Optimizing Website Navigation for Manufacturing Industry
Website navigation is a key element of a successful website. As a manufacturer, you can leverage a functional website navigation menu to support different buying tasks and make the content that converts easy to find. And with search engines increasingly valuing user friendly website navigation, your navigation structure can support your search engine optimization efforts.
Read on to learn more about the best practices for website navigation in the manufacturing industry.
Optimizing Website Navigation for Manufacturing Industry
Understanding Your Target Audience
Understanding Competitive Analysis
Key Elements & Statistics of Effective Website Navigation
Adopt a Clear and Consistent Menu Structure
Focus on Mobile-Friendly Navigation
Use Intuitive Call-to-Action Placement
Limit Clicks Per Session
Understand Search Intent
Conclusion
Understanding Your Target Audience
Did you know that 52% of B2B buyers are more likely to make a purchase after reading content? Content rich sites have an advantage, but they need to make this content easy to discover and explore.
With the manufacturing buying journey becoming increasingly self-directed, the average B2B buyer is now spending almost half of their time discovering content independently.
It's crucial to create landing pages that support independent content consumption while aligning with what search results promised. If a landing page fails to meet expectations, website visitors will quickly move on.
Understanding Competitive Analysis
If you're looking to learn more about the best practices for website navigation in the manufacturing space, competitive analysis is a great place to start.
Open an incognito window. Google and other search engines rely on your history to adjust search results. Using an incognito window reflects the experience of a new buyer. Which competitors appear first in the search engine rankings? What do they promise to new prospects?
Visit the top web page and assess how well it fulfills what the search result promised. Which next steps does this website page suggest? Which actions would a visitor want to perform on this one page?
Now that you know what your competitors are doing, figure out how you can leverage website navigation and other elements to do it better. You can, for instance, make the main takeaways more visible, engage visitors by offering more content formats, or improve the flow with better website navigation. This leads to longer sessions and more content consumption.
Key Elements & Statistics of Effective Website Navigation
There are concrete steps you can take to support the tasks visitors want to accomplish on your site, boost SEO rankings, and improve conversions.
Adopt a Clear and Consistent Menu Structure
Users spend an average of 6.44 seconds looking at a website's menu. It's crucial to make important pages immediately easy to find, but including too many pages in navigation menus can be harmful.
For manufacturing websites, it's best to stick to five to six main menu items. Besides your home page, you should have important links to product, about, contact, and service pages in your main website navigation bar. This approach will help declutter your website and simplify the choices available.
You should also leverage secondary navigation elements to support a wide range of tasks. Website navigation best practices include using a search bar to let users explore more content and adding a dropdown navigation menu to your mega menu.
Dropdown menus can help visitors explore different product categories or brands. Your dropdown menu can also lead to your knowledge repository and help users explore more content.
Adding a horizontal navigation bar can be a good strategy for creating mega menus where desktop users can filter content. You can, for instance, add navigation links to explore educational content on different topics or use dropdown menus that allow website visitors to refine product results.
Your footer menu is a good spot for components like corporate information, newsletter signup, social media, all the pages about your different brands, and more. Your footer navigation menu can also be a relevant place for linking to testimonies, awards, accreditations, and more.
You can also support your navigation structure by using internal links in your copy. Pillar pages are one of the best website navigation examples that doesn't rely on a traditional menu.
Focus on Mobile-Friendly Navigation
While adopting a horizontal navigation bar makes sense on desktop, users with mobile devices will struggle with this web design. With 58% of global traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing your manufacturing site for mobile users is crucial. Plus, search engines are increasingly using mobile-friendly signals when ranking results.
Accommodate mobile users by adding a hamburger navigation menu to your site. Website navigation best practices like large tiles, a top navigation bar, a static footer menu, and in-page navigation elements like carousels and cards can help. You can also use a dynamic vertical sidebar navigation menu that opens and closes to help mobile device users explore more content.
To limit scrolling, think about adding filters to your mobile menu such as a vertical sidebar menu. The filters will provide users with different ways of refining their search.
You should avoid elements like a horizontal navigation menu, drop down menu, and text navigation links since they can be difficult to interact with on a small screen.
Use Intuitive Call-to-Action Placement
Effective navigation refers website visitors to calls to action in a natural way. Research shows that strategies like using visual CTAs can increase clicks by as much as 42%. Instead of using links, create buttons to draw attention to these offers and actions.
Use white space around these elements, and make sure they stand out from the background by using a different color or bold text. Use impactful copy with action verbs and keep the copy short and straight to the point to immediately grab the attention of your website visitors. A/B testing can help determine the best placement by comparing conversions between two pages with a different web design for your CTAs.
Placing social media icons with social media links in visible spots is another great way to connect with visitors and suggest a next step they can take to stay in touch.
Limit Clicks Per Session
How many times are users willing to click to perform an action? For most manufacturers, a users flow report will typically reveal that the average visitor clicks three to five times.
Make sure all your content is accessible via your primary and navigation site's navigation menu within three to five clicks of your home page.
Easy access to your major pages is crucial for a website visitor, but other important links like product pages, warranty information, and other pages should be easy to find via your secondary website navigation structure.
Understand Search Intent
Google Analytics and other tools can help you assess how many queries have a transactional intent. For these users, make your top products and current offers easy to find through banners and other navigation elements.
Google Analytics will also reveal that many users don't have a transactional intent when visiting your website. Mapping these sessions will give you a better idea of what these website visitors want to accomplish on your site, and you can use these insights to optimize your website navigation menus and simplify the most common paths users take.
Conclusion
Optimizing website navigation is an element that will directly support your SEO efforts while driving conversions for your manufacturing business. You can get results by adopting best practices such as creating a mega menu for your important pages, adding drop down menus to support a wide range of tasks, and optimizing website navigation for mobile users through a hamburger menu or vertical sidebar navigation menus.
Fractional can help you enhance your website architecture and develop a website navigation scheme that consistently delivers a positive user experience. Contact us to learn more!
