Usability is a very broad term. Every pixel Web Navigation on a website affects the user experience: colors, sizes, fonts, loading speed, animations, and navigation.
Creating a flawless user experience isn’t an easy or quick process, but it’s worth it: it’s beneficial for both you and your users. In this article, we’ll focus on the last element, navigation, and how to improve it with an intuitive website structure.
Why web usability is important
The goal of Google’s search engine is to provide users with good, relevant content that meets their needs. To achieve this, Google measures what users like and dislike to improve search results. One of the signs is if a user visits your page and returns to the search results to search for something else: this means they haven’t found the answer they needed on your page. This is a clear sign that your page is bad, so it won’t rank well in search results.
The most obvious and common reason for this is irrelevant content: users simply can’t find what they need. But the truth is, modern search algorithms can assess content quality quite accurately, so if you’re in the top 10, content may not be the main reason. In reality, content quality means very little if it’s not delivered to users in a format they enjoy, so having a great user experience is essential to achieving good positions in search results.
Another aspect worth mentioning is the mobile experience, as mobile traffic accounts for more than half of all internet traffic. In other words, every second user browses the web via a smartphone. It’s a very different experience than using a desktop computer: no mouse, no keyboard, small screen. Websites must adapt to these conditions to provide great usability for all users.
Web browsing best practices
We mentioned “intuitive” when describing navigation, but what exactly does that mean? Intuitive navigation usa whatsapp mobile number data means that its elements are in places users are familiar with. These methods have been tested over time for user-friendly navigation.
Use standard navigation elements. Almost all modern websites have the same set of navigation elements. That’s why it’s important to use familiar elements to avoid confusing users. These elements include a horizontal navigation bar , a hamburger button , and the footer menu .
Order your pages correctly. Users navigate pages from left to right, top to bottom: you should use the same pattern when ordering pages in your menu.
Keep navigation elements short and clear. A simple rule: don’t use unnecessary words.
Use breadcrumbs. If you have terms and methods in digital marketing pages that are 2 or more pages deep from the home page, breadcrumbs are a must. Breadcrumbs not only show you where you are at the moment, but they’re also a very useful tool if you want to climb the page hierarchy.
How to structure a website?
There are many ways to set up a website architecture, and it largely depends on what you have at the time.
Create a structure from the semantic core
When people search for your products or services online, they use a variety of search terms. The semantic core refers to the keywords that allow users to find your product or service. The semantic core also serves as the basis for your website’s content. From it, we can define your site’s main categories and subcategories.
To begin, conduct keyword mobile list research using specialized SEO tools. Then, download all selected keywords and their search volumes into a separate file.
Words with higher search volume should be prioritized and used as categories, while words with lower search volume can act as subcategories.
Analytics-based structure
If your website is already up and running, a better way to do this might be to use pages and metrics from Google Analytics or Google Search Console. The best practice is to sort pages by priority. The best priority metric is pageviews, regardless of traffic source, to aggregate all organic search sessions, direct traffic, and referrals.
Consider this: the main category page may not be receiving any views. However, the child pages may be generating a lot of traffic, so you should include the parent page in your navigation. An easy way to do this is to create a category-based pivot table of child page metrics.
Make sure important pages are accessible
We were talking about sorting and categorizing pages, now let’s look at other important objects for any website. In addition to the main and secondary pages, there are always popular uncategorized pages (for example, the “Login” page).
Using pageviews as your primary priority metric ensures those pages aren’t overlooked. To automatically verify that all important pages are included in your navigation.
Depth refers to how many clicks a user must make to access the page. The home page has a depth of 1, pages linked from the home page have a depth of 2, and so on. You should make sure all your important pages have a depth of 2, meaning users can access them from the home page.
Internal links are a count of internal pages that link to the destination page. The home page should have the most of these links. Make sure other important pages have a significant number of internal links. For example, if the “Login” page has only five internal links, it means it can be reached from those five pages; for logged-in users, it would be quite difficult in that case.
Export the results to merge them with metrics from Google Analytics or a similar tool you’re using to prioritize pages.
Analyze your competitors
Another way to establish a website structure is to examine your main competitors. If you see common patterns, it’s a clear sign that you should implement them as well. For example, the top three bike shops have a mega menu for the “Bicycles” category dropdown and bike-related pages/categories in the horizontal navigation menu.
This means that if you’re thinking about creating navigation for a bike shop, it should look like this.
Regardless of which method you find most convenient, the best option is to combine all of these approaches.