Click depth is the number of clicks needed from the homepage for a visitor to reach a specific subpage. Both search engines and users perceive it as a signal of importance: what is closer is considered more significant, is crawled more often, and gains more internal authority. Content nested six levels deep gets indexed slowly and receives almost no traffic. On larger websites, it is worth keeping key pages within three clicks. You achieve this with well-thought-out navigation, hub pages for large categories, links to related content directly within the text, and lists of the most important items at higher levels. Watch out for the opposite – artificially flattening the structure with hundreds of footer links does not replace it and looks like an attempt to game the system.
See also: Orphan page, Crawl budget, Topical authority.
