Website Navigation

Go Here, Go There, Go Everywhere

In the initial stages of Information Architecture we determine navigation labels for products, categories, and sub-categories, mostly by way of prioritizing how to best serve users. This data-driven approach much depends on the nature of the website, its content, its users, and the specific scenario at hand.
Architectural Balance

Primary and secondary navigation

All ecommerce websites will have primary navigation (aka global or main navigation), secondary navigation (aka local navigation) and some contextual navigation. Another form of navigation specific to ecommerce websites is faceted navigation.

Primary navigation is for the content that most users are interested, but keep in mind that importance is relative (something important for your business may not be as important for another business). In general, on e-commerce websites, primary navigation displays departments, categories or market segments (i.e., men, women, kids, etc.). Primary navigation is the easiest type for most users to identify. It allows direct access to the website’s hierarchy and is present on almost every page of a website.

Planning Website Architecture
Fig.1 – TPlanning Website Architecture.

On a side note, it will be difficult for Kohl’s to rank for top-level category keywords (e.g., Home, Bed & Bath, Furniture, Outerwear, etc.) since they will have to compete with niche-specific websites that are laser-focused on a single segment—for example, a company that sells just furniture. It is not impossible for Kohl’s to achieve good rankings, but it will require significant work including onsite SEO and quality backlink development.

Regarding secondary navigation, even information architecture experts like Steve Krug, Jesse-James Garret, and Jacob Nielsen cannot agree on a definitive definition. Secondary navigation stands for content that is of secondary interest and importance to users.

Again, importance is relative to each business. Strongly connected with navigational links, there is an SEO best practice that recommends keeping the number of links on a page under 100. However, this is an obsolete rule; you can list more than 100 links on your pages, depending on the authority of your website. You will see high authority websites like Walmart listing hundreds of internal and external links.

A page with over 600 links may be too many unless you have an excellent site authority. Walmart’s large number of links results from the use of the so-called fly-out mega menus in the primary navigation, for usability reasons. This type of menu makes deeper sections of the website easily accessible to users. Mega menus allow direct linking to subcategories and even to products, but you must be careful to keep the number of links to a reasonable limit.

