6 Website Navigation Tips to Push Visitors Into Your Sales Pipeline

Your navigation could be killing your eCommerce sales and traffic. A good navigation strategy is central to the success of your website because confused visitors will drop out of your site quickly. Your website is the leverage you have to reach out to shoppers and visitors it becomes the most important marketing tool you have, so make sure it is helping your visitors get to where they need to be once they’ve arrived.

You want to ensure your visitors are converting into leads and customers by providing them with an easy way to shop and navigate to the areas they are trying to reach. Here are 6 website navigation tips:

Slim Menus

Everything that is important about your website is connected to its navigation. Trying to fit it all into one area can have big drawbacks. Realistically, you should have no more than seven menu items in your navigation scheme. Lean means focused and a menu loaded with options can have a big negative impact. Navigation that shows your main services or products and is descriptive as well as concise, works best.

Descriptive Menu Items

When Google and other search engines crawl your site your descriptive menu items will be indexed. If you are only using a general or generic term your site will be lumped into that mix. It is advisable to create terms that are more specific to your product or message. They will index better and drive the right traffic to your website. Products and services that are too general will apply to far too many types of businesses. Making you navigation terms descriptive will help with bad clicks and bounce rates.

 

Pitfalls of Dropdown Menus

If you nest all of your categories in a dropdown menu but your visitor doesn’t mouse over it then they may bounce because they don’t see what they want offered. A simple navigation menu with descriptive terms will direct your user to a page where you can present more sub items. This page can be designed to engage and convert the visitor over sending them running because they didn’t mouse over all of your menu items.

Importance of Order

Navigation follows the psychology that the first and last items that appear will be the most effective. Your traffic’s attention and retention are going to be the best for items that appear at the beginning and at the end of your menu. Your most important items need to be at the beginning and end of the menu and the least important items in the middle.

Include Search

If you menu fails  and your dropdowns are overlooked an ambitious and determined user will head for the search bar. Search can be a highly valuable item especially on an eCommerce site. It should be included near the top of every page on your website.

Content and Social Media Items

Your blog and social media links can be critical to helping your conversion rates. Engaging your audience helps build lasting relationships and over time can become key to continued business and traffic growth. Visitors and shoppers that like your social media and web content are more likely to become loyal to you, return more often, refer others and have higher sales totals. Links to these areas should be considered an integral part of your site navigation.

Website navigation mistakes alone could take your business down a very dark road. Your navigation needs to be sharp to create a very easy to use environment while maintaining search engine ranking to drive traffic. Check your analytics before and then again after making navigation adjustments to your site. It is easy to over complicate your website navigation. When you simply tweak a few fundamental areas you can watch your traffic convert and achieve a better reputation for your brand, produce bigger sales and gain a better overall visitor satisfaction rate.