Seo site architecture - how deep?

[YouAndWhatArmy]

Hello Moz community!

We are building out a site for a web hosting/web design company. I am wondering if we should just have home/categories/pages or if we should have home/categories/sub-categories/pages.

I am am not sure if by adding the additional level we can create a bunch of mini-hubs within the categories.

For example:

Home/Web hosting/Business Web Hosting/Small Business Web Hosting

I don't know if these mini-hubs within the category are a good idea or if I should keep it as flat as possible?

Any thoughts on this?

[LesleyPaone]

The best rule of thumb is go only as deep as you need to go. If you try to go to deep, you will risk pages with duplicate content and thin content.

[YouAndWhatArmy]

Ok great! That is what I was thinking. I am going to just bunch some of the sub-catagories up and flatten it out.

Thanks Lesley!

[JaneCopland]

Agree with Lesley - there's little to no benefit in stuffing keywords into a URL (which was a "traditional" reason why people added multiple subcategories), and excessive categorisation / siloing shows diminishing returns. I would stick to as flat a structure as possible whilst keeping a sensible hierarchy of information.

Cheers,

Jane