Descriptive Navigation Hubs

A quick example, using helmets

Like I said, descriptive navigation hubs are the most powerful. Use these hubs when:

• You’ve got a super-competitive term; and/or
• Clearer navigation might be a competitive differentiator; and/or
• The client’s product or service is easily confused with a different product or service. For example “bikes” can mean bicycles or motorcycles. Changing the top nav will clarify things; and/or
• The client has a relatively small number of products or services. You never want more than six options in the primary top nav

Creating a Descriptive Navigation Hub

…we sell bicycle helmets and we customize them. We want everyone to know it. If that’s so, then the navigation at the top of this page is worthless. Everyone knows we sell “products.” Everyone knows we provide “services.”

But we want people to know right away that we make helmets and customize them. We want them to know it right away, no matter what page they land on.

We also want to rank for “bicycle helmets.” That’s not an easy term.

To do that, we change “Products” in our top nav to “Bicycle Helmets” and “Services” in our top nav to “Customization”. If you look up at the top nav on this page, you’ll see that I changed it. We now have this:

The Result

What did that do? It created a link on every page of the site to the Helmets page with the word “Bicycle Helmets” as the link text. It did the same for the Customization page.

No matter what page they land on, visitors will immediately understand that This Site Sells Bicycle Helmets Dammit. They’ll also immediately understand that This Company Customizes Them Dammit. So this is a giant UX win.

And every page has a keyword-rich link back to the Helmets and Customization pages. Search engines look at link text, number of links, and position of links on the page. Search engines will crawl the site and say “Gee, this Helmets page is really important” and “Gee, this customization page is almost as important”. If your site has this navigation, and your competitors still have plain old ‘products” and “services” up top, guess who wins? You.

Descriptive hubs must be fully descriptive. That means it must pass the blank sheet of paper rule: Write the nav on a blank sheet of paper and it should make sense to a stranger. So “Helmets” isn”t as good as “Bicycle Helmets”. “Customization” isn’t that great, but I made a judgment call. It looks better than “Custom Bicycle Helmets” right next to Bicycle Helmets. I opted for the better copy. You should always do the same. Vomiting keywords into navigation doesn’t help.