The Main Nav Mistake

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Alright, this is not so much a question I get as it is a mistake that I see people making surprisingly often, surprising to me anyway, and that is your website navigation, the main menu right at the top of every page on your website. That's your main navigation. If you want to be cool like me, you can call it your main nav. So the mistake that I see people making actually breaks down and they make it in three different ways. I'm going to cover each of those, why it's a mistake for SEO andor AI search, and also conversion rate, that is how many leads you're getting through your website, and what you want to do instead. So the mistake has to do with your service pages. Your service pages, and I say this very often, your service pages are the reason you have a website. If you're a children and family photographer, you hopefully have a children's photography page and a family photography page. If you are a wedding and engagement photographer, you hopefully have a wedding photography page and an engagement photography page. Same for maternity and newborn

Service Pages That Sell

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or whatever it is, you probably have a few different services that you offer. When somebody asks you, what types of shoots do you offer? Those types of shoots, each one of them is going to be a service. And they are the reason why you have a website, they're the reason they're what people purchase from you. So mistake number one I see is that people don't have service pages. They might have a gallery page and they might have a testimonials page and an about page and a pricing page. But the problem there is that there's a couple problems. Number one, you are requiring people to be detectives. If somebody wants to hire you for your children's photography, you don't want to make them have to go to the about page in the galleries page and the pricing page and put all that information together to decide if they want to hire you. I'm sure that you know this. The people who contact you from your website, they don't read everything on your website. Even if it's right there very plain, I'm sure you get people writing and saying, What's your pricing? Well, the price is right there, but they didn't see it. Okay, that's problem number one with doing that, is that the people who are visiting your website, your potential clients, you're immediately making their lives a little more complicated. Okay, that's the opposite from what you want to do. That's the first problem with that. The second problem is you're you're not sending the signals to Google that you want to send. You want to send a signal to Google that if you're a children's photographer, you have a children's photography page. That's a very strong signal to Google that this page is about children's photography. If you don't have that, Google is kind of left to wonder something else that you don't want to do. The same is true and will become more true for AI search. AI can't go out and summarize an entire website unless somebody gives it specifically the URLs to summarize. Okay, so what you want to do is every service has a service page, and on every service page should be enough information so that if somebody is thinking about hiring you for that thing, there's enough information right on that page for them to take the next step, which is probably going to be to reach out and contact you. Okay, so that means you got to have some information about the service, what it is. Probably want to have some at least a small gallery, what the product looks like, at least a little bit about what the pricing is. Even if you don't want to publish your prices, you need to put some sort of range here or a starting price. You don't want to force people to have to go look for a pricing page. Same thing for the gallery and the about you. You can have a little bit about you. In fact, you want to have a little bit about you on your service page, but probably not as much as you have on your actual about page. That page you can have your full story. On your pricing page, you can have as much information about pricing as you want, but your service page just needs to have enough information there so that people can look down, decide if they want to go ahead and contact you and check off all the boxes. Like, yeah, this person, I like their work, I like them, I like their prices, everything is right. I'm going to contact them. That's the purpose of your service page. Okay, number one, that's the mistake. Not having a service page and what you want to, how you want to create your service page. That's mistake number one. Mistake number two is not listing that page in the main nav. And what I mean by that is you would include it in a drop-down menu. Okay, if it's in a drop-down menu, number one, AI search can't see that. AI search cannot interact with a website. If it's a drop-down menu, that means you have to click on it and it drops down. Okay, AI cannot click on something and watch the drop-down menu open up. And you want to send a signal to AI and to users immediately when they

Keep Services Out Of Dropdowns

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open your page and they see the information, they see the main nav there, they know what it is you offer without having to click. If your service page, if any page, is in a drop-down menu, what you're signaling to Google is that that page is not as important as the others, because a person has to take an action in order to see that link. As a user, you know that if you go to a website and you see a big link right away that says something, you probably know that that's an important thing to do on that website. If you have to dig around in order to find a link, that's a signal to again to Google and to users that that page is not very important. So to fix this, what you want to do is take your service pages. They should be right in your main nav and visible. Ideally, you want to have your more important pages to the left-hand side so that when people open up, they're gonna look left to right and top to bottom. Okay, the first thing that they're gonna see is probably your logo. And then you want to show them your most important services, what it is that you offer. Okay, that's gonna help your SEO, it's gonna help AI search. Also, I don't have data to back this up, but that's gonna help your conversions as well. That is how what percentage of people actually contact you? What percentage of your website visitors actually contact you? Okay, that's mistake number two. Mistake number three is I call this out clevering yourself. Now, I understand that a link like children's photography or pet photography or newborn photography is kind of boring. It's not unique, it's not different. And I understand the reason why you would want to distinguish yourself. The problem is that this is not the way you want to do it. You do not want to give a clever name to your service pages because it makes

Use Clear Names Not Clever

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users wonder what it is. Okay, it makes your website experience a little more confusing. They have to become a detective, that they don't know what something is. They have to decide, are they going to click on it? Do they have extra time to just click around and read things? Probably not. Okay, that's one reason it's a mistake. Another reason it's a mistake is that you're not signaling to Google what that page is about. Let's think about it this way. If you visit a website, and let's say there are just uh two items in the navigation. Okay, I know that's not usual, but just to make my point, let's imagine there's two links. One of them is children's photo gallery, and the other one is contact me. If as a user, what do you expect is going to happen if you click on the link that says children's photography gallery? What do you expect is going to be there? Probably a gallery. Probably a children's photography gallery. What if you click on the contact me? What do you expect to be there? Probably a contact page or some sort of option to contact you. Okay. What you're not going to do is put the children's photography gallery under the contact link and the contact page under the children's photography link. That would be extremely confusing. Now, Google knows this. Google knows very well that what you name a link is going to be what that page is about. Whatever that link leads to, you're going to name that link, or you should name that link appropriately. That can be a very strong signal to Google about what the content of that page is. So if you want to improve your rankings for children's photography and you name your children's photography service page Kid Love, that's not sending any signal to Google at all or users. That's also a really weird name to give a page. So don't do that. But my point is this is where you kind of want to be boring. You want to make your navigation as simple as possible. You want to make the people visiting your site, you want to make you want to make it so easy for them to know what everything is. Don't make them guess what a page is going to be about if they click on a link. It's going to help your conversions, gonna help your SEO. Okay, so if you're doing any of those things on your website, I suggest you take a look at how you can fix it. Okay, I hope this helps.