Navigation and structure: helping people find things

Start with what people actually want

Most visitors to a small business site want one of a very small number of things: what do you do, do you cover my area, what does it cost, are you any good, and how do I contact you.

Your navigation should make each of those obvious. Everything else — history, philosophy, awards — is secondary and can live deeper.

A common mistake is organising the menu around how the business thinks of itself rather than what customers ask for. Internal department names mean nothing to a visitor.

Keep it shallow

Every page should be reachable in about three clicks from the homepage. Pages buried five levels down get very few visitors and very little attention from search engines.

Shallow also means restrained. A menu with fourteen items is not helpful; it is a list to be read and decisions to be made. Seven or so top-level items is plenty for most small businesses, with sub-items where genuinely needed.

Write labels that describe things

Menu labels are not the place for personality. "Services", "Pricing", "About", "Contact" are unglamorous and instantly understood, which is the entire job.

Clever alternatives — "Our Craft", "The Journey", "Say Hello" — force a moment of interpretation. Multiply that by every item and you have added friction for no gain. They also lose you the plain keyword match that helps search engines categorise the page.

Internal linking

Links between your own pages do more work than most people realise. They help visitors move naturally from interest to action, they help search engines discover pages, and they distribute ranking value across the site.

Link with descriptive anchor text — the words in the link should describe the destination. "Read about our performance work" is useful to both a person and a crawler; "click here" is useful to neither.

Aim for every page to be linked from at least one other. A page with nothing pointing at it is effectively invisible, however good it is. This is covered further in technical SEO basics.

The page nobody plans

Your 404 page — what someone sees when a link is broken or an address is mistyped. Most sites leave it as the host's default, which is a dead end.

A useful 404 acknowledges the problem, offers the main navigation, and links to your most important pages. It turns a lost visitor into a recovered one, at the cost of about twenty minutes of work.

Common questions

How many items should be in my main menu?

Around five to seven for most small businesses. Beyond that people stop reading and start scanning, which defeats the purpose. If you genuinely have more, group them into sub-menus rather than listing everything at the top level.

Should I have a separate page for each service?

Usually yes, if each is a real service somebody might search for specifically. A dedicated page can rank for that service and answer it properly, whereas one combined page competes with itself. The exception is closely related variations, which are often better together.

Where should my contact details go?

Everywhere. Phone number in the header, full details in the footer of every page, plus a dedicated contact page. Never make someone hunt. A surprising number of sites put the phone number only on the contact page, which adds a click at the exact moment somebody had decided to get in touch.