For businesses, it is extremely important to be able to inform potential customers about the services you have to offer them, why you’re the best business to choose, and how they can get in contact with you. This is done best through creating dedicated service pages.
There are several key steps to building an effective service page, ranging from doing keyword research and competitor analysis to understanding what you need to write about, to making sure that the page design is easy to navigate for your target audience.
This article will start by evidencing what you should do to identify the service pages your business should be creating, followed by outlining the key steps for writing the service pages themselves.
How do you find the different service pages you should create?
Firstly, if you aren’t sure about what service pages you should be creating for your business or where you should be focussing, you need to start by asking yourself a few initial questions, followed by undergoing a few techniques that will provide you with everything you need to know the service pages you should be creating for your website.
Step 1: List the services you currently offer
As the business owner, you will want to start off by noting down all the services that you offer right now. This list is likely to be much shorter than what it could potentially become, after you find out what people are looking for through keyword research.
You will then want to ask yourself some initial questions about your business, which will help you on your way to understanding what service pages you can go on to create. These should include:
- Who are your service pages for?
- How many service pages do you want?
- Is there an opportunity that your business should be taking advantage of?
To answer these questions, we have identified the best methods and techniques that will get you in the know and on your way to creating service pages that generate business.
Step 2: Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first thing that you must employ in order to initially understand what the market is asking for. Keyword research allows you to better understand what your industry is searching for, and then offer services the market is asking for.
There are several tools you can use to conduct keyword research, with the most common and effective, albeit not free to use, being Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz to name a few. Each of these have keyword explorer tools, which allows you to plug in a keyword, for example ‘accounting services’, followed by showing you an overview of the volume of traffic this term is receiving.
If you type in the different services that your business offers, you can use these tools to determine which services most people are searching for, as well as any additional services you may not have thought about that you could also use.
For example, if you were an accounting business, you could use keyword research to find out that demand for bookkeeping services is high in your local area, therefore you would know that you need to focus on creating a service page for this area.
Tip: If you’re targeting growth within a local area, make sure to use a location modifier.
Step 3: Competitor analysis
Conducting competitor analysis is an essential part of planning what service pages your business’s website needs. This involves looking into businesses within the same industry as yours and finding out what service pages they have that you could potentially replicate.
You could do this by simply typing into Google, the industry you operate in, in the area you operate in, for example, ‘Accountants in London’. You will then find plenty of competitors’ websites, which you can look through to identify all the different service pages that you could use on your own website.
If you would like to go more in depth, you could use one of the keyword research tools listed above, such as Ahrefs, to understand more clearly which service pages are ‘working’ better than others. By this, I mean you can look into which service pages are accumulating the most traffic and how they are doing it (i.e. going back to the keyword research you did in step one), which may help you to understand which service pages you should be prioritising.
Step 4: Look at Google’s “people also ask” section
This is perhaps the easiest technique to apply but it is still a very effective way to understand what potential customers are looking for. The “people also ask” section is an area that comes up somewhere near the top of the first results page, which lists a few different questions that people are asking which are similar to whatever you have searched.
So you might type in something like “bookkeeping” and then by looking at the people also ask section you will find a number of different things that people want to know about the service, such as “what is the difference between accounting and bookkeeping?”
Moreover, you can expand and collapse these questions, resulting in more similar questions popping up, allowing you to compile a massive list of all kinds of questions relating to service pages you could create.
This is also a brilliant way to garner supporting content inspiration which you could use for a blog should you wish to create one (we would advise doing so). These also give great FAQ’s to put at the bottom of your service pages.
How to write your service pages
After you have worked out what service pages you would like to create for your website, you need to create the content that will go on those service pages. When writing these pages, you need to make sure that you adopt the appropriate tools of SEO, that you include all the essential elements of a service page (e.g. USPs, CTAs, etc.) and that it is designed well so it is easy to navigate.
Make sure it is SEO friendly
To start with, making your service pages are SEO friendly is vital in order to make sure they are seen, enabling them to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a number of different factors that go into making a piece of content SEO friendly, and will affect how well optimised your content is, which I will go through in this section.
Include keywords
Firstly, you need to include the correct keywords that relate to each individual service page. The keyword research that you did in step two should have resulted in you having 2-3 main keywords for each of your service pages.
This is important because this is the most effective way to match the search intent of potential customers, meaning that by adding the appropriate keywords you are making sure that your page is relevant to what people are searching for, resulting in them having a better chance of finding your content within the search engine result page.
You should use these keywords in the URL (where it makes sense), in the title tag, the page title (H1), and add supporting variations throughout any subheadings, the meta description and anywhere within the body of your content. But it’s also very important to avoid ‘over optimising’ for your keywords…
Don’t ‘over optimise’
Otherwise known as ‘keyword stuffing’, over optimising refers to the practice of placing a large number of keywords into the content of your web page, to artificially attempt to increase the page’s traffic and subsequent rankings on the results page.
