Laurelin Labs · Information Architecture Audit & Proposal
Retire the blog. Make the topic the spine. Every article, framework, service, lab build and project gets one obvious home, anchored to the Four Pillars framework Laurelin already sells. This is the case for the restructure, and an interactive map of the proposed architecture.
01 · Where the current site fights itself
The live site is organised by content type in the primary nav, while a parallel topic taxonomy exists but only surfaces as a filter on one page. That split is the root of everything below.
Primary nav: Services, Frameworks, The Lab, Insights, About. A visitor has to already know whether the thing they want is a "service" or a "framework" to find it. Content type is an internal distinction, not how anyone searches.
The Insights page aggregates existing services, frameworks and lab builds by cluster. There is no article or editorial content type at all. There is nowhere to publish and grow topical content, which is the one thing that moves Pillar 2.
Five clusters exist in the code (AI search visibility, entity authority, technical SEO, measurement, paid media) but they live one level down, as a filter. The thing that should be the spine is a side-feature.
Laurelin sells the Four Pillars, yet the site clusters do not map to them: Topical Content (Pillar 2) has no cluster at all, "AI search visibility" spans everything, and measurement and paid sit outside the pillars. The site does not practise what it preaches.
The test that fails. An IA is only as good as the share of real demand and future content it can house without a rethink. Right now, ask "where does a new case study go?", "where does an article on E-E-A-T live?", "where does the next lab tool attach?" and there is no single correct answer. That is the failure a topic-first restructure fixes.
02 · The move
Borrow the exact model that worked for PST/TT and Music Ally: a demand-weighted topic spine as the primary structure, with an editorial or framework layer sitting behind it. Here the framework layer is Laurelin's own Four Pillars, so the site literally demonstrates the methodology it consults on.
Topic clusters buried one level down. No article type. New content has no obvious home.
Topics becomes the hub: one hero topic, four pillars, three cross-cutting tracks. Services and The Lab remain as cross-cutting lenses over the same content, not competing silos.
03 · The proposed architecture · click any node
One hero hub, the four pillars beneath it, three cross-cutting tracks. Click a node to see the demand read, its pillar anchor, and every existing piece of content that moves into it.
Hero hub · the money page
The four pillars · how visibility is earned
Cross-cutting tracks
04 · Every current page, rehoused
All 23 existing content items map into exactly one node. Nothing is lost, nothing is orphaned. The one node with zero existing items, Trust Signals, is the priority content gap the new IA reveals.
| Content item | Type | Today | New home |
|---|
Demand data. Volumes are live UK monthly searches from DataForSEO (Google Ads search volume, United Kingdom, English), pulled 9 Jul 2026 across an 80-term set mapped one-to-one to nodes. Two cleaning passes were applied so the weighting reflects real intent: 'google eat' (1.22M, food-intent noise) was removed from Trust Signals, and the navigational product terms 'google ads' (165k) and 'google search console' (110k) are reported separately rather than driving the spine. Bars are relative to the largest cluster.