Navigation Menu - Whats too much

[Fozzy1609]

Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu.

For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV.

We then have a navigation menu something like this:

Solar Window Film
    Heat Control window Films
    Anti glare window film
    UV window film
etc etc

Ihave this for all my services and products.  I have unique content on each.

My question is this.  Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page>

For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc.

Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way

[WebElaine]

Reviewing analytics and running usability tests are the two best ways to decide how much to have in each navigation system. There are several different forms of usability tests that you could use to determine the best way to organize your website and how to label each page: TreeJack is a service that will let you try out different navigation menus to make sure people can find what they're looking for; you could do card sorting which gives people a set number of categories but they physically or virtually group the cards into categories and you can then use the categories in your navigation; you can even create prototypes with a tool like Axure or Balsamiq and have people try out a few different options to see which one works best.

If you don't have the time or budget for usability testing, looking at analytics is second best. Things to look for: what content is the most visited on your website? Are people getting there by navigating through your website, or are most of them coming directly from organic search to those key pages? How long do people spend on particular pages? If some of the pages have very low time on site, it's a good idea to shorten the navigation path - you can either deep-link to those pages in sitewide navigation or just look at specific pages and add smaller nav menus within say a sidebar or a CTA button within that page's content, which gets people from that page to a deeper page with 1 click versus drilling down through several different links one at a time. Another great place to look: if you're tracking site search, see what people are searching for and what pages they're searching from the most. If 75% of people who visit the homepage search for 1 of 3 terms, then put prominent featured sections about those 3 terms right there front and center to help them get there. Also take note of the specific keywords people are searching by and use those as your navigational labels - that can be even more helpful than simplifying hierarchy, if you name things the way people use them naturally.

In my personal experience it's best for SEO as well as for users when you stick to the old no-more-than-100-links-per-page rule. If you provide too many options, people just get overwhelmed and don't know what to pick. So my own rule of thumb is to only link to about 5 top-level pages in my sitewide header navigation; under each of those have no more than 4 to 5 sublinks, and leave it at that. But I always make it very, very easy for them to drill down deeper - if the site is 4 or 5 levels deep, those 4th and 5th levels are accessible from the 2nd and 3rd directly, so they don't have to click 5 times to get down 5 levels - they can hit the homepage, go to a 2nd-level page, and from there straight to 5th-level if that's what they're looking for.

[Fozzy1609]

Yes this was what I was thinking. I’m thinking instead of having main category - sub category - second sub category. Having just main and sub may help. The second subcategories are all generally less competitive so having the links from the pages rather than menu might not cause too much problem. Anyone else have any insights into this?

[brooksmanley]

Hmm, that's a legitimate point.

I haven't read anything on the importance or limit on # of links recently, but this Moz post from awhile back says you should usually aim to keep it below 100. It also has some good insight behind the reason that's the recommendation in regards to page rank, and creating a hierarchical structure that makes sense.

I'm interested to see if anyone else has any thoughts!

[Fozzy1609]

Thanks Brooks.  What got me thinking about this was that I saw something about having too many links on one page being bad for SEO even internal links.  As there's a lot of categories and subcategories in my menu I thought this may be hurting my rankings a bit

[brooksmanley]

Hello!

In an ideal world, I would recommend looking at your analytics or interviewing customers to see how they interact with your site. Do they already know the exact product they're looking for? Or are they less familiar with the industry and in need of details and information on the over-arching category?

I personally like the idea of having a kind-of landing page for the product category – Solar Window Film – with some good quality content that answers frequently asked questions on the subject. From there, link to the individual products. This will help you rank for the more broad search term, while also allowing you to rank for the individual product.

As for whether or not to also display these as sub-nav items in your menu, I think you could do that as well if you like. To cater to the user who is already familiar and knows what they're looking for.

Hope that helps!