Menu labels are small but powerful. Clear, descriptive navigation can improve usability, SEO and buyer confidence.
Website navigation looks simple. A few words across the top of the page. Products. Services. Solutions. Resources. About. Contact. Everyone recognises the pattern. Nobody gets frightened.
But we can make a big improvement here. The best navigation labels do more than organise a website. They tell visitors what the business does, where they should go next, and whether they are in the right place. That’s why they need to be descriptive.
“Services” is neat, but it says almost nothing. What services? “Resources” is tidy, but “Marketing guides for manufacturers” is more useful. “Solutions” is just wet. “Widgets in Aerospace” and “Widgets in Processing” give the visitor a reason to continue.
As an analogy, the reception area of a large building lists the businesses and facilities there. The signs don’t say “Rooms” and “Companies”, pointing to secondary, covered-up signs saying which rooms and which companies.
There is another common problem: format-based navigation. Many websites group content by type: articles, videos, downloads etc. This can make sense inside a marketing department because those are the formats we produce. It’s less helpful for the visitor, who is not usually thinking: “I would like a whitepaper, any subject will do.”
They are thinking about a topic. The format is secondary. So instead of building the menu around content types, we should consider building it around the subjects visitors care about.
The test is simple. Could the navigation belong to almost any website? If so, it is probably too generic.