How do you plan a website's information architecture and navigation?
Group pages the way buyers search, not the way your org chart is drawn.
Plan information architecture by making one page for each thing you want to be found for, labeling navigation in the words customers use, and keeping the top level to about seven items. Structure gets decided before design, because changing it later means redrawing everything.
The rules that hold up
- One page per topic you want to rank for. A single Services page listing eight services will rank for none of them well. Eight pages can each be the best answer to one question.
- Label in customer language. Solutions and Capabilities mean nothing. Water damage restoration means something. If your industry has an internal term and a public term, use the public one.
- Keep the top level short. Roughly seven items is where scanning still works. Beyond that people stop reading the nav and start using search.
- Every important page within three clicks of the homepage. If a page takes five clicks to reach, it is effectively hidden from both users and crawlers.
- Do not put a page in the nav twice under different names. It splits links and confuses everyone.
Where service, location, and language pages live
Services usually sit as children of a services index: /services/ and then a page each. Locations get their own index with a page per location, and each location page needs genuinely different content, not a find and replace on the city name. Language variants should be separate URLs with hreflang tags rather than a translation widget, because a widget produces no page a search engine can index.
Blog content is its own branch. Resist the urge to file blog posts under service pages. It makes URLs fragile and the two serve different stages of the buying process anyway.
Why structure matters for AI answers too
Answer engines quote pages that have one obvious subject. A page titled Solutions that covers five topics is hard to summarize and rarely cited. A page that answers one question, with a heading that states the question and a first paragraph that answers it, is easy to quote. Good information architecture and good AEO turn out to be the same work.
Practical test before you build: write the page list on paper and hand it to someone who does not work at your company. Ask them where they would click to find three specific things. If they hesitate, the labels are wrong.
Related: What makes a website design lead generation focused?, Can you build a multi-location or multi-language website?, Is SEO built into your custom web development?, and our blog post on content pillars.