Improve Your Website’s Navigation to Enhance its Conversion Funnel

In this article, we outline 6 ways to improve your website’s navigation to ensure that it’s working to its maximum potential in creating a smooth flow of visitors through the conversion funnel – whether your aim is online sales, enquiries or some other action to be completed.

It’s very important to ensure that your business’s website has good navigation as this can make or break the performance of it when it comes to retaining visitors. Clear and consistent navigation can keep them on the site for a while and encourage them to go all the way through the conversion funnel, by making sure that visitors can quickly find interesting information. This also improves the indexing of your site by search engines.

On the other hand, poor navigation has a detrimental effect and can cause confused visitors to exit the site sooner than they would do otherwise. A confused visitor is usually a non-converting visitor, so it’s crucial to ensure that the site’s navigation is as good as it can be.

The following are 6 top tips on how the navigation can be improved:

Consistent navigation is key – this ensures that the site is easy to use and that visitors stay on the site for as long as possible, if they can find the information that they need. It’s crucial to ensure that there is a common theme to navigation throughout the site so visitors don’t lose where they are on the site.

Clear division of categories – category headings must be separated visually from the sub-categories, even if the categories are links themselves.

Use clickable links for all navigation elements – all heading elements should be clickable links. This is true even with drop-down menus where clicking a sub-category link may be the natural inclination of the visitor.

Ensure the accuracy of navigation titles – use text to describe the linked page accurately so visitors know what they’re going to get. Cryptic or misleading navigation text confuses and annoys visitors, possibly to the point of site abandonment.

Use ALT text for clickable images – Using descriptive text in the ALT attribute clickable image is important (especially for images that link to other pages), to ensure that visitors know what the link is, regardless of how they are viewing the site.

Use a functional search feature – When using an in-site search feature, the search results page must always produce relevant results and never produce a blank result. Test this on your own site and also track search activity in Google Analytics.

A good way to see if the navigation on your site is working well is to compare it with a competitor’s website. That can provide additional ideas on how to improve it and, combined with a good system of A/B or multivariate tests through Analytics, will lead to the best possible user experience and a smoother flow of traffic through the conversion funnel.

If you’d like more information on how the Web Marketing Workshop can help to improve your website’s navigation and conversion funnel, contact us now for further information.

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