How to structure the categories on your website is of great importance for user experience and conversion, and is at least equally important for organic traffic and ranking.
Good SEO is about making both search engines and users happy – good side navigation also contributes to satisfied users!
If you have done a solid job with the navigation on the website, users can easily find the categories and products they are looking for without much effort, and by relying on intuition and experience.
A good side structure contributes to the continued and continued interaction of users with it, reducing boonce rate and gives longer hour & site, both of which are positive user signals that contribute to stronger organic visibility.
A good and transparent page structure makes it easier for the search engines to discover all pages on your website, which they do not always do by themselves (therefore it is important to: sitemap.xml).
A good page structure allows you to get algorithms from search engines sitelinks in the organic search result. This simplifies navigation, increases reputation and trust, helps to make your search result more dominant, and reduces the cost of your search results. the conversion funnelSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.
7 tips for page structure and navigation that both Google and your users will love:
1. Short path length to critical pages.
Make sure that important/prioritized pages can be reached via a maximum of 3 clicks from the front page. This has an impact on how easy users can navigate to the specific page. In addition, it sends a signal to Google about how important this page is: the higher the hierarchy, the more important. The deeper down into the hierarchy a page is located, the lower SEO value; or link juice, will achieve.
2. Use the category names in the menu that the users recognize and expect to find.
Users often have a clear form of what they are looking for and using the most commonly used names and concepts helps to minimise navigation, prevent confusion and frustration, and lead them in an optimal conversion range. Regarding the choice of category name we go to the next point;
Three. Use the data from the analytical tool as input to the layout and naming of the categories in the navigation.>
As I said, it is important to use the most widely used words and concepts among the target groups, as far as they are concerned. descriptive for the different products and services.
Google Keyword Planner gives you valuable insights into the number of average searches per keyword per month.
Search Analytics in Google Search Console, you will find useful data around which search terms and words generate traffic to your page.
Have You Implemented site search in Google Analytics you will be able to see what users are looking for inside Since yours. If the data from this source shows that some categories or products are being searched for which are not included in the category structure, this may mean that they should also be included, or that you should otherwise modify and refine the menu to facilitate navigation for users to find these products more easily.
In all, it is appropriate to consider the niche, target group, tone of voice, and not least the total range of products or size of the website when developing category names and determining the number of categories. Remember that it is more difficult to achieve good organic ranking for high-quality category names due to increased competition, so here you should also consider whether the reputation of the website and the brand name is strong enough to allow you to look for the highest-competitive names.
4. Do not create more categories than you need.
Like unknown words in the menu, and long path length from the front, too many categories, or items, in the menu they are being translated by the user. The human short-term memory has a capacity of approximately 7 objects, so a good remembering rule is not to exceed this number in each category of the different hierarchys. In fact, it is also unfavourable to split into too many categories and levels as this helps to water out the link juice further.
5. Make sure that the url and category structure of the website reflect each other.
A website shall of course be abundantly equipped with links and buttons inside the pages that allow users to navigate easily to different internal destinations, and use a good url structure to allow users to navigate the website, in addition, by removing or adding content to the url.
Vita’s url for Lee Stafford Shampoo – https://www.vita.no/harming/shampoo/filter/lee_stammford allows the user to navigate to both the shampoo category and the hair care category by removing parts of the content. Such a logical and hierarchical url structure will also make it easier for search engines to craw the diversity of pages on your website, and that they get the most accurate picture of how the content is structured.
A good url structure lets you navigate from important landing pages.
Moz's juxtaple for optimal url structure:
6. Use bread musteries / browsecrumbs
Navigation from landing pages (such as a page that the user comes to from a search engine, Facebook, newsletter or similar) is important to consider, especially when you have a comprehensive SEO strategy that also takes care of the entire customer journey and user experience, not just the rankings alone.
By implementing bread mulesties on your website, you make it easier for users to keep track of their location on the page, and because it is clickable, users can navigate up or down the page structure by going up to the path on the top (which is the most appropriate location).
If the breadstumble path is correctly implemented, Google will reward you with showing it in the search results:
This looks “cleaner” and gives users insight into the related pages of your website.
Here you can read more about how to implements bread musteries, and how to use a mark-up that Google will interpret correctly
Seven. Test since before launch, and be constantly open for continuous improvement.
Although there are many recipes, practices and tools that can guide you in developing navigation on a website, this configuration will not be complete until you have tested it out in practice. Testing may involve testing beta versions of the page against a sample of subjects, or presenting different page structure settings in an Excel sheet or with Post-it patches against the testing panel – depending on where in the process against completion you are.
Good web development is about constantly making improvements – large and small – in the light of what works or does not work. As mentioned, data (site search in Google Analytics) on what users are looking for internally on the page can provide you with good guidance on how navigation should be improved. A structure that worked well a few years ago, may not be as good today. Often, the renewal of the website, where graphic and technical elements are improved, may be an opportunity to simultaneously introduce efforts to improve navigation. Then both users and Google will like you better.