Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Local SEO
    4. Local Website Optimization
    5. SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices

    Local Website Optimization
    4
    7
    5431
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • RichardRColeman
      RichardRColeman last edited by

      I've read a number of articles on SEO and main navigation for websites.

      I'd like to get a solid answer/recommendation to help solve this one. This is the situation.

      We're helping a local business that offers pest control and property maintenance services. Under each of these, there area a number of services available, eg, cockroach control, termite inspections or lawn mowing services, rubbish removal and so on.

      Is it best to have a main nav containing the top keywords for the services - Pest Control | Property Maintenance, with a drop down to the services under each. Or, a simple approach - Our Services > drop down to each - Pest Control > Termite Inspections, etc. My concern here is that they have quite a lot of services, so the nav could be way too long.

      Really appreciate any assistance here. Many thanks.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RichardRColeman
        RichardRColeman @Deacyde last edited by

        Thanks for this.

        Great idea. I always have my Wife take a look. Will extend that to the teenagers and my parents. That will tell a lot.

        Great tip! Cheers.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Deacyde
          Deacyde @RichardRColeman last edited by

          Another good way to test, grab your family, kids, friends etc..

          Tell them to goto your site and find something, then ask them how easy was it and find out what wasn't easy an adjust.

          Do this with at least 5+ people and you can have some actionable insight on what to alter.

          RichardRColeman 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • RichardRColeman
            RichardRColeman @BlueCorona last edited by

            Hi,

            Thanks so much. It can be become a little too much as services are added, particularly in pest control, you could have dozens there.

            I have actually created what you've suggested in the main nav but, will move the others over to the top service page as you say.

            Really appreciate your help, thanks again.

            Deacyde 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • BlueCorona
              BlueCorona last edited by

              Hi Richard!

              We work with a lot of home service (HVAC, pest control, landscaping) companies and from our experience we've found that (like Tymen mentioned) dropdowns are ok as long as you don't make them keep dropping out further and further. It also depends on the amount of services you are trying to fit in the navigation.

              Majority of our clients' websites' top level navigation would have - About | Landscape Maintenance | Landscape Design/Build | Portfolio | Contact - or something about those lines. Under "Landscape Maintenance" we might include Lawn Mowing, Irrigation Services, etc., in the drop down, but instead of continuing to add to the drop down, we would only link the top priority services from the drop down and list additional services with internal links from the main Landscape Maintenance page.

              On our HVAC clients we might have "Heating" listed at the top most link in the navigation that has a drop down to Furnaces and Heat Pumps, and then we would include another drop down that includes links to the Installation, Maintenance, and Repair pages for both these services. I would only recommend doing double drop downs if your navigation doesn't include many services. For instance, if you have a bunch of services listed under Heating that ALL have an additional drop down, it could negatively impact user experience.

              We try to pair down the main navigation to be as simple, but helpful/effective as possible, and include links to additional (less prominent) services from other landing pages instead of trying to jam pack everything in the top level navigation.

              I hope this helps you figure out how to pair down the services!

              RichardRColeman 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
              • RichardRColeman
                RichardRColeman @Tymen last edited by

                Thanks Tymen,

                Yes, drop downs are not the best solutions these days.

                Will take a look at the site and see what we can do.

                Thanks!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Tymen
                  Tymen last edited by

                  Hi Richard,

                  I would completely stay away from drop downs. You often get problems with different browsers and mobile. For main navigation you could go for: Home> What we Do> Who we are> Contact. Next to that I would work with a sidemenu or footermenu in which you have all the services. For example you could take a look at www.aliexpress.com. This way the visitor can navigate easily and all the serbices are visible on the homepage for visitors and Google.

                  Good luck! Tymen

                  RichardRColeman 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • boxinghunter

                    Which are the best off-page SEO techniques for 2020?

                    I have just published an awesome website or blog, and i really worked hard keeping everything perfect. Do you think it’s enough? Having a perfect blog, website or business is  just enough. i need readers for my blog, visitors to my website, and customers for my business. So, what to do?

                    Local Website Optimization | | boxinghunter
                    0
                  • jasongmcmahon

                    SEO Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses

                    I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site

                    Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon
                    1
                  • AndyL93

                    Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?

                    We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas. We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it. Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference. Would appreciate the feedback
                    Thanks
                    Andy

                    Local Website Optimization | | AndyL93
                    0
                  • Ohmichael

                    Multi location silo seo technique

                    A physical therapy company has 8 locations in one city and 4 locations in another with plans to expand. I've seen two methods to approach this. The first I feel is sloppy and that is the individual url for each location that points to from the location pages on the main domain. The second is to use the silo technique incorporated with metro scale addition.  You have the main domain with the number of silos (individual stores) and each silo has its own content (what they do at each store is pretty much the same). My question is should the focus of each silo, besides making sure there is no duplicate copy, to increase their own hyperlocal outreach?  Focus on social, reviews, content curated for the specific location. How would you attack this problem?

                    Local Website Optimization | | Ohmichael
                    1
                  • Noriel

                    Local SEO - Multiple stores on same URL

                    Hello guys, I'm working on a plan of local SEO for a client that is managing over 50 local stores. At the moment all the stores are sharing the same URL address and wanted to ask if it s better to build unique pages for each of the stores or if it's fine to go with all of them on the same URL. What do you think? What's the best way and why? Thank you in advance.

                    Local Website Optimization | | Noriel
                    0
                  • Adam_RushHour_Marketing

                    Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)

                    We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution.  However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install. Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com.  This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets. The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
                    Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce.  In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com? Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution? Thank you so much for the help.

                    Local Website Optimization | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing
                    0
                  • Mest

                    Same blog, multiple languages. Got SEO concerns.

                    Hi, My company runs a small blog in swedish. Most of the visitors are our customers/prospects. We will write about generic concepts regarding our business and the occasional company news story. However, I have quite a few ideas for articles that could be interesting to a lot of people, and I'm tempted to write those in english for better exposure. I would love it if that exposure could boost my companies authority. How should I go on about this? Can I somehow tell search engines that a certain part or page of the site is in another language? Should I translate our entire site to english and post the english post in a separate blog feed? Any insight is welcome. Thanks in advance!

                    Local Website Optimization | | Mest
                    0
                  • SarahCollins

                    How Best to do implement a Branch Locator for a Website with invididual location category pages

                    Hi All, We have an ecommerce Website with multiple locations for our stores and we currently display separate location specific pages for the different categories and sub categories. This has helped us previously to rank well for local search in each of the areas we have a store but over the last few months since humingbird, our local rankings on some things have dip a little . We want to implement a branch locator of some description to improve the user experience. From looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages. My query is should I do it so if  a user comes in on a specific category location page and follows it through to product page , then to have a tab on the product page displaying the local branch from which he can come in. My thinking here is that , is that it would help confirm my local citations and help improve local rankings. Or Should the local branch be displayed on the local category pages instead or as well ?. If a user comes in from the homepage or not on a specific location page, then the branch locator will allow them to search for a specific branch. Should I also put in a branch locator as a separate page or can It be in more places. I don't want to damage anything which may have an effect on rankings due to citations and NAP on the location specific pages. Any advice or good examples to look at would be greatly appreciated thanks Sarah.

                    Local Website Optimization | | SarahCollins
                    1

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.