A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that help search engines find, crawl and index all of your website’s content.
Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important, if those pages are important for search engines they need to be important for SEO people.
Sitemaps provide a view of types of pages that can be linked and associated into silos and mini-silos and/or where potential content gaps can be closed or promoted with links.
Grouping themes of pages together with internal links is one of the best ways to push content silos up existing rankings and into new rankings, simply aligning the SEO on-page factors and page content and making decisions on existing assets.
Long-tail search terms are how lower-ranking competitor websites survive. So they can be highly lucrative as the low competition/volume terms are more specific and often highly achievable on deeper pages found in your sitemap.
Don’t forget to optimise for seasonal search opportunities around events, holidays etc… keeping an eye on what competitors are optimising for and replicating their strategies on your authoritative website.
Sitemaps are really designed to help Google easily find, index, classify content on your website. On large lists sitemaps might be broken up into logical category themes or silos. Essentially a site may have many logical navigation sitemaps that form part of the user and search engine journey of the website.
XML sitemaps are generally submitted to Google may too follow logical classifications to ensure that the XML sitemaps are optimally uploaded and updated in the index.
https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/sitemaps
