Check Your Websites Page Depth and Click Depth - Technical SEO & Website Structure
There are a couple of interpretations of page depth. There’s Google’s description and then there’s the technical Page (click) depth of “hows many clicks does it take to get to a page”.
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They are both relevant but first, let’s cover Google’s description.
Google Page Depth
Your page depth is a measure of how many pages are visited on your website by a single user in a single session. It is, therefore, your website’s job to keep people consuming your content for as long as possible to increase its value and get higher SERPs.
Where do I find my Page Session Stats?
To find this in your Google Analytics,
https://analytics.withgoogle.com/
Open ‘All Website Data’
Click ‘Audience’ -- ‘Behaviour’ and then ‘Engagement’.
You will now see your engagement report.
In the report, you’ll see “Session Duration Bucket | Page Depth”
Click on ‘Page Depth’ and you’ll see your website’s statistics.
How do I Improve my Stats?
One way you can help with this goes back to the Content Clusters. We touched on back in the “SEO Friendly URL” post.
https://www.2waydigital.com/use-an-se...
If you have a number of articles and or pages on your website with related content, adding internal links from one document to several other related pages can keep people on your site longer. This has the benefit of increasing your page depth. This is great for your SEO and shows Google you’ve got what their searchers want.
Having offers, forms, or other activities on your website will also count towards your page depth since these activities (signing up for lead magnets / other deliverable content etc.) will all be tracked by Google Analytics.
Page (Click) depth
The number of clicks needed to get to a page, we are touching more on the structure of your content. In this context, the more clicks needed = bad for SEO.
As with most things SEO related, It’s not a direct correlation, but something to be aware of.
The deeper a page is in the hierarchy of a website, the less perceived value it has. While it could still be a valuable page and much viewed, until that happens, it won’t get much help from the search engines algorithm.
If you don’t have much content but the number of clicks needed to get to some of your pages is high, (more than 3 to 4 clicks) then you could restructure your content to make it easier to navigate. Adding an internal linking structure will also help.
Using breadcrumbs to allow a visitor to know where they are, making navigation around your website easier will reduce the impact of greater click depth.
Warning
warning
If you have a lot of content already built up over time, it would hurt your ranking and authority if you just changed your website structure. If you go down that route, get an SEO professional to help.
We talked about this in a bit more detail here:
https://www.2waydigital.com/use-an-se...
Note:
If your website is new or has not had many visitors, your page depth may not be a true reflection of the value of your content.