Since the primary navigation is present on most of the pages on a website, it has a pretty significant influence on how authority moves back and forth between pages. Consolidating a long list of departments into a single place has to do with design considerations (limited screen estate) and user experience (too many options to skim at once). However, it also affects the PageRank passed to the other pages. Figure 24 – Design limitations forced Walmart to reduce the number of links in the navigation. Notice the “See All Departments” link at the bottom of the primary navigation. However, Walmart has a separate page for the complete list of their departments (i.e., health) and categories (i.e., vitamins): Figure 25 – The “All Departments” consolidation is a clever idea because this page will act as a sitemap for both people and search engine bots. SEO can help information architects decide which categories are the most important for users and therefore should be listed in the primary navigation. Use web analytics tools to identify metrics such as the most searched terms on the website, the most viewed pages, the highest search volume from pay-per-click campaigns. Figure 26 – The keyword with the highest number of internal site searches could eventually be placed in the navigation if it makes sense or, it can be placed near the search field. Contextual navigation Contextual navigation refers to the navigation present in the main section of web pages. It excludes boilerplate navigation items such as those found in headers, sidebars or footers. Some examples of contextual navigation on ecommerce websites include sections such as: Figure 30 – Links in Recommended Products carousels. You will need to discuss contextual navigation with the information architect to identify relevant relationships between categories, subcategories, and products and to plan the internal linking accordingly. Prioritization SEO can help with the prioritization of labels in the navigation. It is helpful to know how many pages will be linked from structural sections of the website (primary, secondary and footer links) on each page template. This is important to estimate because you need to determine how many links you can display in the contextual navigation (only if you need to limit the number of links on pages). This is not a definitive rule, but if you start a new website, it is a good idea to keep the number of links on each page to maximum 200. This is because you will have only a small authority to pass along to lower levels in the beginning. Here are some prioritization guidelines:
  • Keep the number of top-level categories or departments in the primary navigation low, to avoid the paradox of choice. Research has established that having too many options is bad for decision-making.
  • The short-term memory “rule of seven items” does not apply to primary navigation, as users do not need to remember the labels.
  • You can list more categories on a “view-all departments” or “view-all categories” page.
Figure 31 – In a horizontal design, the primary navigation is constrained by design space. As you can see in the examples above, in a horizontal design, the primary navigation is constrained by design space. Notice how short the category names must be. Macy’s displays eleven labels in the primary navigation, same as with BackCountry, while Office Depot lists only nine labels.
  • Vertical primary navigation placement allows for more categories to be listed:
Figure 32 – Costco displays 18 categories in the menu (the same as Sears) while Walmart displays only 13. Specialty retailers will probably have less than two or three departments (sometimes none), in which cases they may not even list departments in the menu, but categories. General department stores can have up to 20 departments.
  • You can break each category level into 20 to 40 subcategories, depending on how extensive your inventory is.
  • If a parent category needs more than 40 subcategories, consider adding a new parent category or implementing faceted subcategories.
  • Ideally, the hierarchy depth to reach a product detail page should be under four levels:
    • Two levels deep: home, category, product detail page (this is suitable for niche retailers).
    • Three levels: home, category, subcategory, product detail page (this is the most common setup for medium-sized ecommerce websites).
    • Four levels deep are home, department, category, subcategory, product detail page OR home, category, subcategory, sub-subcategory and product page. This setup is specific to marketplaces, large department stores or websites with extensive inventories.
  • If the hierarchy has more than four or five levels, use faceted navigation to allow filtering by product attributes.
  • To improve the authority (PageRank) and the relevance (anchor text) of product detail pages, add a content layer (e.g., blog, community forums, user reviews and so on) in the hierarchy just below the product detail page level and link to relevant items from there.
  • Ordering categories (or items) alphabetically is not always the best option. You should prioritize based on popularity and logic whenever possible, and eventually, complement with alpha navigation if user testing proves that such type of navigation is indeed, useful.
Figure 33 – An older version of primary navigation on OfficeMax, featuring alpha navigation. Figure 34 – Newer screenshot after OfficeMax tested the alpha navigation and reverted to category name navigation.
  • If a category has too few items, consider moving them to an existing category with more items but do this only if the new categorization makes sense for users.
  • If a category has too many items (i.e., thousands), it may generate information overload. In this case, you can break the category into smaller subcategories. Additionally, create a user experience that allows better scope selection, before displaying a list of items.
