Why Google Wants What It Wants In 2014: Part 4 – Website Navigation

So far in this SEO blog series you will have noticed a common theme: user experience. When writing content, encouraging links to grow your link profile or entering the world of Google+, if you keep that in mind and apply it to everything you do it will be hard to steer yourself wrong. But despite all the bells and whistles, your website remains (and likely will for a very long time to come, barring new technologies we’ve yet to imagine) the central focus of a user’s experience.

Without getting too technical, let’s take a look at a few things which might seem confusing on occasion but become clear with user experience context applied to them.

Menu Structure

What exactly is it that you offer? Whether products or services, you should be able to categorize these quite quickly if you think about how to break them down. This is likely what the structure of your menu should be. Let’s look at an example:

As you can see, this business has thought about what their overall categories would be and then categorised individual services under one of these three while also having links to some of their more popular services on the front page as a bonus.

Drilling down on these main categories then lists individual services which fall under it and each has their own page offering information on that service. This is a very intuitive and user friendly way to structure a menu and Google seems to assess it favourably.

It is not the only way to structure a menu well, but from what we’ve seen here at SponsoredLinX (and we’ve seen a lot) it’s a winning formula.

Page Load Speed

While not the largest of elements unless you have a serious page load problem, page load speed is definitely a factor related to user friendliness which affects your SEO. Google doesn’t want to throw up sites in the search results which are sluggish and difficult to navigate for obvious reasons, so be sure to have this assessed and look into options to reduce page load speed if it seems to be a problem. If you’re unsure but think it might be a problem, then better safe than sorry.

Working Links

This one pretty much explains itself. If you have broken navigation within your site or are sending people offsite with links that lead nowhere then you should expect to lose points for this.

Contacts

Whilst having a phone number and contact email probably doesn’t affect your rankings all that much, this is where you can take advantage of your multiple online properties by linking to your facebook, Google+, blog, industry partners etc and show that you have a broad online presence.

But with all this said, there is one relatively new and increasingly important aspect of your website which HAS to be addressed if you want to survive online. This is mobile optimisation. It will be the subject of the final part in this series, so keep an eye out for part 5!

Also don’t forget we have a webinar on Wednesday the 29th of this month (next week) on exactly these topics.

You can register here.

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