Why it matters on an HVAC site
Depth is a reasonable proxy for how important a site treats a page as being, and contractor sites bury their commercial pages routinely. "Services" opens a menu, the menu leads to a category page, the category page leads to the service, and the service page for the town leads off that. Four clicks to the page that is meant to earn the call.
It compounds with the matrix problem. Every extra level multiplies across every combination, so a structure that is one level too deep for one page is one level too deep for four hundred.
How to check it yourself
- A crawl that records the shortest click path to every URL, reported as a distribution rather than an average.
- Count how many commercially important URLs sit at depth three or more.
- Check the depth figure against the rendered page, since a menu built in JavaScript may not be a link at all.
Worked through in numbers
A crawl of a contractor site returns: depth 1, 9 pages. Depth 2, 22. Depth 3, 51. Depth 4, 289. Depth 5, 41.
Every one of the 289 at depth four is a service-by-area page, reachable only through a county page that is itself inside a dropdown.
Replacing the dropdown with a linked service-area index at depth two moved 289 pages from depth four to depth three, and the 41 at depth five disappeared entirely because they had been reachable only through pagination.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. How many clicks from the homepage a page sits at.