SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices

[RichardRColeman]

I've read a number of articles on SEO and main navigation for websites.

I'd like to get a solid answer/recommendation to help solve this one. This is the situation.

We're helping a local business that offers pest control and property maintenance services. Under each of these, there area a number of services available, eg, cockroach control, termite inspections or lawn mowing services, rubbish removal and so on.

Is it best to have a main nav containing the top keywords for the services - Pest Control | Property Maintenance, with a drop down to the services under each. Or, a simple approach - Our Services > drop down to each - Pest Control > Termite Inspections, etc. My concern here is that they have quite a lot of services, so the nav could be way too long.

Really appreciate any assistance here. Many thanks.

[RichardRColeman]

Thanks for this.

Great idea. I always have my Wife take a look. Will extend that to the teenagers and my parents. That will tell a lot.

Great tip! Cheers.

[Deacyde]

Another good way to test, grab your family, kids, friends etc..

Tell them to goto your site and find something, then ask them how easy was it and find out what wasn't easy an adjust.

Do this with at least 5+ people and you can have some actionable insight on what to alter.

[RichardRColeman]

Hi,

Thanks so much. It can be become a little too much as services are added, particularly in pest control, you could have dozens there.

I have actually created what you've suggested in the main nav but, will move the others over to the top service page as you say.

Really appreciate your help, thanks again.

[BlueCorona]

Hi Richard!

We work with a lot of home service (HVAC, pest control, landscaping) companies and from our experience we've found that (like Tymen mentioned) dropdowns are ok as long as you don't make them keep dropping out further and further. It also depends on the amount of services you are trying to fit in the navigation.

Majority of our clients' websites' top level navigation would have - About | Landscape Maintenance | Landscape Design/Build | Portfolio | Contact - or something about those lines. Under "Landscape Maintenance" we might include Lawn Mowing, Irrigation Services, etc., in the drop down, but instead of continuing to add to the drop down, we would only link the top priority services from the drop down and list additional services with internal links from the main Landscape Maintenance page.

On our HVAC clients we might have "Heating" listed at the top most link in the navigation that has a drop down to Furnaces and Heat Pumps, and then we would include another drop down that includes links to the Installation, Maintenance, and Repair pages for both these services. I would only recommend doing double drop downs if your navigation doesn't include many services. For instance, if you have a bunch of services listed under Heating that ALL have an additional drop down, it could negatively impact user experience.

We try to pair down the main navigation to be as simple, but helpful/effective as possible, and include links to additional (less prominent) services from other landing pages instead of trying to jam pack everything in the top level navigation.

I hope this helps you figure out how to pair down the services!

[RichardRColeman]

Thanks Tymen,

Yes, drop downs are not the best solutions these days.

Will take a look at the site and see what we can do.

Thanks!

[Tymen]

Hi Richard,

I would completely stay away from drop downs. You often get problems with different browsers and mobile. For main navigation you could go for: Home> What we Do> Who we are> Contact. Next to that I would work with a sidemenu or footermenu in which you have all the services. For example you could take a look at www.aliexpress.com. This way the visitor can navigate easily and all the serbices are visible on the homepage for visitors and Google.

Good luck! Tymen