Menu impact on SEO

[built_bot]

we have a single page web application for an ecommerce website. I think it is built in angular. One UX features we are exploring is the use of a "Products" Item on the menu with the categories showing on a menu rather than directly present on the header. The aim being to keep the header nice and clean. The result of this is that the categories which would typically sit in the header will now not be immediately visible until the menu is opened. Let's say I want to rank well for "building materials". Traditionally the view would be that this word would need to be in the header and marked up with the appropriate h tag. Will moving "building materials" into a product menu be detrimental for SEO? My initial thought is that as long as it is coded correctly there shouldn't be any impact on SEO. Can anyone give me their expert SEO view?

[RobCairns]

Hi there,

You will be fine making this change in terms of technical SEO - as long as there's a link featuring anchor text and an equivalent H1/Title tag set up (along with other SEO considerations of course), this is no different than having your internal link navigating through your header. The only impact might be as a result of having your internal links indexed lower down the page than they might be on your header, but at that point you're talking such a small impact that it effectively doesn't matter.

On the other hand, however, is your user experience. I'm sure you've already considered this, but relocating your link structure from your header to another area may impact your visitor's ability to find what they are looking for on your site.

For my money, your priorities with regards to this question aught to be:

1. Can my visitors find what I want them to find?
2. How is the content set up to give my pages the best chance of ranking?
3. What link building strategy will best support my choices in 1) and 2) above?

If you are making this decision based on aesthetics, I would give it another look. If you are making it based on technical SEO strategy, there isn't much basis that it will help or hurt - just a different way of going about it. E-commerce sites represent a difficult SEO problem, so you probably have bigger fish to fry.

Hope that helps and clarifies the situation a little bit - if not, feel free to reach out any time and I'd be happy to discuss.

Cheers and best of luck moving forward!

Rob