A positive user experience translates into significant benefits for your company. People will remain longer and explore deeper as a result, increasing the likelihood that they will become customers, repeat customers, recommending customers, and so on.
As Google and other search engines monitor what people who have been directed to your site do once they arrive, the user experience will have a direct impact on your site’s future ranking in search results. Because a positive user experience is generally associated with a positive conversion rate, a positive conversion rate translates into more organic traffic being directed your way. This translates into increased revenue for your company.
When you include breadcrumbs on your website, visitors will be able to more easily traverse the site, increasing their chances of becoming leads or even customers. Breadcrumbs can also help you minimize your bounce rate. The vast majority of visitors who become disoriented or find navigating difficult will abandon your site and look for another. However, if website visitors navigate further down the page than they originally arrived on, this informs the referring search engine that their bots are succeeding in their perception of your web pages. They are displaying your web page as the answer to a question or a need, and of course Google wants to successfully navigate traffic, so if it is successful in doing so with your visitors, Google will send you additional visitors in the same manner.
In contrast, if you are ranking for search terms and your visitors do not continue to explore your website after they arrive, Google will reevaluate whether or not you should be receiving that traffic in the first place.
Breadcrumbs are useful to both search engines and website visitors.
Yoast SEO is a free tool that assists with structured data, breadcrumbs, and SEO.
In addition to providing a large number of free and reasonably priced SEO tools, Yoast SEO also helps to make a WordPress site more user-friendly and therefore more Google-friendly. Yoast can make a significant difference in a short period of time by providing structured data, a very readable and SEO-friendly URL structure, and putting together your meta data, among other things.
Here are some suggestions for making the most of your website’s breadcrumbs:
- When designing your ecommerce website, blog, or other web properties, keep the user experience (UX) in mind as the primary goal, with search engine optimization as an added bonus.
- Keep it straightforward: Don’t make things more difficult for yourself by over-navigating. When creating a list of phrases and categories, make sure they make sense to your target audience. In some cases, a targeted keyword for your niche will be a fantastic idea to use in your content.
- Make your breadcrumbs visible at the top of each content page by placing them towards the top of the page. Avoid using pop-up windows for them, and don’t make an effort to make them stand out too much. It is sufficient to use a standard-sized font with text only (no images).
- Breadcrumbs should be used as a secondary navigation tool. The inclusion of categories and other calls-to-action on each page of your website will still be beneficial in assisting users in finding their way around the site and enticing them to purchase, opt-in, or follow you on social media, in addition to clickable links to relevant internal pages.
