Prospective visitor came to your website. He didn’t knew where to click to connect with you. He was not directed to information about the services and products you offer. He found nothing in all quarters that could help him in decision-making and you lost the conversion at that moment. What can be more vexing than this to a website designer and digital marketing expert? What do you think, is this website navigation issue?
Such Types of Worries Come To End at TopNotch Innovative Technologies !
Let us share penny of our thoughts to help you understand website navigation best practices.
Importance Of Website Navigation
Designing website navigation is an art in itself and designers daily experience this artifice. It’s all about the good information and navigation techniques that can easily deploy their art of expressing the model.
In the second place, your website’s navigation bar is the vehicle for all of your website traffic to help the audience navigate from one point of the website to another. It will guide the users towards key information and keep their interest and engagement for long duration on your website. Being said that, providing an effective online user experience is a key to the success of your website and its related business.
Feel The Way Your Customer Thinks Of Your Website
Thinking like your users think will make your website navigation design job 50 % easy. Having said so, put your thinking cap on . You will have to feel the same way when the visitor visits your website. This will make you clear of how to drive them to conversion.
Questions you will come across your mind through this practice, how they respond to your website? What is the best website user experience? How much role content plays in different types of website navigation? You need answers to all these questions.
Just think of what style of content each type of persona will be hunting for. If he is in awareness stage, he might be looking for the tips in your blog. And if he is in the decision phase after all research, he may need to look at the case studies and contact forms.
Keeping all the above points in mind you should make your website navigation easy. User should easily be able to find the information he is looking for and content plays an important role in this regard.
Small Menus With Few Options Perform Better
Menus, sub menus and sub-sub menus is a long time ago practice. It is not worthy to implement in this digital era where search engines have become quite smart. Whenever you design a website menu styles, avoid creating a giant mega menu. It is one of the mega menu types that could lose your website engagement by visitors and also the credibility from search engines.
Therefore, a menu with few options is better. Now you might be thinking how it is better if I have over seven to eleven options in my menu. It is better for a number of reasons.
Lets say, user came to your website, found the information faster rather than navigating through multiple pages and then reaching towards what he was looking for. He read the content and that simple navigation forced him to love your website and hire you for the website design services.
Moreover, keeping the menu style advanced and pleasing to the eyes can help him retain the information for a long time later when he thinks of your website easy navigation.
If you perform good at designing smaller menu, its performance would be affected in a positive way on the search engines too. In lieu of this, don’t clutter the menu with numerous options because homepage with various links would make the crawling of your website difficult for search engines.
Google looks at the internal and external links to crawl the websites every page especially the homepage. If links are distributed unevenly on the website, then it would be harder for Google to crawl the page. Hence, making the user search and website content difficult for them. Therefore, it is advised to keep the navigation simple and direct to help both users and search engines track the right information in the right way.
Pay Attention Towards Your Words
Be careful of the words you use to make an effective website navigation. Your words should be capable of influencing change. Though, there is a bit of struggle to select the right words, but the right words can spark interest, drive traffic and help search engines crawl your website.
Refrain from using the descriptive language. It will help him navigate without wondering where to go from this CTA. Straight forward, clear descriptions on top navigation will make the reader hooked. Like, you can say “ Case Studies” then saying “What We Do” , “Services” etc. This will help the user to indirectly look towards your services and sample work. This way you won’t need to tell them what are your services and what you do.
Use Responsive Navigation Menus
It has been observed that average navigation bar is too wide to fit across a mobile screen. However, with this premium screen space, you won’t waste too much on listing your menu options.
Hamburger bar with three short , stacked lines is the best solution for making the sites mobile responsive. This bar should open to a full menu when hovered over or clicked. This widely accepted conventional and responsive web designing is now used on desktop sites. But make sure when you design mobile menus, design according to the needs of mobile users as their attention time is probably shorter than desktop users.
With that all being said, make your menus even more concise, simple and easy to use and website mobile responsive.
Add on The Search Bar Function
Like ecommerce and B2B marketing websites, all business niche websites should also have the search function in their website. It is a high value feature for website users that provides them a quick direct route to information they are looking for.
Ideal location for the placement of search bar is top right side your sidebar. After adding the search bar, look for its functionality. It should provide the results relevant to the keywords user typed in the search bar. Moreover, allow for misspellings identification and offers related to services and the products.
Search bar on your website is another great source of tracking the search metrics of your visitors. After applying it you will come to know what they type in and what they search out of your services.
Optimize Your Website Navigation
According to the web design and development firms, designing your website navigation is not the end of the website. It’s the beginning of the success you are going to achieve through seo and mobile responsive navigation. After working on the navigation, you do evaluation through Google Analytics. Following this, you would be able to see which navigation items are most used by your visitors.
Conclusion
Mistakes with navigation can cost you an arm and a leg, both in terms of search engine rankings and user friendliness. These simple tips and tricks are the key to make your customer buying journey great and boost your SEO too.
If you want to design your website navigation the way, it benefits you maximum, then TopNotch Innovative Technologies, a web design boston agency, is here to make your visitors web experience enjoyable. We will design and develop the website keeping all the premium standards of best user experience in mind. With our uniquely designed websites, you will be able to crawl your website easier than ever. Contact us now to turn viewers into brand stalwarts.