How to Organize a Sitemap for the Best SEO Results

Creating a sitemap is a brief but oh-so-important step in the process of building a website. A sitemap is the information architecture of your website. It reveals all the site’s pages and how they are organized relative to one another. You should be able to look at a sitemap document and figure out how many clicks it takes to get from the homepage to any given interior page. 

When Mad Genius builds websites, figuring out the sitemap happens early in the process and, in most cases isn’t a particularly dense document. Many sites don’t require tons of interior pages or navigation items, and so the importance of this step can sometimes be overlooked. The way your content is organized affects everything from crawlability to clarity. If your sitemap is messy, your site feels messy to both users and search engines.

When organized correctly, your sitemap becomes both:

• An SEO asset that helps search engines crawl, understand, and rank your content
• A user experience tool that guides visitors toward conversion

Sitemaps Are a Tool for Both User Experience and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before diving into structures, it’s important to understand what a sitemap really does.

A well-organized sitemap:

• Clarifies your site’s content hierarchy
• Groups related topics logically
• Guides users toward the next step
• Helps search engines understand topical relationships
• Improves internal linking

In short, structure drives visibility and conversions.

Understanding the Two Core Sitemap Structures

There are two foundational ways to structure a sitemap.

Linear Sitemaps

A linear sitemap follows a step-by-step, predetermined path. Users move through content in a specific sequence. Think of it like a guided journey.

In a linear structure, page one leads to page two, and page two leads to page three. Each step builds on the previous one. Navigation is controlled. You’re leading users from one page to the next, curating the experience they’re having. 

Linear sitemaps work best for landing pages, campaign microsites, story-driven brand experiences, product launches, and funnels. 

For example, take a look at this website we made for Ergon Hyvolt Solution. It’s a landing page that’s heavy on the animation and imagery for visual storytelling, and it takes the user from one section of content to the next in a predetermined order so that we can tell that story.

Pros for SEO and UX

Pros:

• Clear call-to-action focus
• Strong storytelling impact
• High conversion potential for single offers

Cons:

• Limited keyword breadth
• Fewer indexable entry points
• Not ideal for large content ecosystems

Linear structures are excellent for focused campaigns but not for content-heavy marketing websites.

Hierarchical Sitemaps

A hierarchical sitemap organizes pages in layers by topic and specificity. You have parent pages (for broad topics), child pages (for more specific topics), and logical groupings of related content. This is the most common and most effective structure for marketing sites. This layering signals both clarity and authority.

Hierarchical sitemaps are powerful because they scale easily, supporting content expansion, strengthening topical authority, and improving internal linking.

Search engines like Google rely heavily on internal structure to understand relationships between pages. A well-built hierarchy makes their job easier and rewards you with better rankings.

For example, look at this website we built for the Foundation for Jewish Camp. You can navigate to different pages by using the navigation that shows you different pages when you hover on the navigation item. And then within those pages, there are ways to navigate to pages that cover even more specific topics. The idea is to make it easy for the user to find what they want but not completely control how they experience the website.

SEO Benefits

• Clear topical authority
• Better internal linking
• Easier crawling

For the overwhelming majority of business websites, those that are focused on marketing and providing users the information they need to decide about buying a product, a hierarchical sitemap structure will be best.

What Is an XML Sitemap?

You may have heard the term “XML sitemap” if you’ve worked with an agency or web development company before. This is also important, but it doesn’t have much bearing on the planning stage of building a website, so let’s clarify the difference.

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file that tells search engines which URLs exist on your site. You can see a site’s XML sitemap by typing their homepage URL into your browser and then putting “/sitemap.xml” at the end. It feels like you’re hacking the mainframe and that you’re doing something wrong, but to our knowledge, it’s totally legal to look at anyone’s XML sitemap.

You’d make this closer to the launch of your website so that search engines are more easily able to crawl the site and understand your content. XML sitemaps are SEO tools, but they don’t determine the structure of your site.

It helps platforms like Google and Bing:

• Discover new pages
• Understand site updates
• Crawl large websites more efficiently
• What Should Be Included?

Include:

• Canonical URLs
• Indexable pages
• Important content

Exclude:

• Noindex pages
• Redirects
• Duplicate URLs
• Thin or low-value content

XML Sitemap Best Practices

For large sites:

• Break into multiple sitemap files
• Use a sitemap index file

For frequently updated sites:

• Update dynamically
• Include last-modified dates

Bring a Map and You Won’t Get Lost

With all the exciting things that often come with a website like a new user interface, imagery, and animations, sitemaps can often get lost in the shuffle. But as you can see, it can have a great bearing on how your site performs once it’s out in the world. It’s important to spend some real time pondering how you want your site to be structured. Put yourself in the shoes of someone visiting your website. What are the reasons for visiting your site? If they navigate to a certain page, what are they expecting to see after that? If we can figure these out before launching a site, then it’ll be in good shape from both an SEO and user experience standpoint.