Avoid Mega Menus

Why didn't Cyrus S. conduct this insightful 50-site study in 2015? My greatest SEO success was in 2010-2015 when I consulted to NAB and Optus, two of Australia's largest household brands. A mega menu was one of the features I removed, having seen it removed on the Commonwealth Bank, Australia's largest bank. The latter has not changed this feature to this day and does very well in the SERPs.

I can't claim that NAB's organic traffic doubled in eight months* and tripled over 2.5 years entirely because of this feature, because the success was shared by entire teams who continued to deliver value in their fields. Being an external consultant then, I had more credibility than as an in-house specialist in my next two roles.

*See the testimonial on my profile from the client.

What Are Mega Menus?

I will cover this topic in more detail in my next book, but the summary is that Google has a metric known as PageRank that matters in Information Architecture and Internal Linking from the SEO viewpoint. A mega navigation bar, also known as a mega menu is found at the top of many websites when you hover a mouse and the options appear. Some menu options have fly-out sub-options.

What's the Problem?

Each option in a menu is a link. Google assigns a theoretical quantity of "link juice" to each page and the first link on the page conveys a full unit of this link juice to the page it targets. The second link on the page (whether on the menu or in the body) halves the link juice delivered, and so on. I have seen as many as 500 links on a home page, making each link worth 1/500th of its impact.

Link Flavour

The SEO view of information architecture likes to see topics linking to like topics because it increases their internal importance. I coined the term "Link Flavour" and have not seen anyone else using it. For example, if I went to the Cards option in a bank's menu, I see credit and debit cards and each of their pages should lead to specific kinds of cards. When I am looking at a specific kind of card, I should not be distracted by other unrelated choices, such as home loans or term deposits. This also makes sense from a conversion angle.

From the link flavour angle, a mega menu is repeated on every page, so the same 100-500 pages are linking to all pages. That Platinum credit card gets almost the same volume of link juice as the Terms & Conditions page. Although Google gets many other signals to make it deliver a relevant page in search results, it might rank a competitor's page that is of equal quality but is less drowned by conflicting link flavours.

Fighting Friendly Fire

My third book is a long way off, but I will cover the vexed issue of internal company silos that are all working hard to achieve their goals, but some of them can work against the interest of others. I am speaking on this topic at Pubcon Las Vegas next month and in SEO Collective Melbourne in April, so I will only touch on User Experience (UX) teams here.

UX teams have the customer's best interests at heart and they work hard to deliver value. They conduct user tests and tell me that customers preferred a mega menu over a flat menu. Clearly, they did not survey customers of the Commonwealth Bank, Optus, Amazon, eBay, or some companies that have a hybrid menu solution, like Toronto Dominion (TD) Bank. It cuts no ice when I ask, unkindly, if CommBank/Amazon etc customers are different, or if their UX team is deficient in expertise.

I must mention that I have worked with very attentive and co-operative UX teams who have spent many hours testing my wild theories and concluded that their customer tests proved otherwise. I don't mind that at all. It means that the SEO team has to look for other techniques to rank high.

Alternative

A two-level, or flat menu is best seen on CommBank's website. There is no hover menu at the top and off-topic link flavours do not leak into unrelated product pages.

Benign Neglect of SEO

Within companies, UX is far more sexy and interesting to senior management than is SEO. Eyes glaze when they hear "SEO" and even the prospect of making greater conversions does not matter. One of my soapbox topics is how C-Suites need to pay more attention to SEO if they are serious about making more revenue, but that's another article.

Conclusion

I encourage you to read Cyrus' article, Winning & Losing Big Google Updates: 50-Site Case Study, for it covers a lot more than mega menus, which he found to be one of the strong factors behind sites that have dropped in rankings. I consider myself semi-retired, so there is no personal angle in this article. I have only one small client now. I care enough for my profession to spend my time writing about it.