How website navigation affects SEO?

How website navigation affects SEO

Website navigation and structure of the website have a great impact on the site’s SEO. Search engine crawlers find your website content with the help of site structure. Crawlers make the interfaces with your content by using the “Main Topic” for your site and then fetch the related contents with the “subtopics”.

It is so easy to get a ranking soon on the search engine if you rightly focus on the site design and structure. Many people made mistakes in their site structure and page navigation without using a proper “main topic “structure.

As we already mentioned website navigation is great for your website users and SEO.

Proper website navigation allows your website visitors to find what they exactly need and allows search engines to crawl your website without any difficulty. This results in more conversions and great search visibility.

In this article, we explained how to use the proper website navigation for better SEO performance.

What is Website Navigation?

Website navigation is an internal link structure that connects to your other pages on your website. The main purpose of designing proper website navigation is to help your website users easily find all stuff on your website.

website navigation

Links help search engine to understand the exact content of your page and also it easily discovers the new pages.

To satisfy your website user, make your website navigation easy and simple and then optimize it for search engines without hurting the page SEO.

Importance of Content Hierarchies in Website Navigation

When you are searching for a particular page or topic within a book, you can simply find it through the table of content or by using the indexing page.

When you go to a department shop or grocery store, you can easily identify the products with the help of categories and subcategories labeled with product names.

Same as for a website you should give proper navigation for your users to easily identify the contents.

Content hierarchies are the best way to simplify the process of page navigation and allows users to access your page easily with different categories and classifications.

Content Hierarchies Diagram

How to overcome Bad website Navigation?

The Real – Fact: Problem Faced by One of our clients due to bad page navigation.

Website architecture and page navigation are important facts for SEO because it affects the site traffic and keyword rankings to your website a few months back, we met our new client, Natural Smiles whose top page navigations was structured with more numbers of main categories, most of them are not have a focus for their business to get leads.

With this wrong structure of the top navigation menu with the non-focused categories, they were telling the search engine crawlers that all the categories have equal importance, but they are not. Even the search engine and website users did not know the main purpose of the website because the site is overwhelmed with too much information at the top level.

webpage navigation for SEO

Our experts understand the scenario and start to restructure their website with the proper page navigation. We minimize the main categories and build more supporting pages and internal links. We understand the focus of their business and we did effective keyword research to redesign their website with proper page navigation. We created more supporting pages to makes Google crawlers easily access and index the content and makes the users understand exactly what the site was about. Our simplified page navigation allows people to understand their business purpose and their products.

We structured their website with the top categories and keyword phrases in the top-level site navigation. We kept three main categories at the top-level of page navigation to say the whole story of what the website was about and added the sub-pages under the main categories with the supporting content and gave an internal link back to the main category for better chances of ranking for competitive keywords. Also, we properly structured the URL of each sub-page related to the website structure.

traffic-growth-of-dentist-website-600x290

Changes – Made after the site structure:

After changing the structure of page navigation, we do few changes to our client sites:

  1. We optimize main categories
  2. We add more sub-pages for keyword rankings
  3. Add more-focused keywords to the supporting pages
  4. Updated more blog contents
  5. Properly structured the URLs

After all these, we saw a drastic change in our client’s website ranking. The position comes closer to #1 in Google search.

website navigation SEO

From this, we learned the importance of website navigation and site structure. Once your site is structured properly with the right page navigation and you can add more supporting pages in the future (Like regular blog updates, news, promotion, etc) and you can tell your visitors and crawlers even more about your website and business. For more details visit https://www.clickdo.co.uk/case-studies/seo-for-dentist/

Final Words:

Now you all understand the importance of website navigation and how it boosts up your site SEO. So, it’s never been too late to restructure your website navigation! Connect with our experts to design your webpage and website navigation to improve your user experience as well as website ranking

Author Profile

Karthiga Mohan
Jr. SEO Consultant, Blogger, & Content Specialist. Passion for writing in SEO, Digital Marketing & Tech-related Niches.
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