Every website has a menu.

Your website navigation menu is absolutely the key to success in digital marketing.

1. Use descriptive navigation labels

“What we do” doesn’t actually say what you do. Neither does “Products,” “Services” or “Solutions.” Descriptive navigation that uses keyphrases is better for two reasons: rankings/traffic (SEO) and usability/conversions (UX).

Pages with generic labels also have an SEO disadvantage. If you have one page listing all of your services, it will never rank. That’s because it’s not focusing on one specific topic. Every page on your website has a chance of ranking, as long as it’s focused on a topic, on a keyphrase.

put a few possible options into Google TrendsOpens a new window. It will show you the relative popularity of any two search terms over time. It also shows geographic differences. It’s a quick way to use keyphrase research to guide sitemap decisions.

Descriptive labels help the visitor predict what they’ll get if they click. They guide the visitor to the deeper, more specific pages.

Every click is segmentation.
Each click brings the visitor to a page that speaks to them more specifically.

2. Avoid format-based navigation labels

Navigation labels tell visitors the format of the content. Other labels tell visitors the topic of the content. Here are some examples that show the difference.

Formats:

Articles
Videos
Whitepapers
Webinars
Infographics

Users interested in a specific topic usually don’t care in what format the information will be delivered to them; they are focused solely on finding answers that will address the question they had in mind.”

3. Avoid little drop down menus

Popular, yes. But not usually a great idea.

Here’s why: visitors move their eyes much faster than they move their mouse. When they move their mouse to a menu item, they’ve already decided to click…and then you gave them more options. It’s a hiccup in the mind of the visitor. A moment of visual friction.

More importantly, drop downs encourage visitors to skip important pages.

The “mega menu” which is a very large drop down with lots of elements, almost like a mini site map. These offer so many options, making that moment of friction worth it.

mega menus give you the opportunity to add descriptive text, groupings, icons, content and calls to action.

4. Add a call to action to your header

Visitors who are ready to reach out will look for a way to contact you in the header. It’s a common location. In fact, 55% of marketing websites have a contact button in the top right,

You can make this button more visually prominent by using a contrasting color.

The words you choose can make a difference. Here again, specificity correlates with clickthrough rates. Specific, descriptive button labels can make a difference.

Test your primary navigation CTA

You can use Google Optimize to run an A/B test on the clickthrough rate (CTR) of your primary call to action. Without any software or costs, you can create variants and check their performance against the original in real time.

5. Groups items when there are more than seven

Limiting the number of links in your main navigation is good for two reasons.

Fewer items in your navigation are good for search engines

Fewer items in your navigation are good for visitors

The more items in your navigation, the more difficult the information is to scan and process for your visitors. Visually, eight is a LOT more than seven. If you have too many, visitors’ eyes may scan past important items.

6. The order of your website navigation is important

it combines two cognitive biases:

Primacy effect: Items at the beginning of a list are more easily remembered.
Recency effect: Items at the end of a list (or things that just happened) are more easily remembered.
For this reason, anything you put at the beginning or end of our navigation becomes more prominent.

7. Keep social icons out of your header

they do not belong in the header of a website. This is website navigation that reduces your traffic by suggesting the visitor leaves.

Not only are you showing them the door, you’re sending them to a place with a million distractions. The instant they click, they’ll see ads, competitors and notifications. They’ll see fun events, interesting shoes and cute kitties.

These little icons are extremely visually prominent for three reasons: the color (high contrast), high position (top of the page) and they’re global (on every page).

8. Website navigation on mobile devices

Check your Analytics to see what percentage of your visitors are looking at your mobile menu.

In Universal Analytics, the report is in Audience > Mobile > Overview. In GA4, you can find it under Reports > Tech > Tech overview.

every marketing website has a significant percentage of visitors on mobile devices. These visitors may not be as critical to business outcomes (maybe they’re mostly low-converting blog readers) but you still need an easy to use mobile menu.

This generally means a “hamburger icon” which are the three little lines in the top right of the mobile screen. Here is an example of mobile navigation:

Tapping the hamburger icon reveals the menu, then a second tap expands the section categories.

9. Optimize your navigation using Analytics

It takes just a few clicks to see how visitors are using your navigation menu. Here’s how to use a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Exploration to measure website navigation performance.

The basic idea is to remove things that rarely get clicked if they aren’t important, rename them if they aren’t important, or move things around to help visitors get where they’re trying to go.

Charting (and changing) your course

Ideally, you can implement your ideas quickly in your content management system. A good site is flexible, letting you adjust the labels and order of your menus in minutes.