3 Tips For Improving Your Navigation Bar

Think of your navigation bar as the GPS of your website. A visitor’s journey from prospect to customer begins from home. Most business owners would like web-sightseers to travel from their homepage to making a purchase in a relatively short time period. But the key to repeat business is an interesting trip with memorable menu items enjoyed along the way.

Valorous Circle’s top three recommended navigation bar traits will help move your visitors from prospect to purchase. And on future visits, they’ll fly instead of drive.

1. Position & Order

Figuring out how to navigate something new and different takes time. More importantly, if your visitors don’t find what they’re expecting where they’re expecting to find it on your navigation bar, they’re liable to get lost.

Save your visitors time, energy and frustration by putting your navigation bar near the top of your page and organizing it from left to right. This is important because your visitors read from top to bottom and left to right. When information is organized in this manner it makes more sense to the reader.

The order in which links are placed on the standard navigation bar is also related to how we read. Have you ever wondered why Home is always on the left and the Shopping Cart or Contact link is on the far right? Studies show that we remember the first and last things we read better than anything in the middle. With these two things in mind, the ideal navigation bar could look somewhat like this.

2. Keep It Simple

When coming up with titles for your navigation links, think about being descriptive and relevant without getting overly creative. Avoid using jargon unfamiliar to a first-time visitor. One way to come up with these terms is considering what keywords your website visitors might be searching for. Listing your main product or service categories on your navigation bar will tell prospects in an instant what your company does.

An added benefit of using keywords in your navigation strategy is that it will boost your SEO ranking. If your prospects are looking for the best mousetrap, doesn’t it make more sense to have ‘Best Mousetrap’ on your navigation bar than to have it buried under the generic ‘Products’ label? After all, when was the last time you searched for ‘products’ on Google?

3. Less Is More

Companies with several service categories featuring hundreds of products have no use listing them all on their navigation bar.

Studies have shown that short-term memory can retain 5 to 9 separate items. Long lists encourage readers to skim and skip rather than to read causing important information to be missed. With this in mind, experts recommend including no more than seven links in the main navigation bar and avoiding numerous drop down menus.

When you consider that more that 50 percent of all website visitors are now using mobile devices to look at your website, seven can even be considered a lot of links to work through. And when each menu item has a drop-down menu, website visitors are more likely to click away than stay and read.

If you’d like more visitors to read your web content, you need a navigation system that makes sense to the majority of your visitors. Valorous Circle can craft a well-designed, carefully structured and search optimized website, but only if you call.