Best SEO Practices for Your Menu Navigation
As the number of people that use mobile devices to shop continues to increase, you may be wondering about redesigning your navigation menus on your website. Navigation menus offer convenient options for e-commerce sites to organize products by category. In addition, your customers will likely use them to review your site offerings in a logical manner.
However, when it comes to SEO, you must also think about your site rankings in addition to the usability of the navigational elements on your website. Here are the best SEO practices for your site navigation so that you can design better menus for your website.
Use Keywords Sparingly
For SEO, you need to focus on making sure that you are not oversaturating your menus with keywords. Google does not like keyword-stuffing and this general rule applies to your site menus as well. You should not repeat the same keywords multiple times in a single menu. You should also make sure that the menu does not link to everything that you sell in that category on your site if it is a large number of items. While your original intention might have been to help users find things on your website, overuse of keywords will still be considered as keyword-stuffing by Google.
Avoid Drop Down Menus
Dropdown menus can be hard for Google to crawl, especially if the menu contains animations and images instead of text links. Some usability studies also indicate that dropboxes are not user-friendly. Drop boxes can make people browsing your website skip over the top-level items in your menu in favor of clicking the items in the drop-down menu.
Organize Menu Hierarchies With Visual Cues
While this tip is more about keeping your site up-to-date than about SEO, it is still an important consideration. Organizing the hierarchies of items in your menu with visual cues can make it easier to code your menu so that whenever you decide to update the menu, it is in line with the latest SEO recommendations. Color coding is a good option for separate top-level categories from individual category items.
Avoid Generic Terms
If your store’s inventory isn’t large or fits into just a few product categories, avoid using generic terms in your site menu like “Products” or “Shop.” Instead, you should list the actual product categories that you sell like “Chairs” and “Tables” to improve your rankings for these categories.
Make Sure That the Menu Is Responsive
As you update your website to responsive design, you may feel that you have everything covered, but have you thought about your menus? Having a menu that is not responsive on your website can significantly increase page bounce rates and reduce the amount of time that visitors stay on your site. Make sure that the menus are responsive along with the other site content for better SEO.
Get Help
Do you need assistance with redesigning your e-commerce website? Infintech Designs offers web design and development to help you create a responsive website that is SEO-friendly. Contact us now about your project.
