Great navigation is a crucial element to get right on your website for two main reasons.
First, it affects your user experience—helping users find what they want will result in more conversions.
Second, it helps search engines. Because good navigation will help them better understand how you’ve organized your site and ensure
Keep navigation collaborative
Changing navigation can be challenging. This is because multiple stakeholders with different areas of expertise have their own demands. The merchandising, UX, customer service, and SEO teams all need to be satisfied.
Often, difficulties with changing navigation occur for two reasons:
- Usability isn’t the primary reason for making the change.
- There is a lack of data to suggest the change will be worthwhile.
For reason #1, if the change does not improve usability, the UX team will likely reject it. For instance, SEO teams often concentrate on PageRank and what search engines want. To persuade a UX expert, do not talk about that. Instead, discuss the secondary effect the change will have on users—that’s the more important element after all.
For reason #2, any team could reject the change. Start by gathering insights on why you think the change will be positive. This can be:
- Search demand data.
- Behavioral analytics data from Google Analytics or similar.
- Customer service feedback.
- Sales and revenue data.
The ideal scenario here is each team works together using the different data they use daily to form the ideal navigation based on their expertise.
Final thoughts
Website navigation is a broad topic. Each component has a lot of nuances and, usually, the decision on what components there will be and how they’ll function has input from people with different types of expertise.
Still, the return on implementing excellent site navigation is worth the time investment. Hopefully, this article has inspired how yours will work.
Any further questions on website navigation? Find me on Twitter.
