Sitemaps are important for SEO because they help search engine bots discover pages on your website. While search engines can still crawl your website without a sitemap, a sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find pages you want them to find.
Sitemaps become increasingly important the larger your website is. The more complex your internal navigation and linking structures become, the more useful and valuable a well-maintained sitemap becomes.
Sitemaps can also increase your website’s crawlability, which is valuable for a new website that has very few backlinks – search engine bots like Googlebot discover and re-evaluate your content through backlinks. Sitemaps help search engines find pages that aren’t well linked to (regardless of if they’re internal or external links). This does mean sitemaps are more of a band-aid than anything, but useful as a stopgap.
Contact Fire&Spark to discuss best practices for creating your website architecture & navigation.
