To improve website navigation, cut your main menu down to the handful of things buyers come for, name each item in the words they'd use, group your services so each one is a click or two from the homepage, and make sure every page tells visitors where they are and where to go next. Then watch a few real people try to find something. Navigation problems are almost invisible to the people who built the site, and obvious to everyone else within a minute.
Good navigation helps search engines as well. Google's SEO Starter Guide says organizing a site logically helps search engines and users understand how your pages relate to each other, and that most new pages Google finds are discovered through links.
Start with a ten-minute test
Before changing anything, find out where people get stuck. Ask two or three people who don't work for you (a friend in another industry is ideal) to open your site on their phone and complete three tasks while you watch:
- Find out whether you offer a specific service you sell.
- Find out whether you work in their city.
- Get in touch to ask for a quote.
Stay quiet and watch. Note where they pause, what they tap first, and what they say out loud. If two out of three struggle with the same task, you've found your first fix. It costs nothing. It'll tell you more than any analytics report.
The main menu
Fewer items
Five to seven top-level items is plenty for most B2B sites: Services, Industries or Markets, Projects, About, and Contact, give or take. Everything else can live in a dropdown or the footer. A long menu makes visitors read; a short one lets them scan.
Labels in the buyer's words
Menu labels should be the words a buyer would type into a search box. "Solutions" and "Capabilities" make people guess. Guessing loses them. "Commercial Roofing" or "HVAC Maintenance" don't. If your team uses internal names for service lines, keep those off the menu.
Dropdowns that work for everyone
A dropdown that only opens when a mouse hovers over it fails on a phone, and for anyone using a keyboard. The W3C's accessibility tutorial on menus says fly-out submenus should work with both mouse and keyboard, and that clear menus showing the current page help people with limited attention or short-term memory. Mark the current section in the menu. It's a small thing that helps everyone.
Contact, always
Put the phone number and a contact or quote button in the header on every page, because the visitor who's ready to talk shouldn't have to go looking, whether they've just landed on a project page from a search or have been reading your service pages for ten minutes. On mobile, keep them visible outside the collapsed menu so nobody has to open it to call you.
Below the menu
The menu gets people into the right section. After that, the page takes over.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the small trail of links near the top of a page, such as Home > Services > Roof Repair. Google describes a breadcrumb trail as showing the page's position in the site hierarchy, letting people move up a level at a time, and it uses breadcrumb markup to help categorize the page in search results. On a site with dozens of service and location pages, they're well worth adding.
Links inside the page text
Your service pages should link to related services, to the areas you serve, and to project examples. A page about rooftop unit replacement that links to your maintenance agreement page helps a property manager find the next thing they need without going back to the menu.
Make the link text say where it goes. Google's link guidelines ask for anchor text (the clickable words) that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant, and they say Google can only reliably follow links built as standard HTML links with a real address. Ask your developer to confirm the menu is built that way, especially if it was put together with a lot of JavaScript.
A footer that catches the rest
People who scroll to the bottom are often looking for something specific: an address, a careers page, a list of service areas, a license number. Put those there. Keep it tidy. A tidy footer with your main services and locations also gives every page on the site a link to your most important ones.
Common snags on B2B sites
- One page per service, buried. If a service page is three clicks deep with nothing linking to it, buyers and search engines struggle to find it. Link it from the Services menu and from related pages.
- Location pages nobody can reach. Add an "Areas we serve" page or footer list that links to each one.
- Mega-menus with everything. Fifty links in one dropdown is a site map, not a menu. Group them, or move the long list to a page.
- Dead ends. Every page should offer a next step: a related service, a project, or a way to get in touch.
When the navigation is a symptom
Sometimes the menu is hard to fix because the site underneath was never planned. Pages were added one at a time over the years, by whoever was handling marketing then, for whatever service or event needed a page that month, and now there's no logical place to hang half of them without breaking something else. In that case, a new page plan does more than any menu tweak, and it's often the moment to rebuild.
A rebuild is where Inbound SDR starts. We build a website of up to 100 pages in the first month, planned around every service you sell and every area you serve, with the menus, breadcrumbs and internal links set up from day one. We host it, monitor its health, and keep adding to it with a new blog every business day, plus two to three expert hours a month for page changes and technical fixes. Packages start at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term.
If your site is well planned and only the menu is off, you don't need a program like that. A developer can fix the menu in an afternoon.
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