Knowing How to Structure a Website Is Foundational
Poor navigation isn’t obvious. It does tend to leak customers. Someone clicks on a link, searches for what they want, can’t find it in a blink, and clicks away. No page not found, no contact page, no good-bye. They’re off to a competitor, whose website made navigating their way to the right page feel like a cakewalk. There’s a lot to learn about seo for electricians, but navigation is at a strange crossroads between user experience and SEO. Do it right and you’ll help both people and search engines navigate your website with ease. Do it wrong and you’ve got a maze that everyone gets lost in, including your site owner.
Here’s an analogy to help. Your site’s navigation menu is a lot like the electricity supply in the walls of a home. When it’s right, it’s invisible, it works, and the lights go on when you flip the switch. When it’s a mess, wires crossed, connections slack, panel too crowded, things don’t work well and it’s difficult to find the problem and fix it. The metaphor is apt because most electricians can tell when something’s wrong with the wiring on a job site but may not see the same jumble in their website structure. The symptoms, however, are the same: things don’t work.
Make the Main Menu Clear and Specific
The biggest problem with menus on electrician websites is they are either too generic or too cluttered. “Services” as an all-encompassing menu item to cover everything from electrical panel upgrades and new lighting to generator connections is not specific enough to be useful. At the opposite extreme, a menu with fifteen items is cluttered and confusing – it overwhelms the visitor. The optimum number of items in a primary menu is between five and eight, so that each menu item is clear and specific enough that a stranger can figure out what’s on the other side of the link.
Use menu labels your customers will immediately recognise, not your own jargon picked up after years of working in the business. “Residential Services,” “Commercial Electrical,” “Emergency Electrician,” “Panel Upgrades,” “EV Charger Installation” – these menu labels work because they’re the same words that a homeowner or property manager will use to describe their problem. Don’t create menu items that are too clever. Don’t call it “Solutions”. “What We Do” is not as good as “Services”. Not many people looking for a quote on a panel replacement think “let me click on their Solutions page”. Keep it simple, stupid.
For search engines, the links in the navigation are the most authoritative links in the site. Google pays special attention to main menu links because they’re present on all pages of the site, and therefore they consistently tell the Google crawler which pages are important. A service that’s listed in the main menu is being recommended in a way by the entire site. That’s valuable. So there’s a point to choosing the pages that go in the menu.
URLs Should Mirror (and Support) Navigation
URL structure and navigation should be in sync. A website with a main menu that reads “Panel Upgrades” but the page is located at “yoursite.com/page7” has a problem that will confuse crawlers, and dilute any keyword signal that might otherwise be present. Neat URLs follow the nav tree. The electrician’s page for panel upgrades should be at “yoursite.com/panel-upgrades” or “yoursite.com/services/panel-upgrades” – it’s easy to read, easy to remember and contains the desired keyphrase.
The same principles apply for electricians with multiple service areas. If the site has a “Services” page and an “Areas We Serve” page, they should follow the same structure. An area-specific page might be located at “yoursite.com/areas/[suburb-name]” but a service-and-location page might be located at “yoursite.com/panel-upgrades/[city]”. One approach isn’t necessarily better than the other – just be consistent. Search engines map out your site structure, based on URLs and links. A consistent structure makes this process easier and a good map will help search engines index all of your pages.
Breadcrumbs like “Home > Services > Panel Upgrades” that you see at the top of many web pages provide another layer of clarity without consuming much real estate. Breadcrumbs provide another way to reinforce the hierarchy; allow the user to easily move back to a previous page without using the browser’s back button; and create more relevant keyword-rich internal links for search engines to follow. Breadcrumbs are a simple but under-appreciated element of multi-page sites.
They’re Not Just Pretty: Footer Navigation Has a Purpose
Few visitors will see the footer on their first visit. But search engines visit the footer on every page, so it’s a valuable area to supplement the page’s navigation structure with more links. Electrician site footers are often a minimalist services list, links to the most important location pages, contact info, license numbers, and perhaps links to a few important blog articles. All of these elements are there for the user who scrolls down, but they’re also internal links that Google sees, and that communicate to Google what the most important pages on the site are.
Google Judges Your Navigation by What’s Important
The design of a site’s navigation is, in and of itself, a prioritization. Pages in the main menu are high priority. Pages that they link to are second. Pages deep within the site with minimal links are low priority, whether you want them to be or not. The implication for an electrician is to scrutinise your navigation through that lens. If urgent electrical repairs are a lucrative part of your business, they probably shouldn’t be three clicks deep in a dropdown menu. If EV charger installation is something you are targetting as a source of revenue, it should be given corresponding prominence in your main navigation.
Search engine crawlers crawl following links, and the sooner and more often they see a link, the longer they dwell on the page. The shallower the structure – where the pages you want in the index are two clicks from the homepage rather than five – the faster your service pages will be indexed and the more important they’ll be considered by the search engine. The shorter the route, the stronger the signal. Remove unnecessary levels, flatten the hierarchy wherever possible, and ensure that all pages that are doing their fair share for the company can be found quickly and easily.
