How to check the click depth of a page?

Click depth is the number of clicks it takes to get from the homepage to a destination URL. In other words, click depth shows how deep a page is in the site structure. Ideally, the most important pages should be within 3-4 clicks from the homepage.

Minimizing the click depth across a website will help to establish clear paths for your site visitors and create a smooth user experience. At the same time, low click depth corresponds to better SEO results, as it helps search engine bots to crawl your pages easier and faster, and determine their value for search rankings.

Below you can review a step-by-step guide to finding pages located too deep within a website using DataForSEO On-Page API.

1 Set a task to On-Page API and specify the necessary target site.

POST: https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/on_page/task_post

[
  {
    "target": "dataforseo.com",
    "max_crawl_pages": 10,
    "tag": "some_string_123",
    "pingback_url": "https://your-server.com/pingscript?id=$id&tag=$tag"
  }
]

2 Configure your request to the Pages endpoint with a filter as in the example below.

POST: https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/on_page/pages

[
  {
    "id": "07281559-0695-0216-0000-c269be8b7592",
    "filters": [
      ["resource_type", "=", "html"],
      "and",
      ["click_depth", ">", 4]
    ]
  }
]

The response from the API server will contain a list of pages located further than within 4 clicks from the homepage. You will also get detailed performance metrics, including meta tags checks, page timing, and over 60 other check-ups for each listed page.

To learn more about checking internal links with On-Page API, refer to this article.