Label menu items with the words customers use, not your internal names: furnace repair rather than Comfort Solutions. Find those words in calls, emails and search terms, then test labels with people outside the business.

Solutions, Programs, Resources

The menu reads Home, About, Solutions, Programs, Resources, Contact. Each label made sense in the meeting where it was chosen.

A visitor whose furnace has stopped working has to guess which one holds furnace repair. Solutions, probably. Possibly Programs.

Menus like this are built from the inside: the names of product lines, the departments on the organisation chart, labels somebody thought were clever.

Nobody meant to make the site harder to use. Each label was chosen by people who already knew what was behind it.

Visitors bring their own words, and they scan the menu for them.

How visitors read a menu

Nobody reads a menu from left to right. They glance across it looking for one word, the one already in their head from the search they typed or the conversation they had.

A label that contains that word, or something obviously close to it, gets tapped. A label that does not gets skipped, even if the page behind it is exactly right.

On a phone the menu sits behind an icon, so a visitor opens it with a specific goal and gives it a second or two. Vague labels lose that second.

Where internal labels come from

The fourth is the hardest to see from inside. Staff say HVAC and IAQ all day, so the terms stop sounding like jargon to them, while a homeowner searches for a new furnace or cleaner air.

Customers' words are already written down

The words visitors use are not a mystery. They are in the questions people ask on the phone, the wording of quote requests, and the reviews they leave.

Search Console's Performance report lists the searches that brought people to the site. If the site has its own search box, Analytics can record what people typed into it, once it is set up to.

Read a month of each and the vocabulary is plain: heat pump, not ductless solution; furnace repair, not residential service. Write the recurring phrases on one sheet; those are your candidate labels.

What makes a good label

Short: one to three words. Concrete: a noun the customer would use, such as Furnaces, rather than a category, such as Solutions.

Front-loaded: Furnace repair rather than Repairs for furnaces, so the word that matters is the first one the eye catches.

Distinct: no two labels that could hold the same page, such as Services and Solutions side by side. Conventional where convention exists: About and Contact work because everybody knows what is behind them.

And matched: the page a label leads to should carry the same words in its heading, so visitors know at once they have arrived in the right place.

A worked example

A family-owned heating and cooling company had a menu reading Comfort Solutions, Residential Division, Commercial Division, IAQ, The Comfort Club and Resources.

The office took steady calls from people asking whether the company installed heat pumps, or repaired a particular brand of furnace. The answers were on the site, under Comfort Solutions.

The labels were rewritten from those calls and the Search Console queries: Furnaces, Heat pumps, Air conditioning, Air quality, Maintenance plans, Commercial and Contact.

The Comfort Club, the name on its invoices and van doors, stayed as the heading of the maintenance plans page rather than a menu label.

Before launch, five people outside the business were asked where they would book a furnace tune-up. The test turned up something nobody had expected: they wanted the price first, so the maintenance plans page now opens with it.

Order matters too

Labels are read in order, and the first few get the most attention.

Put the services most people come for first, in the order they are asked about. Keep Contact at the end, where visitors expect to find it, and About near it.

Fewer items help as well. Each extra label is one more word to scan past, and a menu with ten items often hides two pages that belong together under one plainer name.

Brand names that earn a place

Some internal names are also customer words. A product customers ask for by name, a signature dish, a program that has run for twenty years: these have earned a label.

The test is whether customers use the name unprompted, on the phone or in reviews. If they do, it can sit in the menu.

If they only see it on your invoices, it belongs on the page, under a label they would recognise.

Testing labels with outsiders

Staff cannot test their own labels, because they already know where everything is.

Find five people outside the business. Give each a task in the customer's words, such as your furnace is making a banging noise, and watch where they tap first. Do not help, and note every pause.

A second test needs only index cards: write each page's name on a card, ask people to sort them into groups and name each group. Their group names are often better labels than yours.

Either test takes an afternoon and needs nothing more than a phone and a pen.

The counter-case

Plain labels are not always the answer.

A business selling to specialists, such as engineers or contractors buying supplies, may find its customers expect the technical terms, and would read plain ones as amateur.

A very small site with four pages has less to get wrong, and conventional labels may be all it needs.

And five people are a sanity check, not research. They find the obvious problems, which are usually the expensive ones.

For most sites the rule holds: label the menu in the words your customers use, and test it with people who are not you.

Fixing the menu

  1. Write down every menu label as it stands.
  2. Collect customers' words from calls and emails.
  3. Check Search Console for the searches that find you.
  4. Rename each label in those words.
  5. Match each page heading to its label.
  6. Test with five people outside the business.
  7. Keep brand names on the pages themselves.

Step six is where the surprises come from. Staff cannot unlearn their own vocabulary, and five strangers with a task will find in an afternoon what a meeting never would.

Where those labels sit on a phone is covered in the mobile menu nobody can find.

Frequently asked questions

Why do internal menu labels hurt?

Visitors scan a menu for the word already in their head. A label built from internal language, such as Solutions or a product line name, gets skipped.

Where do I find the words customers use?

In phone questions, quote requests and reviews, in Search Console's list of searches that bring people in, and in your site search, if Analytics records it.

What makes a good navigation label?

One to three words, a concrete noun customers would use, distinct from every other label, conventional where convention exists, and matching the heading of the page it opens.

Can product line names go in the menu?

Only if customers use them unprompted, on the phone or in reviews. Otherwise put the name on the page, under a label customers would recognise.

How do I test menu labels?

Give five people outside the business a task in customer language and watch where they tap first, or ask them to sort index cards of page names into named groups.

Are technical terms ever the right labels?

Yes, for specialist audiences such as engineers or trade buyers, who may read plain words as amateur. Most small businesses sell to people outside their trade.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Menu labels only your staff understand?

List your menu labels and send them over. We will compare them with the words customers search for and suggest plainer ones.

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