How To Structure Your Lead Generation Website

So I've been continuing to learn how to structure my site for the best SEO optimization and thought I'd share what I've learned and started to implement.

Your site should have three layers:

1. Main Home Page
2. Pillar (Topic) Pages
3. Blog Posts

The main page is just your main, home landing page that is optimized for your main keyword that you want to rank for.

Your Pillar / Topic pages are landing pages that are built similar to your home page, but geared toward the topic.

Some example topics for my home buying site are:

• Filing for Divorce
• Probate
• Tax Delinquent

Your Blog Posts will cover all of the subjects pertaining to your Topic. You want to become the expert in Google's (and your prospect's) eyes on the topic. That way, when someone searches for anything related to your topic, regardless of keyword optimization, your site pulls up. An example Blog Post that we have is Selling Your Home During A Divorce, which links to Filing for Divorce.

Your Internal Linking

For SEO optimization, you'll drive as much traffic as possible to your blog posts. This can be in the form of social media posts, guest posts, Web 2.0 posts, etc. Within the blog posts, you should naturally be linking to your Topic Page that corresponds with your blog post as shown in the picture above. The reason is so that all of the juice that you give to your blog posts from all of the external sources goes straight into your Topic Pages, and then into your Main Page.

Each page will link up and down the layers. For example, your Divorce Topic Page will link up to your main page and down to all of the associated blog posts about divorce. You'll do this for each Topic page that you have. The reason here is so that your higher ranking pages boost all of your lower ranking ones and boost them up to drive more traffic to your sites.

Why This Is Important

I've covered why it's important for SEO, but what about your user experience? If someone lands on your blog post searching for a subject they are looking to learn more (in research mode). You shouldn't take them straight from reserach mode to "fill out my form now." You should take them down a path that creates credibility for your company.

We do this by having them land on our blog posts, we interlink between related blog posts and then up to the Topic page. This allows them to research more about the subject they want to learn about through our other blog posts while also moving up the ladder into our Topic page that creates more credibility. This Topic page also links to the other blog posts on the subject if they went there prematurely and up to our Main Page. We're trying to walk them along a bread crumb trail. The other added benefit is that since all pages are linked together on a topic, they can get anywhere on our site for that given topic with just a few clicks.

Another benefit is that you can FB retarget just the Main Page and Topic Pages, so you're managing 5-10 pages being retargeting vs 40-100.