Developing supporting content for main ideas

[Brando16]

I attended Mozcon this year and the session by Joe Hall "Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing" has me considering some changes to our site structure and architecture. I'm currently putting together a landing page for our webinars but could things like webinars and case studies be considered supporting content to our main ideas?

For example instead of my architecture being:

home > webinars > webinar about an idea

It could be:

home > main idea 1 > webinar about an idea

So my webinar landing page would link out to all of the different webinar pages on the site instead of being contained in this bucket. Just wanted to get some thoughts on this.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Brandon,

Anything that improves the user experience is a good thing, but be careful you don't end up just creating doorway pages, as this in itself can bring you a penalty.

Try to envisage how this will look from when a user lands but do keep in mind that this should not be done just to try and gain more favour with Google. However, if it does start to look like a doorway page, then as long as there is real value add, you should be fine.

-Andy

[Brando16]

I think this structure makes sense from a users perspective and what our goals are as far as providing information. Typically we would want somebody to find our site because they have a particular problem and need a solution. They go to our page that has the solution and there to support the solution is a webinar further explaining how we may be able to help.

While we still do have this webinars page on our site, I don't think many people would say let's see what webinars they have before investigating a solution. A returning visitor or somebody that is already familiar with our solutions may go to our resources/webinars first but I feel like that would be the only case.

Creating these pages would definitely not be for targeting specific keyword terms but for providing more supporting content for our products and services.

[irapasternack]

As long as all the pages have real value (and it sounds like you have that covered) I think it makes sense to have an index of all webinars, AND to link a webinar to a blog post or other piece of content if it expands on the ideas in that post or page. Depending on the goals and path of the user, both options should provide value.