If you already understand site architecture and want to check your own site rather than read about it, this is the checklist to run. It covers the same four areas a structural audit checks: crawl depth, internal link flow and orphan pages, topical gaps, and URL structure. Work through each section in order with a spreadsheet open. None of it needs paid software, just a full crawl of your site and the patience to compare lists properly rather than skim them.
Crawl depth checklist
Crawl depth is the number of clicks from your homepage to a page, and it’s the fastest section to check, so start here.
- Crawl your full site, or export your XML sitemap, and list every URL.
- For each page you want to rank, count the clicks from the homepage along the shortest internal link path, not the number of folders in the URL.
- Flag every important page sitting at depth four or deeper.
- Run your URL list through the free crawl depth checker for a fast structural read without a full crawl.
- For each flagged page, note which higher-level page, homepage, main navigation, or a pillar page, could link to it directly to pull it shallower.
Internal link flow and orphan pages checklist
This is the slowest part of the audit, and the one most people skip, which is exactly why the biggest structural wins usually hide here.
- Export every internal link on the site, meaning a crawl that records inlinks and outlinks, not just a list of URLs.
- Compare your full URL list against the inlinks export. Any page that exists but receives zero internal links is an orphan page.
- For each orphan, decide whether it deserves to rank. If yes, note which live pages should link to it. If no, mark it for a redirect or removal.
- List your five or six highest-authority pages, by internal links, backlinks or traffic, and check where they currently link. If they don’t point at your priority pages, that authority is going to waste.
- Check for pages hoarding a disproportionate share of internal links relative to their importance. This is usually where internal linking equity pools instead of flowing to the pages you actually want to rank.
Topical gaps checklist
Structure isn’t only about links, it’s also about whether your content maps to the topic the way search engines expect it to.
- List the subtopics and questions a genuinely thorough resource on your core topic would need to cover.
- Match each one against a page on your site. Anything left unmatched is a gap.
- Check whether your existing pages cluster around a clear pillar, or sit scattered with no hub page tying them together.
- Look at which page currently ranks, or tries to, for your most important terms. If it’s the “wrong” page, that’s a sign your topical structure isn’t legible to search engines.
URL structure checklist
URLs are the visible skeleton of your architecture. They should mirror the structure, not fight it.
- List all live URLs and check they follow one consistent pattern, not several competing structures left over from old redesigns.
- Check that URL folders reflect your actual topic hierarchy, not a historical CMS default nobody revisited.
- Look for redundant or near-duplicate URLs, trailing slashes, tracking parameters, capitalisation variants, that split authority across what should be one page.
- Confirm deep URL paths still resolve to shallow crawl depth through internal links. A long path isn’t a problem by itself, an unreachable one is.
DIY versus done for you
Worked through properly, this checklist will surface most of the structural problems capping your rankings. The honest catch is time. Mapping crawl depth, comparing inlinks, and checking topical coverage by hand across a site of any real size is slow, and the link flow section specifically is easy to get wrong, since where authority pools isn’t visible from a URL list, it takes a proper crawl graph to see it clearly. A site architecture audit does all of this for you, mapped and prioritised, in 5 days.