Website navigation
The main navigation should prioritize critical content, audiences, conversions, and SEO. In this step of the project, we’ll help organize your site to get users to the information they need.
High-level sitemap
Every website has a main navigation. But some are much better than others. Your header navigation is the key to success in digital marketing.
It’s one of the most important elements on your website because it affects the most important outcomes:
“What we do” doesn’t actually say what you do. Neither does “Products,” “Services” or “Solutions.” Descriptive navigation that uses keyphrases is better for two reasons: rankings/traffic (SEO) and usability/conversions (UX).
For example, if you’re a bank, consider using descriptive keyphrases like “Checking Accounts” or “Home Mortgages” instead of generic labels.
This helps both search engines and visitors quickly understand and find the specific content they need.
If you have a big site with lots of pages and a very diverse set of products or services, a mega menu may be a good idea. It can act as a “wayfinding” tool for your visitors, and can provide context for someone who is not familiar with your offerings.
Also, besides the menu itself, mega menus give you the opportunity to add descriptive text, groupings, icons, content and a call to action.
Visitors who are ready to reach out will look for a way to contact you in the header. It’s a common location and a web design standard. You can make this button more visually prominent by using a contrasting color.
Fewer links in your main navigation are good for search engines and for visitors. The more links in your header, the more difficult the information is to scan and process.
Content planning
In the sitemap presentation, we’ll suggest pages Orbit would like to write and/or layout into templates. We’ll select a number of pages based on your proposal and:
We might recommend we write a page we don’t layout — and vice versa. And we’ll always ensure our recommendations align to your expectations.
Content workbook
When you redesign a website, you don’t want to lose equity from your existing site.
The content workbook is a Google Sheet that includes an inventory of all existing pages, new pages, SEO performance data — and more.
The workbook helps us keep track of the content effort for the entire inventory of pages and where we assign content responsibilities.
Who is responsible for writing specific pages and the status of each page.
Who is responsible for entering specific pages and the status of each page.
What pages are migrated as is or the pages that are being migrated from a database.
And it contains supporting data from Analytics and Moz to help determine page performance and equity.
We’ll document notable data or issues uncovered in the content audit and in Google Analytics.
If your website will have more than 2 or 3 forms, we’ll use this tab to document all the form pages and settings
After you are trained on the CMS and you begin making edits to the website, you’ll use this tab to record all questions, ideas, changes, etc. so all information is in one location.
We may use additional tabs to keep track of other assets or deliverables related to content.
Your workbook is where we collaborate on your project. It’s where you’ll find links to new copy documents. It’s where you’ll determine what gets ported over to your new site.
Your Project Manager will give you a detailed walkthrough of your custom content workbook. Together, you’ll find the best way to use the tool to manage data on your existing and new site.
We understand that services and products change over time. When those pages are bringing traffic to your website, take time to understand what that could mean if you omit them.
Here are some quick guidelines on pages to keep.
Using the Sitemap tab in the Content Workbook to compare Page Authority and Traffic data. See any standout data for the pages you want to omit?
Proceed to next item below
Are there keyphrases on page 1 or page 2 of Google results? Do the keyphrases have good search volume? If yes, these pages are bringing traffic to your website. Keep them.
When other websites link to your pages, it can increase your authority. Is there a decent number of linking domains? More than other pages? Assuming the linking sites have good authority, keep them.
Look at your Google Analytics, does the page get a lot of traffic? Does that traffic convert? Keep them.
The page and content can live on your website, but not be present in your navigation. We call these HIDDEN pages.
This means visitors may still arrive on the page through various mediums. So, you’ll want to add a callout to the page that explains the new course of action or the new product or service and lead them to it.
And don’t worry about taking the time to completely revise the page (you don’t want to lose organic traffic)… the page becomes a hidden landing page that’ll get some of that previous traffic and hopefully lead them to reach out.
NOTE: If you decide to omit an existing ranking page with page authority – there will be a drop in organic traffic. Perhaps you can make up for it by taking time to improve your other key pages. We can help with that, just talk to your PM.
We’ll confirm alignment on the overall structure of the navigation and map our visual navigation into the Content Workbook, where we’ll manage page name changes, updates, additions, and merging.
Remember, your navigation should be:
… and our next step will be copywriting and layouts!
The visual navigation approach we’ll share with you is our user-centric approach to organizing your content and website brand story. It does not include EVERY URL that will live on your website — that is what the content workbook is fore. Changes to the overall sitemap in the content workbook are common as we make determinations later based on the content lift.
Things to consider as you’re reviewing the sitemap:
