Your website exists to help attract new customers, meet the needs of existing clients, and serve as a marketing tool for your company. However, it can only achieve these goals if you have a high-quality website that is laid out in a logical fashion. Having great information is one piece of the puzzle, but if nobody can find it, it might as well not be there at all! One of the best things that you can do for your business is take time to improve your website’s navigation.
Know What Good Website Navigation Is
Before we cover how to improve your website’s navigation, it’s important to understand what makes navigation effective. The most important goal of your navigation is the average user being able to find what they are looking for quickly, easily, and without any frustration. Your navigation should be consistent throughout your entire website and not change from page to page. It should also clearly organize all of the pages on your website so that things like services or employee bios are easy to find.
Find Your Problems
Next, when you set out to improve your website’s navigation, you should start by reviewing existing data to determine what problems you might have. Check your Google Analytics and other data to see how users are navigating the website now. Where are people going? Are there any pages that seem to have noticeably higher bounce rates? Is the search feature being used very heavily because it is hard for users to find what they’re looking for? The data that you receive during this part of the planning process is essential to make sure that you are creating meaningful change and not merely reorganizing for the sake of reorganization.
Be Consistent
Consistency is key, but many companies still fail to make navigation consistent on their websites. Make sure that the navigation on every page is identical to the navigation present on other pages. For example, if you have a menu bar at the top that expands to show all of the pages, that should be present on every single page on your site. It should not switch to a sidebar menu or another type of menu when the user navigates to another page, as this makes it harder to find.
When you improve your website’s navigation, you should make sure that you are keeping things as simple, streamlined, and consistent as possible. The goal of your website is to make sales or attract new clients, and if it is hard for the user to find what they are looking for, your chance of completing that sale dramatically drops.
Use Categories Wisely
Categories in your menu are great tools to thoroughly organize your website and many pages without cluttering up your menu. Always group pages into logical categories so that they are easy to find. This also allows you to use a top-level menu that gets more specific as you go into drop downs. For example, if you are a landscaping company, your “SERVICES” section could expand into some pages that include things like lawn mowing, tree care, and more. This helps users find specific things that they are looking for and prevents them getting overwhelmed having to scroll through multiple pages to find what they need.
Test Your Work
Finally, once you have taken time to improve your website’s navigation, you need to test it on a variety of users to make sure that it is effective. There is a good chance that you will need to use trial and error to determine what works the best for your users. Our team can help you design tests and execute them to see what menu formats work the best, what headers might be confusing, and more. We will look at things like how easy it is for people to find what they are looking for, how long it takes them to find what they are looking for, and what they first click on when they visit your website. We are here to help you!
How Can We Help Improve Your Website’s Navigation?
Working with a professional digital marketing company is the best way to make the most of your website and all that Facebook Pixel, LinkedIn ads, Google Analytics and other digital advertising platforms have to offer. To learn more about the best digital marketing strategies for your company and reach a bigger audience than ever before, work with Gauge Digital Media. For a quote or to schedule a call, contact us at 443-376-7709.
