Visitors Who Cannot Tell Where They Are

Through the side door

Somebody types a specific question into Google, a page deep in your site answers it, and they tap straight through to that page.

They have never seen your home page and may never see it. They do not know your name, what else you do, or how this page fits into the rest of the site.

Visitors from search arrive this way all the time: on a service page, an old project, a blog post or a price list.

Sites are usually designed as though everybody comes in through the front door, and the side doors often open into a room with no signs on the walls.

What a visitor needs from any page

• Whose site this is, with what the business does and where.
• What this page is, in a heading that names it.
• Which section it belongs to, marked in the menu.
• The main services, one tap away from anywhere.
• How to get in touch, without hunting for the home page.
• Where to go next if this page was nearly right.

The first is the one most often missing. A logo tells a returning customer whose site this is, and tells somebody who has never heard of you almost nothing.

Say who you are on every page

The home page usually explains the business. Inner pages rarely do, because whoever designed them assumed the visitor had already read the home page.

A short line beside or beneath the logo fixes it: what you do and where, in plain words, such as residential electrician, Surrey and Langley.

It appears on every page through the header, so it costs one line of design and works everywhere at once.

A heading that names the page

The main heading should name the page, in the words a visitor would have searched with: heater repair, not Our expertise.

Blog templates are a common offender, showing the word Blog in the largest type and the post's real title in something smaller.

The page title in the browser tab, which also becomes the headline in search results, should name the page too, with the business name after it.

A menu that shows where you are

When a visitor is on a page inside Services, the Services item in the menu should look different: underlined, bolder or in another colour.

It is a small signal, and it answers a real question. Without it, the menu is a list of places with no mark saying you are here.

Many themes already support this, and nobody switched on the styling. Where a page sits in a dropdown, mark both the page and its parent.

On phones the menu is folded away, so the mark is invisible until the menu opens. A small section label above the main heading does the same job on a small screen.

A worked example

A pool and hot tub service company in the Fraser Valley had built up a set of articles answering common problems: cloudy water, a heater that will not start, a pump that hums.

Those articles brought in most of the site's search visitors. Each sat on a blog template with the logo, a large Blog heading and no sign of which section it belonged to.

The logo was a stylised name that said nothing about pools or hot tubs. Nothing on an article page said the company repaired them, or where, or how to book.

The header gained a line saying pool and hot tub service across the Fraser Valley. Each article's own title became its main heading, and the menu marked Advice as the current section.

At the end of every article went a short panel: the related service, the area covered, a link to book a service visit and the phone number.

Breadcrumbs on larger sites

A breadcrumb trail is a line near the top of a page showing its place in the site: Home, then Services, then Heater repair, each one a link.

It earns its place on sites more than one level deep: a store with categories, a contractor with groups of services, anything with sections inside sections.

A five-page site does not need one. Breadcrumbs also do not replace the menu; they show where the page sits, and the menu shows where else to go.

When breadcrumbs are marked up for search engines, Google can show the trail in its results in place of the page's address.

A way back to the main services

Every page should lead somewhere useful. Old project pages, articles and price lists are the usual dead ends, with nothing at the bottom but the footer.

End them with a short route onwards: the related service, a way to get in touch, and perhaps one other page a reader of this one would want next.

The footer can list the main services on every page, which gives anyone who scrolled to the bottom a second menu without scrolling back up.

Pages with no surroundings at all

Some pages reached from search have no menu at all: an old campaign landing page, a page built outside the site's template, or a PDF price list.

A PDF is the hardest case. It opens with no header, no menu and no way back, so it needs the business name, the website address and the phone number printed in it.

Where possible, put the information on a web page and link the PDF from there, so search sends people to a page with surroundings.

The counter-case

Some pages strip away their surroundings on purpose.

A landing page built for one advertising campaign may hide the menu so visitors focus on one offer. That is a reasonable choice, provided the business name and phone number are still there.

A very small site needs less of this: no breadcrumbs, and a menu short enough to show every page at once.

For everything else, every page should say whose site it is, what the page is and where to go next.

Page by page

1. Open the Landing Pages report in Analytics.
2. Visit the top ten on a phone.
3. Add a line saying what you do and where.
4. Name each page in its main heading.
5. Mark the current section in the menu.
6. End every page with a route onwards.
7. Add breadcrumbs if sections have sections.

Step two is the test that shows the problem. Seen through the side door, on a phone, most pages show at once whether a stranger would know where they are.

What those deep pages say once visitors arrive is the subject of keyword stuffing left over from an old site.

Frequently asked questions

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.