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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 -
JS reliant faceted navigation - ecommerce/blog - is it a bad idea?
I have noticed that some e-commerce sites don't worry aout their store working when JS is switched off - yet some do - are there any SEO implications of losing faceted navigation/filtering functionality when JS is disabled I tried M&S - didn't work - but Tesco did - when JS is disabled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Menu anchor text and PR / Juice Flow
Hello, I have a top menu coded this way with an (it is automatic with my wordpress template). Can google read pass the juice and read the anchor text with this type of code or no ? <nav id="top-menu-nav"> myanchortext </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?
Good Morning! I have been trying to clean up this website and half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me. I found this post on Moz from last year: http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed. I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly. Thanks everybody!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Best method to update navigation structure
Hey guys, We're doing a total revamp of our site and will be completely changing our navigation structure. Similar pages will exist on the new site, but the URLs will be totally changed. Most incoming links just point to our root domain, so I'm not worried about those, but the rest of the site does concern me. I am setting up 1:1 301 redirects for the new navigation structure to handle getting incoming links where they need to go, but what I'm wondering is what is the best way to make sure the SERPs are updated quickly without trashing my domain quality, and ensuring my page and domain authority are maintained. The old links won't be anywhere on the new site. We're swapping the DNS record to the new site so the only way for the old URLs to be hit will be incoming links from other sites. I was thinking about creating a sitemap with the old URLs listed and leaving that active for a few weeks, then swapping it out for an updated one. Currently we don't have one (kind of starting from the bottom with SEO) Also, we could use the old URLs for a few weeks on the new site to ensure they all get updated as well. It'd be a bit of work, but may be worth it. I read this article and most of that seems to be covered, but just wanted to get the opinions of those who may have done this before. It's a pretty big deal for us. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well Am I getting into trouble if I do any of the above, or is this the way to go? PS: I should also add that we are not changing our domain. The site will remain on the same domain. Just with a completely new navigation structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
How much is too much content for a home-page?
Hey guys, I'm looking to implement a strategy where I put a 20,000 word article on my home-page. It won't be a super-long page, this content will be divided into nested tabs. The content will also be found on individual pages (corresponding to the tabs) on the site, but these will have a canonical tag pointing to the home page, Will I get penalized for this kind of structure? Cheers, JC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trx0 -
Keeping the Navigation on the Sitemap HTML Page?
Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place. Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0