Website Navigation That Helps Customers

Your menu is a set of answers to customer questions.

Navigation Answers Questions

Most small business menus are organised around how the business sees itself. About, Services, Portfolio, Blog, Contact. That structure is inherited from the template and nobody questions it.

A visitor arrives with a question. Do you fix this specific thing? Do you cover my area? How much? Can I get in this week?

Good navigation answers those questions with its labels. The test is whether someone could guess what is behind each item without clicking. If your menu says Solutions or Resources, they cannot.

Five Items, Maybe Six

Once a menu goes past six items, people stop reading it and start scanning for the one word they came for. If that word is not there they use the back button.

For most brick and mortar businesses the working set is: what you do, who you serve or where, proof, price, and contact. That maps to something like Services, Areas, Reviews, Pricing, Contact.

Everything else goes in the footer. The footer is where policies, careers, the full location list and the blog belong. Nobody needs those in the header, and putting them there dilutes the four items that move someone toward booking.

If you offer twelve services, that calls for a Services page with twelve links on it, and one menu item.

Name Things The Way Customers Do

Use the words your customers use, which are usually the words they type into search. If people search for emergency plumber, your menu item is Emergency Plumbing; a label like Rapid Response Solutions gets scanned past.

This has a direct search benefit. Navigation links are internal links, and the anchor text tells search engines what the destination page is about. A menu full of clever names is a menu that passes no useful signal.

Avoid single word abstractions. Solutions, Approach, Experience and Offerings all mean nothing on their own. Avoid your own internal jargon, including product names you invented. Nobody is searching for your branded service tier.

The Dropdown Problem

Dropdown menus work reasonably well with a mouse and badly with a thumb. On mobile they become an accordion the visitor has to open, and the second level is often where the pages people want are hidden.

If you have enough pages to want a dropdown, consider a hub page instead. One Services link goes to a page that lists everything with a sentence of description under each. That page is easier to use on a phone, and it is a page you can rank, which a dropdown is not.

Where you do keep a dropdown, make the parent item clickable in its own right. A visitor tapping Services should land somewhere useful rather than having a menu expand under their finger.

Make Contact Look Like An Action

Contact should look different from the rest of the menu. Give it a button treatment so it reads as an action rather than a destination, and keep it last, on the right, where the eye finishes.

On mobile, consider a fixed bar at the bottom with call and book. It occupies real estate, which designers dislike, and it consistently outperforms a hamburger menu, which visitors ignore.

Also worth saying: Contact should not be the only route to contacting you. Every service page wants its own way to get in touch, at the point where someone has just finished reading why they need you. Sending them back to a menu to find the contact page is asking them to do work.

Breadcrumbs And The Back Route

Many of your visitors will not arrive at the homepage. They will land on a service page or a location page from a search result, with no idea where they are in the site.

Breadcrumbs fix this cheaply. They tell the visitor where they are, give them a route up a level, and produce a breadcrumb rich result in search that improves how your listing looks.

The rule is that every page should make sense as a landing page. If a page assumes the visitor already read the homepage, it will confuse most of the people who see it.

Checking Whether It Works

The measurable signal is where people go from each page and where they stop. In Google Analytics, look at your top landing pages and then at what the next page is. If a large share of visitors land on a service page and their next action is the homepage, your service page is not answering the question and they are going back to look around.

Another useful check is your site search box, if you have one. What people type into it is a direct list of things your navigation failed to surface. That list is often the best menu redesign brief you will get.

This is the kind of thing askotter watches continuously once a site is live. The site reads the paths people take, flags the pages where they turn back, and proposes the change with the traffic data attached, for a person to approve before it ships.