Marketing
Does every service you offer need its own page?
One page listing eight services will not rank for any of them. How to decide what deserves its own page, and what happens when you make too many.
If you offer eight services and they all live on one page, that page will rank for at most one of them, and probably for none. Search engines match a query to a page, not to a paragraph, so a page trying to be about eight things is specifically about nothing.
The opposite mistake is worse though, and it’s more common than it used to be: dozens of near-identical pages built to catch keywords, each one thin, all of them dragging on each other.
The test for whether something deserves its own page
Not whether it’s a different line on your service list. Whether somebody searches for it as a separate thing and needs a different answer.
Three questions, and it needs a yes to all three:
- Would a customer search for this by name, rather than searching for the broader service and finding it?
- Is there a page’s worth to say about it that isn’t already on another page: what it involves, what it costs you to do, who it’s for, what goes wrong without it?
- Would the answer be materially different from your other pages, or is it the same page with a word swapped?
If the answer to the third is “same page, different word,” it belongs as a section on an existing page, with a heading that names it. That way the phrase is still on the site, in context, without a thin page attached to it.
What too many pages looks like from the inside
On the Stone Care of Arizona site we found 73 template scaffolding pages that were live and indexable. They weren’t real pages. They were leftovers from the theme and from previous work, and nobody knew they were there.
That’s the version of this problem most owners actually have. Not somebody deliberately building doorway pages, but a site that accumulated pages over years, where nobody has ever printed the full list and read it. The finished site is 65 pages, and every one of them is there on purpose.
The first step is almost never writing new pages. It’s finding out how many you already have.
Why the blog is not the answer to this
An article and a service page do different jobs, and the difference is intent.
A service page is for somebody who has decided they need the thing and is choosing who does it. It should own the head term: the plain name of the service. An article is for somebody earlier than that, asking a question. It should answer the question and hand them to the service page.
When those get mixed up, two things go wrong. Articles start competing with the service pages they were meant to support, which splits the signal between them. And service pages get padded with educational content that a buyer has to scroll past to find out whether you serve their town.
What you can check in the next thirty seconds
Write down, on paper, the distinct things somebody could hire you for. Not internal categories. The words a customer would use.
Now open your site’s navigation and count the pages that correspond. If your list has seven items and your site has two pages, the gap is work you’re not being found for. If your site has forty pages and your list has seven, you have pages nobody planned and it’s worth finding out what they are.
For the precise version: search Google for site:yourdomain.com and read the count at the top. Most owners are surprised, in one direction or the other.
The order that works
Structure, then words, then build. In that order, because a page list settled after the design is a page list that gets renegotiated during the build, and you pay for that twice.
For each page that survives the three-question test: what it’s for, who it’s for, what it says, and which page it hands the reader to next. That’s a half-page of planning per page, and it’s the difference between a site with forty pages and a site with fourteen that each earn their place.
When to bring somebody in
The crawl is the part worth outsourcing early, because it needs a tool and a willingness to read every page including the embarrassing ones. What comes out of it is a list: pages that rank, pages nobody visits, pages that shouldn’t exist, and services with no page at all.
The rest is the structure work above, and then building the pages so that each one has its own title, description and schema rather than the same ones repeated site-wide. That’s part of how we build websites, and the read on your existing site is the first thing we do on an audit call.
Common questions
How many service pages is too many?
There is no count. The limit is how many pages you can write properly. A page that exists only to hold a keyword reads as thin to a search engine and to a visitor, and thin pages drag on the pages around them.
What about a page for every town we serve?
Only where the work genuinely differs by town or you have something specific to say about it. Twelve near-identical pages with the town name swapped is the oldest thin-content pattern there is and it stopped working years ago.
Should the service page or a blog post target the main phrase?
The service page, always. It is the page that sells and the page that should rank for the head term. Articles support it by answering the questions around it, which is why an article outranking its own service page is a problem rather than a win.
Can I split an existing page in two?
Yes, and it is often the right move. Keep the original URL for the stronger half, give the new page a real page of content rather than a fragment, and link them to each other so the relationship is obvious.
What do I do with pages nobody visits?
Read them first. Some are fine pages nobody links to, and the fix is internal links. Some are thin and should be merged into a stronger page. Deleting them without a redirect is the only clearly wrong option.
More in this category
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Submit, learn more, and get started all cost you calls. What a button should say, and why every page needs one obvious action instead of three.
How slow is too slow on a phone?
The threshold is two and a half seconds, and most local business sites miss it badly on a phone. How to measure yours and what usually causes it.
What somebody decides about your business in the first ten seconds
Most visitors judge whether you are worth calling before they read a word. What they are reacting to, and what to change first if the answer is no.
Want this looked at on your site?
Count the distinct things somebody could hire you for, then count your pages. If the second number is smaller, that gap is work you are not being found for.