaceted online mind-mapping and diagramming tool. You can use it for keyword mapping, to better understand how keywords are connected to each page of your website, or to create keyword clusters (keywords that are grouped based on topic).
Although GitMind was not necessarily designed for SEO objectives, using it for keyword mapping can help you build a more structured website that will ultimately enhance user experience and search engine crawlability.
More info:
Gitmind: Flowchart Guide
Have Questions? Contact Momentum Today!
Using site architecture tools can help you develop a more user-friendly website that’s accessible and easily navigable. But, you also need a solid understanding of SEO and website design and development practices. Otherwise, you won’t know what you need to look for.
Whether you’re building a new website or restructuring an existing one, our experts at Momentum can help. Founded in 2010, we’re an experienced digital marketing agency providing website design and development and search engine optimization services to clients in many industries.
Please reach out to us today to learn more about site architecture or how we can help you redesign and rebuild your website.