Keyword variations Planning a categorized product hierarchy is not easy. At the top category level, the labels in the primary navigation must be intuitive, must have the appropriate search volumes and must be concise enough to support menu-based navigation. It is worth repeating that determining the hierarchy of an ecommerce website based solely on keyword research is neither ideal nor recommended. However, keyword research should complement and support information architecture. One common question regarding keywords is how to handle misspellings, synonyms, stemming or keyword variations for a category. Where do you place them in the web site’s information architecture? For your internal site search, this should be easy to handle: you must associate each keyword variation, misspelling, etc. to an existing product or category and redirect users to the respective canonical product or category page. If there is no exact match between the keyword variation, misspelling or synonym and a category on your site, then send users to an internal site search result page. For example, when someone searches for “tees”, “tee shirts” or “tshirts”, you return results for “t-shirts”. If there is an exact match between the search query and the category name you can also redirect the searcher to the t-shirts category listing page. Figure 35 – Make sure that your internal site search works appropriately and does not return wrong products, as in this example (a search for “t-shirt” returned bras). In this screenshot, I wanted to highlight the improper handling of internal site search results; returning bras when someone searches for “t-shirts”. Handling keyword variations for external search engines is a bit more complicated. Commercial search engines like Google and Yahoo! need to understand and connect keyword variations with the right content on your website. In the past, you would’ve created individual pages to target keyword variations (or a group of keyword variations). However, Google shifted to ranking topics instead of individual keywords. Therefore, it is important that your pages include the searched keyword and semantically-related words (e.g., synonyms, plurals). Just make sure you are not overdoing it; including all 20 possible variations of a keyword on a single page is spammy. Here are some ideas for you to consider: Target the most common variations in the title and description or both. Figure 36 – Gap targets keyword variations in the description, while Sears uses the title tag. Use product and category descriptions One option is to use category or product description sections to add keyword variations in the copy. The bottom of the image below highlights how this website uses two keyword variations for “t-shirts”. Figure 37 – This retailer uses the words “tees” and “t shirts” in the category description copy, to capture traffic for those keyword variations. Take advantage of related searches This approach requires displaying a related searches section on your pages. This section may contain several of the most used keyword variations: Figure 38 – Keep in mind that Related Searches sections should be useful for users, in the first place, and only then for search engine bots. Identify possible information architecture problems You can perform the site: query on Google, for example, “category_name site:mysite.com” (without quotes) to see whether search engines list the right page at the top. You can also use products and subcategories in the site: query. For example, you can search for: site:www.costco.ca/ gourmet products site:www.costco.ca/ “gourmet products” If what the page your optimized for on your website does not show up at the top of the results, various reasons are possible, such as:
  • Improper internal linking. This happens when the internal linking architecture does not support the correct page.
  • Thin content, no content or inaccessible content (e.g., JavaScript reviews) on the right page.
  • External links point to the wrong page(s), diluting and reducing the relevance of the correct pages. If people are linking to the wrong pages, you must ask yourself why. Maybe those other pages are more relevant to them?
  • Page-specific penalties.
Of course, an in-depth analysis is required to identify the cause of these issues. When attempting to determine the cause of such problems, it is important to understand how the targeted page (the page you want to rank with, at the top of the SERPs), is linked internally from other pages on your website, and external sites. One of the tools for analyzing this is Google Search Console: Figure 39 – The Internal Links report will display the most important internal links, but only for the most important pages on the website. This report is basic, but it can provide some immediate insights. Look for signals such as:
  • Are there more internal links to the wrong page(s) than to the desired page?
  • Is the desired page linked from the parent pages (pages higher in the hierarchy)?
  • Is the desired page linked from pages with high authority?
  • Is the desired page linked with the proper anchor text?
