What Should I Include in my Website Menu?
Why Your Website Menu is Important:
The structure of your website’s menu (professionally referred to as the website navigation or even a “sitemap”) will determine how many leads you convert into paying customers. Essentially, if the visitors of your website cannot work out how to navigate your site easily, they will simply leave and find another website that delivers what they are looking for without complexity.
However, your website navigation isn’t important purely for usability purposes. After all, there’s no point in making your website beautiful and super user friendly if no-one can actually find it. You guessed it! Your website’s menu is also a huge aspect of your SEO performance because it makes your site easier for search engines to crawl. Using appropriate keywords throughout the menu, particularly on the top level, will help tell search engines what your website is all about i.e. the services or products you offer. As a result, you are more likely to rank for your target keywords.
What to Include in the Website Menu:
Planning your sitemap is of the utmost importance. You might try to be clever with the content by using unique keywords, but doing so will not help the user or your keyword rankings. Instead, be sure to implement user friendly terminology that everyone can understand and that might be typed into Google as part of a search. You can show off your impressive vocabulary within the body content on the page itself.
As mentioned above, you will need to include your main offerings on the top level of the navigation. Try to be specific as a way to pinpoint quality leads. Here are a couple of examples:
Example 1: if you are a private school and you put “Our School” on the top level, you will target all parents who are looking for a new school, no matter the age of their child. A better option, and one we would strongly recommend, would to be to include each of the entry levels of your school and separate them within the menu; for example “Nursery”, “Junior”, and “Senior” or “Pre-Prep” and “Prep”.
Example 2: If you are a builder’s merchant, having “Our Products” on the menu opens you up to anything from nail varnish to chainsaws. Instead, you need to specify within the top level that you sell “Bricks”, “Timber” and “Roofing Supplies” etc. so that you rank for people who are actually looking for these types of products.
Innermedia offers sitemap creation as part of your project, usually before we start the web design stage. Our SEO experts will use their knowledge and experience to help them propose the most suitable structure for you, but are more than happy to work with your suggestions so that both parties are satisfied with the finished result. Email promotion@innermedia.co.uk for more information.
