Imagine going to a natural track that you have no idea about. The first thing you will be handed is a map to the track, your golden ticket to navigate the track without getting lost.
Now, imagine your website as the track and the search engine is the visitor, they will be able to make sense of it all if you add a sitemap as a digital roadmap that helps search engines and users navigate.
If you’re new to learning SEO, understanding the importance of sitemaps is essential. This blog provides all the guidance you need.
Let’s go together ahead on a little journey of understanding sitemaps, why they are necessary for websites, and how to leverage them for efficiency.
What is a Sitemap?
A Treasure Map for your website!
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that connects all the pages. It helps search engines crawl and index your content. It helps in organizing the site structure, connecting pages in order, and guiding crawlers to find the essential URLs.
🎯 Sitemap contains metadata related to last page updates, frequent changes, and their importance relative to other pages.
✍🏻 You need to make sure that the sitemap is only filled with high-value content and landing pages. Don’t overstuff it with unnecessary URLs, as it should be clean and concise.
Two Types of Sitemaps: HTML vs. XML
HTML Sitemaps: For Users
HTML sitemaps are designed for users to get navigated to specific pages on your site. It eases up the navigation process on the website for users to understand your offerings.
XML Sitemaps: For Search Engines
XML are the maps that are more technical and developed especially for search engine crawlers. The work of XML is to make sure that search engines can crawl through every page, even that is buried deep in the website.
✍🏻 Make sure that you incorporate both HTML and XML into your sitemap correctly. HTML will help enhance user experience, whereas XML will ensure that everything on your website can be seen and crawled by search engines.
Why Your Website Needs a Sitemap
Improve Crawl Efficiency
Search engine requires a roadmap to navigate everything on a website before ranking them. These search engines are fast but are not perfect. Make sure that you develop a sitemap that helps search engines navigate and index.
📊 According to a study on crawl efficiency, a website with simple and well-structured sitemaps is 20% more likely to be indexed by search engines.
✍🏻 Some pages might remain undiscovered without a sitemap. A website with hundreds of pages such as an eCommerce site can benefit from a sitemap.
Boost SEO Performance
Improve Your Rankings
Sitemap doesn’t directly improve your SERP ranking but it helps in ensuring that every page on your website is well-linked and indexed. It will help when search engines crawl and index more of your content, opening up possibilities for higher rank.
You can create a sitemap using links from each important page of the site. However, for optimized SEO performance, you can also create a different sitemap for Google Web Stories.
Using a sitemap for Google Web Stories, your web pages can get internal links from multiple sources boosting relevance in the eyes of search engines.
📊 According to a recent study, a website with effectively implemented sitemaps is 30% more likely to see improved crawl rates, leading to higher rankings.
✍🏻 Every time you add new content to your site, make sure that you add that in the sitemap for Google to navigate better.
Identify and Prioritize Key Content
Direct Search Engines to Your Important Pages
You can prioritize your pages based on their importance through sitemaps for search engines. You can add the importance level of each page, ensuring which pages need to be focused by Google on the most.
📊 You can help Google crawl your important pages faster and more often with the help of priority tags used in sitemaps.
Help with Structured Data and Rich Snippets
Unlock Rich Snippets
Sitemaps can guide search engines to find structured data on websites. This will help your site get rich snippets in search results, such as pricing, ratings, and event information.
📊 You can experience visibility up to 40% using structured data in their sitemap on search engine results pages (SERPs).
✍🏻 Your chances of getting rich snippets can increase if your sitemap uses all the relevant structured data for content like products, recipes, and reviews.
Reduce Crawl Errors
Minimize Page Overlaps and Duplications
A sitemap well-structured, can help reduce crawl errors as it gives search engines clear navigation. Your key content might get missed in the absence of a sitemap or index duplicate pages, which can harm your rankings.
📊 If a website updates its sitemap regularly, they are more liked to reduce crawl errors by 35% ensuring more accurate indexing.
Monitor Your Sitemap Performance
Track Success with Google Search Console
You can monitor the performance of your sitemap using Google Search Console. It will tell you how Google crawls your website as well as point out any error in the sitemap preventing full indexing of the site.
✍🏻 Make sure to use Google Search Console in sitemap to make it error-free and up-to-date, especially if you have updated or redesigned your site recently.
Facilitate a Better Mobile Experience
Ensure Mobile Pages are Indexed
Ensure that you include mobile pages in the sitemap of your website in compliance with Google’s mobile-first indexing. Including mobile pages in the sitemap will ensure that Google finds and indexes mobile-friendly pages to improve visibility on mobile searches.
📊 Mobile search accounted for over 50% of global web traffic! And if you don’t have a mobile-friendly sitemap, you will lose out on a huge chunk of your audience.
✍🏻 Make sure that you develop sitemaps for both desktop and mobile versions of content. Especially in the case of separate URLs for mobile pages.
Speed Up New Page Discovery
Get New Content Indexed Faster
If you are eager to get Google’s attention on your new blog post or product page, a sitemap is the quickest way to do it. Once you update the sitemap, Google will be able to crawl and discover new pages more quickly.
📊 Your site can experience 50% faster indexing, if you update your sitemap frequently with new content.
✍🏻 You can use Google Search Console to ensure quick indexing on Google, if you update the sitemap manually with a new article or new page launch.
Sitemaps Are Non-Negotiable!
Sitemaps have become a necessity in the SEO world. It helps search engines identify every piece of content that can be relevant to users. Irrespective of what you are trying from launching a brand new website or improving the current one, if you have a clean sitemap, you will be able to boost your SEO performance.
Improve indexing, and ensure seamless user experience on your site using sitemap. If you find it difficult to create and update a sitemap for your site, get it done by outsourcing SEO services.
Ensure to review your sitemap regularly! Always delete the pages and content that are outdated or deleted to avoid broken links or 404 errors that can reduce your rankings on SERP.
Ready to optimize your site with a sitemap?