Optimize your navigation menu
When a user lands on a new website, he acts like a lost puppy in a strange neighborhood. If this website is yours, you want to guide that puppy home — and have him pick up a few treats along the way. Your navigation menu is that guide, day in and day out. When the guide is broken, visitors don’t find what they came for, they leave immediately, your bounce rate worsens, and Google reduces your ranking.
Why do I need a navigation menu?
The navigation menu guides both your visitors and search engine crawlers. Ideally you frame it while planning your site’s architecture: put down a basic flowchart with the headers of all the pages you want to build. It helps with structuring your URLs too.
Navigation menu and search engine crawlers
Every page on your domain should get indexed, and the navigation menu is how you tell crawlers which pages exist and how they relate. It communicates your site’s hierarchy: if three, four, or five pages are the most important on your site, link them in the top navigation; pages under them rank next in priority as sub-menu items.
Keep the menu to a maximum of six or seven items — more crowds the page and confuses visitors. Google allows roughly 250 links from a single page, but don’t overcrowd; extra links belong in the footer.
Navigation menu and website visitors
A new visitor should understand your navigation instantly. Months of design and fresh content are wasted if users can’t find their way through it. Bad navigation means confused visitors and fewer conversions — if someone doesn’t find what they want easily, they leave for a simpler competitor.
Improving your navigation menu
- Make sure every page is indexable from the navigation structure. Never orphan a page so that a crawler can’t understand its relation to the site.
- Use Google Analytics and Search Console data to make informed improvement decisions.
- Run basic competitor keyword research with Google’s Keyword Planner to understand what competitors rank and bid for; it helps frame your site’s navigation and overall flow.