Beautiful web design is important in keeping visitors on your page. People gain a sense of comfort on a beautifully designed website much in the same way they do when in a beautifully designed doctor’s office. And comfort is important. The problem is a confused and frustrating navigation and user-experience can send a site visitor packing from that beautifully designed website much in the same way a confusing and frustrating in-take process does for a patient in a doctor’s office.
Experience matters, and typically, the first experience a user will have on your website is navigation. “Where do I go to get the information I need?” That’s the question one asks themselves on your website. If you don’t answer those questions at the outset, they may just exit and move on to the next website.
Efficient website design mandates that ease of use in navigation be top of mind when layout out the pathway your users take upon entry. And that’s important to get them to ultimately convert. But in addition to that, how you name your navigation titles matters to the SEO health of your website. Here are a few tips that will get you where you need to be when you are designing how to get your users where they need to be upon entry to your website:
- Naming Your Navigation Titles: Typically, business websites use generic names to navigate toward the more meaningful content that describes their business offerings. Don’t do this. This produces no benefit for your site in terms of SEO and no benefit for the site visitor in terms of navigation. Instead of titles like “Services” or “About Us,” try creating navigation that tells visitors and search engines what you do. For instance, a construction firm could use titles like “Home Renovation” and “Kitchen Remodeling” and “New Home Additions.” Titles like these instantly give visitors information on what you do and eliminates steps in that vital process. Keeping the number of navigation titles to a minimum is important, so use the most popular services or products in the navigation menu and group others in limited dropdowns wherever possible.
- Avoid Formatting Descriptions in Your Navigation Titles: Titles like “Videos” or “Gallery” or even “White Paper” only describe the format of the content and not the subject matter of the content. That is unhelpful for both the site visitor and for your business’ SEO ranking. Descriptions of the content itself helps on both fronts and should be used in place of formats. Try using a white paper’s subject matter in the navigation title, or the video’s or gallery’s subjects. This will go a long way toward conveying information about what your business specialty, and that helps both customers/clients and your bottom line when it comes to Google search rankings.
- Limiting Your Navigation Titles: Of course, you want to keep your navigation clean, so try to keep the number of options in your navigation menu limited just makes sense. Do as much grouping of options in your titles as you can so as to keep your menu options to one line. Also, creating dropdowns (grouping) should be limited to 5 – 7 in a list. Keeping things tight helps to avoid confusion and prevent users from having to work too hard to find what they’re looking for on your website.
If you would like to learn more about Proctor Digital’s website design team and what we can do to drive sales for your business, call us at 773.664.5819. We love to help!