Navigation Menu - Whats too much
-
Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu.
For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV.
We then have a navigation menu something like this:
Solar Window Film
Heat Control window Films
Anti glare window film
UV window film
etc etcIhave this for all my services and products. I have unique content on each.
My question is this. Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page>For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc.
Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way
-
Reviewing analytics and running usability tests are the two best ways to decide how much to have in each navigation system. There are several different forms of usability tests that you could use to determine the best way to organize your website and how to label each page: TreeJack is a service that will let you try out different navigation menus to make sure people can find what they're looking for; you could do card sorting which gives people a set number of categories but they physically or virtually group the cards into categories and you can then use the categories in your navigation; you can even create prototypes with a tool like Axure or Balsamiq and have people try out a few different options to see which one works best.
If you don't have the time or budget for usability testing, looking at analytics is second best. Things to look for: what content is the most visited on your website? Are people getting there by navigating through your website, or are most of them coming directly from organic search to those key pages? How long do people spend on particular pages? If some of the pages have very low time on site, it's a good idea to shorten the navigation path - you can either deep-link to those pages in sitewide navigation or just look at specific pages and add smaller nav menus within say a sidebar or a CTA button within that page's content, which gets people from that page to a deeper page with 1 click versus drilling down through several different links one at a time. Another great place to look: if you're tracking site search, see what people are searching for and what pages they're searching from the most. If 75% of people who visit the homepage search for 1 of 3 terms, then put prominent featured sections about those 3 terms right there front and center to help them get there. Also take note of the specific keywords people are searching by and use those as your navigational labels - that can be even more helpful than simplifying hierarchy, if you name things the way people use them naturally.
In my personal experience it's best for SEO as well as for users when you stick to the old no-more-than-100-links-per-page rule. If you provide too many options, people just get overwhelmed and don't know what to pick. So my own rule of thumb is to only link to about 5 top-level pages in my sitewide header navigation; under each of those have no more than 4 to 5 sublinks, and leave it at that. But I always make it very, very easy for them to drill down deeper - if the site is 4 or 5 levels deep, those 4th and 5th levels are accessible from the 2nd and 3rd directly, so they don't have to click 5 times to get down 5 levels - they can hit the homepage, go to a 2nd-level page, and from there straight to 5th-level if that's what they're looking for.
-
Yes this was what I was thinking. I’m thinking instead of having main category - sub category - second sub category. Having just main and sub may help. The second subcategories are all generally less competitive so having the links from the pages rather than menu might not cause too much problem. Anyone else have any insights into this?
-
Hmm, that's a legitimate point.
I haven't read anything on the importance or limit on # of links recently, but this Moz post from awhile back says you should usually aim to keep it below 100. It also has some good insight behind the reason that's the recommendation in regards to page rank, and creating a hierarchical structure that makes sense.
I'm interested to see if anyone else has any thoughts!
-
Thanks Brooks. What got me thinking about this was that I saw something about having too many links on one page being bad for SEO even internal links. As there's a lot of categories and subcategories in my menu I thought this may be hurting my rankings a bit
-
Hello!
In an ideal world, I would recommend looking at your analytics or interviewing customers to see how they interact with your site. Do they already know the exact product they're looking for? Or are they less familiar with the industry and in need of details and information on the over-arching category?
I personally like the idea of having a kind-of landing page for the product category – Solar Window Film – with some good quality content that answers frequently asked questions on the subject. From there, link to the individual products. This will help you rank for the more broad search term, while also allowing you to rank for the individual product.
As for whether or not to also display these as sub-nav items in your menu, I think you could do that as well if you like. To cater to the user who is already familiar and knows what they're looking for.
Hope that helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it a good idea to create a faceted navigation on your footer?
Hey everyone, I am curious to know if anyone has tried to implement faceted navigation on the footer's website. I am asking because top navigation is a sensitive topic and can't be touched. Please share if this is something that works or not? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?
Hi all, One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain). The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example: Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A. We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different? So: The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ Thanks in advance! Best!0 -
Is it normal for Bing rankings to fluctuate so much on a daily basis?