On the face of it, you may think this is a good idea, but I can assure you that it is not. It is not only against Google’s terms of service, but also ineffective. This is because there are algorithms in place to help Google identify when terms are irrelevant, overused or out of context.
So, make sure that you do add the necessary keywords within the content of your service page, but make sure that you don’t go overboard. A good guide is to make sure that the text reads naturally, if you’re forcing your keywords in there and it sounds off, chances are you’re forcing it.
Avoid optimising multiple pages for the same terms
Optimising multiple pages for the same terms, also known as ‘keyword cannibalisation’, is a mistake that you definitely need to avoid making. If you do this, it’s likely your service pages will suffer in rankings, because search engines will not be able to understand which of your pages it should show to users.
Therefore, when you’re writing your service pages, it is crucial that for each one you are targeting different keywords.
Make sure it is the right length
Another factor that acts as a determinant for how highly a page ranks on an SERP, is the word count. This is something you should do when conducting your competitor analysis, in which you should look into how much your competitors have written on their service page. You can then use this as a rough estimate for how much you should write on your own page.
The essential content
So, now you know how to make sure your content on your service page is SEO friendly, what exactly should you be writing about?
Description of the service you offer
The most important part of your service page is describing what you have to offer. You need to outline clearly and concisely what the service you have available is, how it or the process works at your business, and why the potential customer should choose you.
Ultimately, make sure the benefits of your service are displayed as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, as it is pertinent that you win over the customers’ trust.
A service page that describes what it is offering clearly and thoroughly will help instil the confidence that a customer needs to engage with your business.
Your USP
A USP stands for a ‘unique selling proposition’, which refers to how you inform users about how and why your service is better than your competitors.
You should include things like, how many years of experience you have, what previous clients have said about the service (obviously keep this positive), and any case studies that exemplify how good your service is.
A call to action (CTA)
Your call to action (CTA) is a short phrase that encourages a sale, for example “book with us today”, or “contact us here”. You can put this at either the top or bottom of your service page.
Although, A strong CTA isn’t just having a button that says “contact us” as that’s quite weak. You need to make it compelling to the visitors, showcase the benefits of your service and explain how easily you can solve their problems.
And then do this throughout your website & service pages.
This is essential as the main reason you have created these service pages is to get people to purchase your goods or service, so make sure this stands out.
Reviews
Adding positive reviews somewhere along the service page is a brilliant way to build confidence and trust in your business. By showing potential customers how well received your service is, it increases the likelihood of them booking or purchasing your service, as they can be assured that your business is reliable.
Case studies
Similarly, providing case study examples of your service will work wonders, as customers will be looking to see what your service looks like in action.
Adding one or two of these will show potential customers what they should expect and how it works, in turn giving them all the information they need to decide whether they should choose your business.
The importance of the page design
Finally, the design of your service pages and its navigation can be important for SEO, but it’s more important for converting visitors into customers. This section will detail the essential components of a well designed service page.
User experience (UX)
User experience, or ‘UX’ encompasses a lot of things about your website and you must make sure that it is up to a good standard. It refers to how well users can interact with your website and your services, which includes its ease of navigation, the page loading time speeds, providing the right amount of information about how the service benefits them, etc.
Conversion
Converting visitors into customers is the primary aim of your service pages and the design is an important factor that can influence this.
Making people want to purchase your product or service largely depends on the aspects I talked about in the essential content section, but these components will only be useful if they are designed effectively.
This entails that you need to make your CTA stand out, perhaps right at the top of the page so the reader knows where it is instantly, or maybe at the bottom to ensure they have read all about your service. You should have multiple testimonials, which also visually stand out, for example printing a 5 star rating above their comment – simple things like that will make a big difference.
Other design features such as adding a location map showing where your business is located, or photos and descriptions of your team can also go a long way in convincing someone to trust your business, as these will make your service page much more visually appealing.
Targeting your audience
The way your page is designed needs to ensure that it matches the type of audience that you are targeting. This implies that the design of your service pages will vary depending on who you are targeting.
For example, if you are targeting middle-aged/older generations (i.e. generation X), it is important that the features within the interface of your service pages are relevant to them.
They would be much more practical than other generations and mostly require a more unobstructed path to whatever they are trying to achieve.
Therefore, your page should include features such as simple and consistent navigation, informative and useful content, and a minimalistic and clean design, in order to cater to their needs.
First impressions count
All in all, the way your service page is designed is important because this is the first thing that users will use to determine whether your website is worth trusting.
Having a sleek looking, easy to navigate and speedy service page, it is much more likely to cast a fantastic first impression on potential customers, with the likely result being that they will follow through with purchasing or booking your product or service.
Summary
In conclusion, creating service pages for a local business will take some work, but by following all the steps and information provided in this guide, you will be well on your way to doing so.
When finding the service pages you want to create, remember to focus on keyword research and competitor analysis, and when writing the content for them, remember to make sure your service page is relevant, easily accessible, and beneficial to the user.
Each of these techniques are the foundations for understanding how to create service pages, so now you have digested this information, it’s time for you to go out and create your own. I look forward to seeing the finished product!