If there are issues like these, it is time to restructure your internal linking. Keep in mind that Google will not allow you to download the complete list of links, only the top ones. Another useful method to assess the internal linking is to run a crawl on your website using tools like Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog and export the results to Excel. It is also a good idea to run the most important terms on your internal site to check whether there is a match between the URL returned by your internal site search and the URL returned by search engines. For instance, let’s say that Google returns the Gourmet Products category URL in the first position when you search for “site:costco.ca gourmet products”. If you were to click on the result, the Gourmet Products page opens: Figure 40 – Costco’s organic search landing page, pointing visitors to the right category page. However, Costco’s internal site search returns a different page, which is a search results page. This is not the best approach from a usability point of view or for search engines, because Google does not want to list in SERPs other results pages. Figure 41 – In Costco’s case, this mismatch may happen because of the setup of the internal site search rules. In many cases, when there is an exact match between a user’s query and a category name, it is preferable to redirect the user to the listing page instead of to a search results page. Labeling In reference to choosing the names of the links in the navigation, labeling is an area where information architecture and search engine optimization overlap. SEOs and information architects must understand the user’s mental model to label the navigation correctly. Labeling is not easy and presents a real challenge for very large ecommerce websites. Research from eBay shows how complicated it can get. While most ecommerce taxonomies can be architected based on a predefined vocabulary, SEO can assist in the labeling process. Let’s say you sell toys. Start by searching for the category name (“toys”) using Google’s Keyword Planner: Figure 42 – Do not forget to set up the targeting options based on your target market. Download the list generated by Keyword Planner and open it with Excel. Then, categorize keywords into “buckets” by mapping each keyword to either its category, attribute or filter name: Categorize keywords into “buckets”. Insert a pivot table that counts the occurrences of Category: Sort by Count of Category. If you sort by Count of Category, you can get an idea of what needs to be present in the navigation. You can also identify filters values that can be used in the faceted navigation. Some navigation labels will be easy to identify after tagging fewer than a hundred keywords. For instance, in our example, it seems clear that brand should be a primary or secondary navigation label and users should be able to navigate and filter items by brands. Other possible candidates in this example are age, theme, and character. Take the findings from this type of research and discuss them with the information architect. Another thing you should do with the keyword list generated by Keyword Planner is to get the individual word frequency, using tools such as wordle.net: Words sorted by frequency. Visually, this is how the word frequency will look like for our previous example: Figure 46 – The “word cloud” for a list of keywords. The image above is what we call the “word cloud,” and in our example I excluded the words “toys” and “toy”, to make the other words stand out. The frequency of the word “kids” is particularly interesting. If you sell toys only for kids (no other target age, i.e., adults), then you probably should exclude the word “kids” from your analysis. If you are in this niche, you may notice that a few essential segments/labels are missing from this keyword list:
  • One is the gender label (girls and boys).
  • Is your target market price sensitive? Then pricing might be another segmentation/label ( shop by price).
Insights like the ones above cannot be discovered using keyword tools. So, how do you identify these “hidden” labels? By conducting user research, user testing, creating consumer personas and scenarios, user flows, website maps and wireframes. Keep in mind that from an information architecture perspective, labeling does not stop with the text used for links and navigation. There are different types of labels as well, such as: Document labels
  • URLs (whenever possible, URLs should contain keywords that make sense to searchers and to search engines).
  • File names (having relevant keywords in filenames is important for SEO and users).
Content labels
  • Page titles should make sense to searchers and search engines. When there is a partial match between the keywords in the HTML title element and the search query, search engines will emphasize (bold) the matched keyword(s), which may help with SERP click-through rates (CTR).
  • Headings and sub-headings. Headings use large fonts and attract the eyes almost immediately. Putting keywords in headings assures users that they are in the right place and help with dwell time and bounce rates.
Other types of navigation labels
  • Breadcrumbs. Keep in mind that since search engines became so popular, home pages are not the only entry points to websites. Therefore, use breadcrumbs to easily and quickly communicate the hierarchy of your site to searchers.
  • Contextual text links. Using keyword-rich anchor text placed in a sentence or paragraph is one of the best ways to interlink pages, either vertically or horizontally.
  • Footers are also a type of navigational label. A quick note on this type of navigation: this is probably the place people spam the most, by creating tens of keyword-rich internal links.
