Getting a site structure that Google can easily crawl

Hello! Wondering if the lovely Ghost community can give me some pointers about site structure within Ghost to make my proposed website SEO friendly. I suspect I’m overthinking it, so could do with a sense-check!
I’m going to start blogging about different locations, and then writing about eg places to visit, things to do etc within each location. Proposed site structure is:

  • mysite.com
    • location1
      • places to visit
      • things to do
    • location2
      • places to visit
      • things to do
        To achieve this, I’ll create tags for ‘location1’ and ‘location2’, then generic tags of ‘places to visit’ (rather than ‘location1 places to visit’) and ‘things to do’. Then in my routes.yaml have:

collections:
/location1/places-to-visit/:
permalink: /location1/places-to-visit/{slug}/
filter: tag:location1+tag:places-to-visit
template:
- index
/location1/things-to-do/:
permalink: /location1/things-to-do/{slug}/
filter: tag:location1+tag:things-to-do
template:
- index
/location1/:
permalink: /location1/{slug}/
filter: tag:location1
template:
- index

If a post is tagged ‘location1’ and ‘places to visit’, in theory it should only reside at an SEO-friendly URL of mysite.com/location1/places-to-visit/post1 without any duplicate URLs such as mysite.com/location1/post1.

Will this method overcomplicate things eg will it cause Google confusion when crawling my website? Should I maybe wait for subtags to be implemented, and if so, is this imminent?
This structure also causes a few problems:

  • The homepage is empty because I left it out of collections in routes.yaml - if I include it, then all posts match that and won’t appear anywhere else
  • ‘Places to visit’ has its own tag page at mysite.com/places-to-visit with places to visit from location1 and location2 - not ideal. I tried creating it as an internal tag instead but internal tags don’t seem to work with collections. Can I maybe leave ‘tag: /{slug}/’ out of taxonomy in routes.yaml or is that a bad idea?
  • It means that posts can only sit in one collection - I can’t tag a post with both ‘places to visit’ and ‘things to do’

Thank you!

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