Are Sitemaps important for SEO in 2023?

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file placed on your site which provides you with information about the pages, texts, videos, URLs, and other files. Search engines like Google use sitemaps to understand your website's content and structure. It can also help website users to find specific pages easier. 

Do we need to optimise the sitemap for SEO?

If you are a large and complex website you must have a sitemap. A sitemap will provide the crawlers with a list of pages and helps crawlers to find your content as fast as possible. A sitemap will provide the crawlers with a list of pages. Your website will benefit from having a sitemap, it will never be punished for having one (unless you have duplicated content). A sitemap is vital for a large website’s SEO as it provides quicker indexation, better indexation for “deep pages”, and continually monitors index pages in case content changes.

How do I know If I Should Use a Sitemap?

There are some circumstances when we believe you should use sitemaps. You should use sitemaps for the following:

• You have a large website with new content (crawlers might overlook some new content)
• Your website content changes frequently
• You need to index your content fast
• Your site has a bad inter-linking strategy - If you don’t regularly link in-between your pages, some of them might be hard to crawl by search engines
• Your site is new and has few backlinks - Since websites are discovered from link to link, other websites must link to your site to signal its existence.

Although sitemaps can help crawlers scan your website, it doesn’t help boost your rankings!

Are they important for SEO in 2022?

Although there are more important SEO issues to fix, a well-executed website means making your website accessible. A sitemap is important as it helps keep your website organised.

Some benefits of using a sitemap for SEO:

• Makes your website user-friendly
• Make it easy for search engines to classify your content
• Helps you to find internal linking opportunities
• Organize large sites
• Determine areas to improve website navigation
• Provides faster indexing
• Automatically index your updated content
• Increases visibility of your website in SERPs

Conclusion

Having a sitemap that is created considering a business goal could be the driving force to a website’s success. Sitemaps can help take your SEO strategy to the next level; however, you must fix the main issues first to get the results you are looking for. 

Are you looking for help to optimise your SEO and website? Contact the Zen agency on 0141 229 1333 or fill out our quick enquiry form on our website and a member of the team will be in touch to discuss your marketing needs.

The Zen Agency are specialists in all things digital, whether it be website and app development or digital design. We can help with creating digital marketing strategy, content creation, social media marketing, PPC, SEO and videography.