You may have seen sitemaps on other websites and wondered if you need one for your coaching website. A sitemap does improve your website SEO and makes things easier for human website visitors too. Let’s talk about how to create a website, what needs to be on your sitemap, and whether you need a sitemap for your coaching website.
What Is a Sitemap?
Think of a sitemap a little bit like a directory. It helps both human users and search engine crawlers to find the pages that they need a little easier. Not every page on your website will be on your sitemap though, only the ones you think are the most important.
Does your website need a sitemap? No, especially not if it is a simple website. However, it can improve your website’s SEO and highlight important pieces of content that may otherwise get buried.
What Are the SEO Benefits of a Sitemap?
The main benefit of a sitemap is that it improves your website’s search engine ranking. Basically, search engines deploy bots called “search engine crawlers” to crawl web pages and give the search engines a summary of what is on each page. This summary is stored so the search engine can compare them against search queries and that is why search engines can return results in seconds.
These search engines crawl your coaching website regardless. They start on your homepage and then use the links to go through every link they find in the order they find them. This means that pages that are closer to your homepage are prioritised over pages that are a few pages back. So, if you have a services page/work with us page in your menu that then links to your coaching services or you have a blog with multiple articles, these pages are a lower priority to search engine crawlers.
That is where a sitemap comes in. Your sitemap is a page just off your homepage (the best location for your sitemap is in the footer menu of your website) that lists all of the most important links so the pages you want the search engine to prioritise will be prioritised. When a website has poor internal linking strategy, it can be beneficial to list every page on your sitemap. Just having a sitemap on your website improves your SEO, but you can also submit your sitemap directly to search engines. That way, the search engines always have the most up-to-date version of your sitemap.
What Are the User Benefits of a Sitemap?
Human visitors to your website also benefit from a sitemap. It helps them find what they are looking for easily. Your sitemap will organise all of the important pages on your website under simple headings. How you organise your sitemap is up to you. A lot of coaches will separate out the following categories:
- Coaching services
- Coaching products
- SEO pages
- Content categories with the most important blog posts.
Sitemaps are not heavily designed pages, often they are a basic webpage with a lot of links. The priority here is ease of use rather than look.
What to Put on Your Sitemap
The best way to decide what goes on your sitemap is to think about the pages you want to rank on Google. In other words, what pages do you want your ideal clients to be able to find easily?
- Coaching services
- Coaching products
- Books
- SEO pages
- Content categories
- Important blog posts
Your headings don’t need to be the page titles, you can change them to ensure it is really easy for human visitors to tell what is on that page. For example, you could have a heading labelled coaching services that leads to your “work with us” page and then list the coaching services you offer with links to the relevant pages. Then, you could have another heading labelled templates or workbooks that leads to your online shop and your coaching products listed underneath.
How to Use Your Sitemap Effectively?
If you want your sitemap to be effective, it needs to be simple. Don’t make it fancy, the priority is that it has the links your website visitors need.
Here are some ways to make sure your website is effective:
- Make sure all the links work, broken links make your sitemap useless
- Put your sitemap in your footer menu
- Submit your sitemap to search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the top search engines)
- Update your sitemap regularly
- Check tools like Google Search Console to spot issues with indexing (compare the number of pages on your sitemap with the number of pages that Google has indexed)
- Break your sitemap down into smaller sitemaps when you exceed 50,000 links
- Create an XML sitemap (for search engines) and a HTML sitemap (for human users) to boost the SEO benefits of a sitemap
Learn more about how to improve the SEO of your coaching website here.