Jennie Lane from Schipul discusses tips for reviewing data from your Google Analytics to revisit and restructure your website navigation. Using data to improve your website results!

https://www.tendenci.com

 Hi, my name is Jenny and I'm on the
search engine marketing team at Schipul

Today we're going to talk about your
website's navigation. Your navigation is

how your visitors are getting around
your website, so naturally you want to

make sure it's working for both you and
your visitors. It's a good idea to take a

step back and analyze your navigation
structure every 6-12 months as your

priorities change, and you get more data
about how visitors are interacting with

your site. We're going to start by going
to Google Analytics to take a look at

how visitors are interacting with our
site now. This will give us an idea of

what might need to change. The first
thing we can do is pull up your top

content, and it's defaulted to sort by
pageviews. If you're seeing certain pages

that are getting a lot of this is that
are really not key pages, then you may

want to rethink your navigation
structure. For this particular website

we're seeing that the staff page, the
about page, careers - all these are in the

top and these are not that important. We
would prefer to see their services pages

and more contact pages, and there is a
contact page on the four spot but we

would like to see the request for
services page also in the top. Another

way to view how people are interacting
with your site is to click into the

navigation summary tab, so we're still in
the content section, and just scroll up

to the navigation summary. It defaults to
the homepage, as you see here, and on the

left side are the previous page paths, so
these are the pages that were visited

before going to your homepage. They don't always
land on your homepage. And then on

the right, these are your page paths that
occurred after clicking to your homepage

and again we're seeing less important
pages in the top such as staff, careers,

about us, and we'd rather see service
type pages and contact pages. This is

how the website looked before we made
edits. You can see that the navigation

order is in line with the top content
that we were seeing in Google Analytics

We recommend this to the client that
they break out the services section in

two separate nav items, and also move
the request for services forum page into

its own nav item, since it was buried in
this drop-down. We can see the after

Now we have each of the services in
their own nav item, as well as the

request for services pulled out into its
own nav item, and we added a utility nav

for maybe less important pages, as well as
adding the phone number, and this is in

text form so it's clickable from mobile
devices. I wanted to point out that we

generally read in an F pattern and so we
want to order our nav items with that in

mind, and also be descriptive when naming our
nav items, so rather than just saying

services we would say web marketing
services. Here is an overview of tips

for restructuring your navigation: use
analytics to determine which content is

most important to your visitors, make
sure the most important items are

top-level nav items, order items so the most
important items read left to right, use a

utility navigation for logistics that
don't need to be in the main nav, use

descriptive words in titles. I hope that
was helpful for you guys and good luck

restructuring your navigation.