Do You Really Need A Website Sitemap?

Woohoo! You’re building your website on WordPress, and ready to create some pages. You’ve gone through all the work of messing with plugins, themes, Google Analytics, but now it’s time for the fun part—the site build-out.

But before you jump straight into creating pages you’re going to want a map to navigate through the madness. You’re going to want a sitemap.

A sitemap isn’t anything fancy. It’s merely a graphical representation of your site’s structure to help determine if there’s a logical relationship between pages. Sounds simple enough, but there are some things you need to watch out for.

Do Your Research!

This important step is one that often gets overlooked! Take the time to think about your target market and how you can solve their problems.

People search online for 2 reasons:

To be entertained
To solve a problem

When creating your sitemap, take into consideration why your target market would want to stick around on your site to see what you have to say.

Ask yourself:

How can I serve their needs?
What do they really want to find?
Why haven’t they found it yet?
What can I give them that my competition can’t?

Once you have your target market pinned down, you can start thinking about the actual layout of your site.

First Tier Page

Your first tier page, or homepage, is very important. It’s usually the most trafficked page, and gives visitors a taste of what your website is about.

It’s nearly impossible to do this step well without having done target market research. If you don’t know what’s really important to your target market, how do you know what to showcase on your site?

From the time visitors land on your website you have 5 to 7 seconds to:

Grab their attention
Show them you have something of value
Direct them where to go next

A whopping 5 to 7 seconds isn’t a lot of time. If you’re unsuccessful in getting visitors to the next step, they’ll find another site. You need to make sure your website is clean, concise and makes logical sense.

Second Tier Page

The further a visitor goes into your website, the more committed they become. They’re willing to spend more time reading information and more likely to do business with you. That’s why a second tier page is where you want to give more specific content that will bring them closer to a buying decision.

Common Second Tier Pages:

About Us
Contact
Special Offers
Blog

Long Story Short

Once you finish up your sitemap it should look like a pyramid. You’ll have the first tier page, a homepage, at the top. Then second tier pages such as blog, contact, about us, towards the base of the pyramid. Once it’s put down on paper you can determine if the flow of your website and relationship between pages makes sense.