Question on Website Navigation and SEO

[duongo]

Hi there,
I'm just after a little advise regarding what is the best thing to do to benefit on-site SEO.
I own a little gifts shop and am currently thinking about re-organising some of my categories/sub categories, but have come to a halt. I have my section categories listed at the top. Then if you hover the mouse over a main category, you get a drop down menu of all the sub section categories. For example, a main category is Personalised Gifts, which when you hover, lists sub categories eg Personalised Drink Gifts. Straight under Personalised Drink Gifts, you have a list of product types eg 'glasses & tankards', 'mugs & hipflasks' etc etc.

Under my current layout, when you click on Glasses & Tankards, the site lists all products related to Glasses & Tankards. My question is, should i refine this even further so that when you click on glasses & tankards, the left hand menu lists:
Glasses
Tankards

Then when you click on glasses, further refinement on the left for different types of glasses eg wine glasses, champagne glasses etc.

Doing this way would allow me to really target specific product types and keywords, and although there's quite a few clicks from the home page to get to say Wine Glasses, i would hope due to having these pages being optimised for specific keywords, in SERPS, if someone searches personalised wine glasses, this particular landing page would appear (and not my home page).

My other option is to shorten the number of sub sub categories by doing it this way:

Personalised Gifts
(under this)
Personalised Drink Gifts
(under this)
Glasses
Tankards
Mugs
Hipflask
etc
etc

Then when you click glasses, you get the type of glasses listed on the left hand side.

Doing it the latter way would mean i would be changing my current urls ie glasses & tankards would now just become glasses, and i would add a new sub section for tankards (so a new page). So i would probably lose any seo benefit that my page for 'glasses & tankards' already has.

Sorry to ramble, but i hope this makes sense- what is the best approach for future seo gains?

Thank you for any advice you can give!!

 

[tomsk]

Probably best you read through the forum in the SEO, PPC and Online Marketing section you will see this question asked an answered many times.

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Hi Duongo.

I'm going to give you a round about answer on this:

Firstly, having it one way rather than the other *may give you some small SEO benefit either way...

However, your top priority in terms of navigation should be usability. Don't worry about Google, just try to figure out which set up would be easiest for your users to navigate.

In terms of your category pages ranking in the SERPS, getting the wording on your navigation might help a little, but you can get a much bigger impact by making sure that there is some unique, descriptive and helpful content on each category page.

Then just make sure your users can actually find the category pages they are looking for.

Ideally, you should try to test navigation structures to see what works best. You could (for instance) test whether one structure compared to another reduces your home page bounce rate.

Using the better navigation structure would therefore retain for you more visitors - and this would probably also help your rankings anyway.

Hope that helps.

 

[duongo]

Hi ThinkTraffic
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, much appreciated. As it my current layout is, i think it is easy to navigate, with sections and sub sections listed clearly and relevant way. My worry is, on sub of my categories, i have grouped product types together eg glasses & tankards. From a user perspective, as i don't have hundreds of different products listed in this particular section for example, it's easy enough to go through the 3 pages of products listed. If someone wanted to find wine glasses, they would go to the glasses & tankards section and will find them quite easily.

Regarding content, i have some unique content for each page/section, so for Glasses & Tankards, i talk about what my shop has to offer (wine glasses, tankards, shot glasses). However from a SEO and SERPS perspective, if someone searches 'personalised wine glasses', would i rank better if i had a page dedicated to 'wine glasses', as the content would be truly unique to wine glasses (content and titles). Currently i don't rank at all for this search term- well not in the 1st 7 pages anyway! I know of-site SEO has a lot to do with it as well, but i'm just currently working on my on-site seo first.