Tips From Semalt For Building SEO And UX-Minded Navigation

Website usability is a complicated-sounding term that refers to how user-friendly a website is. The objective of any website is to present visitors with a platform for finding and using information, entertainment, products, etc., with ease.

In theory, this may sound easy, but in reality, many layers and steps are required to provide value to your audience. One of the most important aspects of web usability is website navigation. A proper web structure compliments the web design and content in meaningful ways.

Designing the structure of an effective website can be an arduous task. Figuring out where to start alone can be difficult. In essence, this content is designed to show you simple ways of improving an existing site to provide better content pathways, usher conversation, or highlight the importance of certain pages to visitors or search engines.

Website Navigation Structures: The Key To User-Friendliness

There is a widespread misunderstanding of website structure that it should either be simple clickable links or a tremendous work of art that should wow every viewer with its optics. This couldn't be further from the truth.

The right approach to developing a proper website structure is to create an interactive chain of information and communication channel that increases awareness within your target audience, business, products, services, and brands. In order to create a successful website, you need more than just high-quality content and design. You need to consider your navigation structure. But what is website navigation?

The Fundamentals Of Navigation Structure

Having a navigational structure that is as clear as possible is key to delivering a pleasurable experience to visitors. If a website structure allows someone to quickly and intuitively click through and find useful content, then it is more likely that the visitor will become more inclined to subscribe to newsletters or become regular visitors.

Website main navigation is unique to every website. We use them to connect users from the landing page to conversion, connect information seekers to resourceful content or create a highway for search engine crawlers to discover and index pages. Regardless of the reason behind it, your main navigation must be focused on SEO and usability to be fruitful.

To make your website interesting enough for visitors to linger in it, it will need the following essentials:

Clear structure: Users should be able to move across pages and figure out where they are on the website without difficulty.
Intuitive Interface: Users should be able to reach their search goal with only a few clicks. The fewer clicks, the better when finding products, information, services, etc.
Useful and Easy to Understand content: the content published on web pages should be understandable and useful to users.

Tips For Building User-Friendly Navigation

Analyze Google Analytics User Flow

The first thing you should do when optimizing website structure is to review how the current audience uses the top link structure on the site. Optimizing your website structure is beneficial to both search engine bots and the human audience, but the user experience comes first.

Within your Google Analytics profile, locate the Audience segment and find User Flow. Doing this will tell us how common visitors move across pages on the site. It is important to see what visitors do after landing on the home page or when they land on other internal pages.

Is there a common pattern to their movement?

To get a more in-depth understanding of how users navigate a site, you can review the journey of:

New users vs. returning users
Users based on the traffic channel
Users who visit a special section of the site
Audiences based on geographical and language differences

Analyze Search Queries On Internal Site Search

Utilizing your site search query can give you insight into what pages your audience finds valuable. Investigating these search queries tells you what your audience expects to find but finds it difficult to, so they search.

You can find out this data by analyzing Site Search in Google Analytics. Observe what search terms are most common, whether users have to refine searches and their exit rate. Understanding this points you in the right direction of what content and links users expect from your site but can find using your main navigation.

A deeper dive can mean sorting the overall search results to develop a search pattern for users based on their starting pages. This can help you redirect the flow of traffic from specific pages outside the main navigation.

Visualize User Interaction With Heat Map

This step will give you a more in-depth understanding of how users interact with main navigation by creating a visual map. To see this data, you will need a heat mapping data provider.

When looking at this, you should pay attention to how users interact with the main pages and other internal pages. It is also important to note the similarities and differences in how mobile and desktop users interact with pages. In most cases, what you see will be very different.

Teach Users What To Expect In Anchor Text

Stop thinking for your customers and get to learn what they are thinking. This strategy is far more effective than making incorrect assumptions.

Before you can lead your audience through your top pages, make sure they have a basic understanding of your brand, industry, product genre, and the needs you can meet. These few areas heavily impact the names you give your navigational anchors.

First, ask your product and sales team to learn how your customers understand, and prospects refer to your brand, products, and services. Pick the brains of your customers, and navigation will become a lot easier.

Secondly, use keyword research to see keyword demand and volume. This will tell you how users search for your products and services on your website. Proper use of keywords in your navigation anchor text also helps search engines understand what services/ product niche you belong to.

Find Top Linked Pages On Your Site

In SEO, the more you create an internal link structure to a page, the more precedence it has on the website. It is important to link your pages to one another (without spamming) to create a network of interrelated content, improving site navigation.

Google Search Console is an excellent tool to show you the internal linking structure on a page. With it, you can see what internal pages you are linking to your main navigation. We've had instances where reviewing this data showed us where we were misrepresented.

Do Not Forget The Basics Of SEO

Main navigation SEO is founded on technical considerations. These are factors that make web crawling efficient. Search engines like Google and Bing have improved greatly in crawling and indexing Javascript; however, it is far safer to ensure that your main navigation is constructed in an HTML format.

Sadly, many websites make the mistake of creating their main navigation using Javascript. To access potential issues in the state of your main navigation, you can use the Chrome extension Check My Links. This tool is useful in highlighting redirecting links which forces search engines to slow down crawl speed and become less efficient in crawling the site.

Check What's Ranking And What's Not

Reviewing your top organic search rankings helps you understand where you have gaps or zero traffic. One way to fix this is by linking more to these pages, directing not only users but search engine bots to see that such pages are important.

Better Web Navigation Through Design And Content

It is vital to note that a good navigation structure isn't dependent on just layout. Other factors such as the style, color, scheme, and content design of a website also contribute to developing a user-friendly navigation structure.

Finding the right design for your website directly impacts website navigation. We have dozens of examples on commercial websites. Your design should make your site easily recognizable and consistent throughout your site while maintaining the image of your brand.

The design of your website is becoming more important nowadays due to the rising percentage of mobile visitors. A responsive web design will help your web usability and can determine whether or not a user moves across a page on your site.

Conclusion

A well-thought-out and optimized website structure is the backbone for a good web UX experience. As long as you follow the rules outlined above, you should be able to develop a navigation structure that gets your target audience to where they need to be with only a few clicks.

As you learn the secrets to main navigation audits, pay attention to how your website improves in website usage metrics such as the time-on-site, bounce rate, and pages viewed per session.

Ultimately, this guide will help you create a user-oriented and search-engine-optimized way of creating a great internal linking structure.

Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.