Figure 47 – The screenshot depicts a footer that makes this website a good candidate for an over-optimization filter. This footer is mainly boilerplate text, meaning that search engines will most likely ignore it when assessing this page’s content and the anchor text relevance. It does not help to repeat “men’s{category name}” across a million pages since search engines can exclude boilerplate text pretty well when computing relevanc. Figure 48 – An excerpt from Google’s webmaster guidelines regarding boilerplate repetition. It is funny how SEOs refer to the concepts discussed in this section of the course as on-page SEO factors, while information architects refer to the same as labels. It seems that SEOs and information architects work with similar and related concepts, but they still cannot easily come to agreements when it comes to optimizing websites for both searchers and search engines. Poly-hierarchies SEO can help information architects with canonicalizing poly-hierarchies. Very often, multiple suitable hierarchies could be appropriate for a given item. It is important to help the information architect choose the best fit as the canonical hierarchy and to stick to it. From the primary or secondary navigation, you should link only to the canonical hierarchies. Ideally, all links on the website should point to only one canonical hierarchy. You can keep as many logical hierarchies as are helpful to users, but to avoid confusing search engines, link to the canonical hierarchy as well. For example, the Elmo category can be found under: Toys > Stuffed Animals > Elmo (URL: mysite.com/toys/stuffed-animals/elmo/)</em > Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Elmo (URL: mysite.com/gifts/holidays/christmas/elmo/)</em > If you decide that the first hierarchy is the canonical one (usually canonical hierarchies are the shortest), then whenever you link internally to the Elmo category, use the URL mysite.com/toys/stuffed-animals/elmo/ You can use your web analytics tool to see how most users reached a given page. For example, look at the Navigation Summary report generated using Google Analytics (under Behavior –> All Pages), and see how most people reached the Elmo page: Figure 49 – To get this report, follow the steps illustrated in this screenshot. If you want a more detailed analysis, use the Visitors Flow report under the Audience tab. Additionally, you look at the Refined Keywords dimension in the Behavior –> Search Terms section to understand what keyword refinements were made after a search for “Elmo”. The Refined Keyword report can also be a source of keyword variations as you can see in the following screenshot: The Refined Keyword report can be a source for keyword variations. Remember that there is no wrong or right way to classify a product into certain taxonomies if you refine them over time if need be. However, once you decided on a canonical hierarchy, it is a good idea to set that in stone. Here are some other SEO tips for ecommerce information architecture:
  • If you use Google Analytics (or any other web analysis tool), activate the Site Search Tracking option. Analyze what users search for and use that information to decide on the website’s hierarchy. However, do not rely solely on your web analytics data, because you will miss a lot of data that is sourced outside your site.
  • Use keyword research tools to identify keyword variations and suggestions for the terms you have in mind or for those generated with user research and card sorting.
    • Google Keyword Tool
    • Search Term/Query Reports
    • Wordstream
    • Ubersuggest
    • Keywordtool.io
    • Google Suggest
    • Google Correlate
    • SEMRush
    • SpyFu
  • Analyze your competitors’ website architecture and navigation, but do not copy blindly. Use their information for inspiration but create your site architecture in the end.
  • Use a crawler on your competitors’ websites and sort their URLs alphabetically. You may need to crawl a large number of URLs (i.e., 250k+ URLs), for this to work.
  • Find your competitors’ sitemaps (both the HTML sitemap and the XML Sitemap) and analyze them in Excel.
Figure 51 – Sorting URLs alphabetically can reveal the website structure.
  • Download the DMOZ taxonomy and look at the shopping categorization.
  • When choosing category names, use Google Trends to check whether there is a steep drop in what people search online, over time.
Notice how the interest in “digital cameras” trends downwards. Maybe this has to do with mobile phones that yield increasingly better pictures.
  • Do not create the website hierarchy solely on keyword research data; validate with card sorting and user interviews. Nowadays, you can quickly do that online.
  • Perform simple navigational queries , like “contact{your_brand}” and make sure the contact URLs, and all other important URLs, are user-friendly.
This is a not-so-friendly “contact us” URL. Remember, labeling applies to URLs too, not only to links. In this example, the URL is not optimized for users (nor for search engines). This may be limited by the CMS, in which case it may be the time to ditch the old CMS for a new one. A friendly URL will read www.jcpenney.com/contact-us OR jcpenney.com/contact-us
  • If you need to categorize large volumes of items, you can use the power of folksonomy, which is an academic term for what we commonly call crowdsourcing. Services such as Mturk from Amazon will allow you to categorize products quickly, and even create relationships between products using real people. However, you need to be careful about how you select participants and what instructions you give them.
  • When card sorting tests are in progress, it is more important to listen and observe than to put words in your users’ mouths.
  • When you remove/update categories from your website (at all levels), make sure that the URLs belonging to the updated categories redirect to the most appropriate working page.
  • When you develop or update the website, create a checklist of SEO requirements for the information architect (e.g., directory and file name conventions, canonicalization rules, lower casing all URLs, data quality rules for data input teams, seasonality, and expired content handling, parameters handling, and so on). I will not provide an extensive checklist here, because people tend to limit to using just the pointers in the list while missing others. After reading this book, you should be able to come up with your list.
  • Send email alerts to the search engine optimizer when someone removes or updates categories, subcategories or products so that he or she can check the header responses for the new and old URLs. This task can be easily automated.