Hi all, I launched a new website in Aug 2015, and have had some success with ranking organically on Google (position 2 - 5 for all of my target terms). However I'm still not getting any traction on Bing. I know that they use completely different algorithms so it's not unusual to rank well on one but not the other, but the ranking behaviour that I see seems quite odd. We've been bouncing in and out of the top 50 for quite some time, with shifts of 30+ positions often on a daily basis (see attached). This seems to be the case for our full range of target terms, and not just the most competitive ones. I'm hoping someone can advise on whether this is normal behaviour for a relatively young website, or if it more likely points to an issue with how Bing is crawling my site. I'm using Bing Webmaster tools and there aren't any crawl or sitemap issues, or significant seo flags. Thanks dhYgh
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tinhat0 -
Penalty for adding too much content too quickly?
Hi there, We released around 4000 pieces of new content, which all ranked in the first page and did well. We had a database of ~400,000 pieces and so we released the entire library in a couple of days (all remaining 396,000 pages). The pages have indexed. The pages are not ranking, although the initial batch are still ranking as are a handful (literally a handful) of the new 396,000. When I say not ranking - I mean not ranking anywhere (gone up as far as page 20), yet the initial batch we'd be ranking for competitive terms on page 1. Do Google penalise you for releasing such a volume of content in such a short space of time? If so, should we deindex all that content and re-release in slow batches? And finally, if that is the course of action we should take is there any good articles around deindexing content at scale. Thanks so much for any help you are able to provide. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveW19870 -
Really, is there much difference between an unnatural links warning and Penguin?
We know that the unnatural links warnings are manual and that Penguin is algorithmic. (I'm not talking about the latest round of confusing unnatural links warnings, but the ones sent out months ago that eventually resulted in a loss of rankings for those who didn't clean their link profiles up.) Is there much difference in the recovery process for either? From what I can see, both are about unnatural/spammy linking to your site. The only difference I can see is that once you feel you've cleaned up after getting an unnatural links warning you can file a reconsideration request. But, if you've cleaned up after a Penguin hit you need to wait for the next Penguin refresh in order to see if you've recovered. Are there other differences that I am not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Performing Internal Optimization Without Much Anchor Text?
Hi guys. We're in the process of building a new site, and are using a lot of icon based linking, image linking, etc. There is some basic text linking here and there, but not a whole lot. My concern is, because I'm not using actual anchor text, but just images, that crawlers are going to have a more difficult time determining what pages are about. Do I have a valid concern, or am I just worrying about nothing? If this concern is valid, what is the best way to remedy this concern? Alt img tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
SEO for Global Navigations
I did my first SEO audit from the book SEO Secrets by Danny Dover on my new website at http://melo4.melotec.com:4010/ In the book he says to disable Javascript and see if the global navigation still works. So when I did that the dropdown menus in my navigation don't show. I'm assuming this is a problem but when I check the cache text only version of the site, the dropdowns are in the text only version. Are their any experienced SEO's out their who can weigh in on this issue? Should I have my developer redo the navigation without any javascript? Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0 -
Best SEO Practices for Top-Level Navigation Structure
OK - First of all, thank you to those of you who view and take the time to answer our question. We are currently in the middle of re-designing our golf packages website, and we're trying to decide the best way to structure our Main Navigation for maximum SEO benefit while keeping user experience in mind. The top key phrases we are currently targeting: 1) Myrtle Beach Golf 2) Myrtle Beach Golf Packages You can find the current navigation structure we have come up with here: http://www.myrtlebeachsitemasters.com/index2.html So our question is this: We have subdivisions of: Golf Packages, Accommodations, Golf Courses Is it in our best interest to: A) Get rid of the subdivisions and consolidate them to one page? or B) Simply "NoFollow" the subdivisions within the Main Navigation? We are concerned about the subdivisons for 2 reasons: Too many internal links in Main Navigation The "first link only" rule with Google affecting our additional internal links on existing pages. THANK YOU again to those of you who take the time to answer this question. We really appreciate any clarification on this issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0