Summary – The importance of optimizing sitemaps for BFSI websites with millions of pages is discussed in this article. It includes guidelines for creating and refining XML and HTML sitemaps, as well as an explanation of how sitemaps help search engines navigate complex structures.
Key Takeaways:-
BFSI (Banking, Financial, Services, and Insurance) websites are known for their complex procedures, including varied pages and subpages—critical for search engine rankings. Sitemaps enable search engines to provide a seamless overview of a website’s structure, links, and more. Optimizing BFSI sitemaps with a million pages can be challenging; hence, we have mentioned detailed steps in this article.
By implementing a scalable strategy for optimizing BFSI sitemaps, organizations can improve online visibility, user experience, and website credibility and drive better revenue. Sounds interesting?
We will help you explore the importance of sitemaps, highlight accurate steps and tools to leverage diverse perks, and guide you on how to optimize large website sitemaps hassle-free.
A sitemap is a detailed blueprint of your website designed to help search engines identify, crawl, and index diverse content and pages on your website. However, sitemap optimization means that you are telling search engines which pages to focus on or which page holds the utmost importance.
When search engines or bots crawl/find content on your website, they explore varied links to discover specific pages. However, when there are a million pages, or if your site entails complicated navigation, the search engine may miss out on particular pages or nooks.
This is the reason why most organizations optimize sitemap for large websites. By creating sitemap optimization, you are simplifying methods for search engines with a structured directory to explore your web pages.
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The common types of sitemaps enable list or linking pages, making it easy for varied search engines to coral or scan the website pages. Some of the different types include:
An XML Sitemap refers to a file that strives to list all web pages seamlessly. This means that this file simplifies the job of search engines, and accessing links and other details is easy through a centralized XML file. However, remember that XML files are written for search engines or bots and not for end users.
In addition, XML sitemap focuses on other technical information like:
Here’s what XML sitemap looks like:

An HTML sitemap is a dedicated page on your tremendous website that lists essential website pages for search engines. This type of Sitemap acts as a table of contents for your website. It tends to assist search engines and website visitors in navigating across the site—ideal for huge websites containing millions of pages with critical information.
Here’s what HTML sitemap looks like:

An image sitemap is utilized to ensure the images mentioned on your site are listed in the section of Google Image on the Search Result. On the other hand, a Video sitemap aids users in discovering your videos on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
This method of sitemap optimization helps crawlers to understand the context of the content from the video easily. Details like URL location, title, description, video content, thumbnail location, and video player location improve the chances of ranking your video.
Here’s what Image and Video Sitemaps looks like:

Sitemaps are typically a map for your website listing essential web pages or links that correlate with each other. They guide search engines to crawl the content quickly and effortlessly, enhancing your website’s online visibility. Let us explore a few methods to optimize BFSI Sitemaps.
Building a manual sitemap requires attention to detail, like XML format. Let’s explore a few steps to create an HTML sitemap for BFSI Organizations successfully:
In contrast to HTML sitemaps, creating sitemaps can take some time. However, you can optimize BFSI sitemaps in XML format by automating the process with powerful tools. Here are some of the best choices:
This tool generates sitemaps for websites with 500 pages for free. It is user-friendly and does not demand technical expertise. It can be used directly from the browser to create sitemaps ready for search engine submissions.
WordPress plugin is designed to meet Google’s guidelines for XML sitemaps. It is easy to use and can enhance website visibility with minimal effort.
You can easily generate a sitemap using the sitemap automation template. Simply refer to the attached spreadsheet, go to the instructions tab, and follow the steps. You’ll have your sitemap generated in seconds.
When it comes down to the challenges of managing large BFSI sitemaps, the list can be a bit long. Some of the most common ones include:
BFSI includes strict and complex regulatory laws. Implementing operations as per recent rules can be time-consuming. Hence, regularly updating sitemaps based on the website changes and meeting evolving search engine guidelines can help address this challenge.
Since BFSI organizations face critical challenges in maintaining massive databases effectively, they need to make sure the data management system oversees the complexity of data to scale website performance and reliability with effective sitemaps.
Due to complex processes and data, integrating diverse information across sites can be challenging, leading to indexation-based issues. Hence, implying reliable and effective data integration practices is essential to making sitemaps effective with structured and accurate page linking.
Along with the mentioned challenges, other technical SEO issues such as slow page load times, broken links, and mobile usability can also hinder site performance. Addressing these issues are equally important to provide optimal user experience and maintain search engine visibility.
As discussed in this article, a sitemap is essential in optimizing a website. To enhance your SEO performance and streamline sitemap practices, let us explore a few methods dedicated to optimizing sitemaps for BFSI organizations.
Utilize a robust sitemap generator tool to create sitemaps ( as discussed above) automatically. However, if you have a WordPress website, you can utilize the Yoast plugin and enable XML sitemaps directly. Organizations can use Google XML Sitemaps for other websites to create sitemaps seamlessly.
Then, submit the Sitemap to Google through Google Search Console. Then, through your dashboard, click on Sitemaps. Add the URL of your SItemap in the blank space. Then, submit the Sitemap and check it in the Submitted Sitemap section.
It is important to structure and organize your sitemap URLs by site section in Google Search Console to optimize XML sitemaps. To begin with, you must create sitemap index files for every section on your website. A basic structure for Sitemap can include:
Include only canonical URLs in the Sitemap, as this ensures that search engines rank and index the ideal version of every page. This would eliminate duplicate content problems with huge websites and enhance SEO performance.
In addition, by mentioning canonical URLs in the Sitemap, you’re guiding search engines to the primary content sources, which allows for imposing website ranking.
If your website sitemap directs engines to thousands of low-quality pages, then the bot would interpret webpages as an indication that the site is not credible and reliable that the audience may visit.
To avoid such circumstances, consider directing search engines to primary web pages such as:
Utilize dynamic sitemaps that automate the updates when the content is modified.
This will ensure that search engines are instantly well-informed about modified pages. In addition, consider categorizing and splitting content into varied sitemaps based on categories defined to overwhelm bots with multiple URLs in a single file.
To optimize BFSI sitemaps for websites containing over 1 million pages, it is important to implement ideal practices to ensure effective crawling and indexing. Alongside following best practices, businesses should choose the right enterprise SEO agency for BFSI brands to ensure these strategies are implemented accurately and deliver long-term search visibility.
Our team has many years of experience optimizing BFSI sitemaps for multi-million-page websites. To guarantee effective crawling and indexing, we utilize industry best practices including content categorization, and automated sitemap creation.
As we have built search visibility for numerous BFSI leaders like Bajaj Finserv’s Bike Insurance, we’ll be able to do the same for you as well.
Trust our experts to manage your large website in the BFSI industry!
Categorize the Sitemap in multiple small XML files and regularly update It to ensure it represents the site’s modified content. By leveraging a sitemap index file, you can manage diverse sitemaps and track issues of every sitemap in real-time.
Get insights on evolving customer behaviour, high volume keywords, search trends, and more.