Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Your website is the first impression your business makes on most of your potential customers. By now, you have a homepage, and there's information on your site about your services.
But are those service pages clear enough for someone to get the information they need? Are they designed to inspire someone to take action? Here's how to set your service pages up for success when it comes to website conversions and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
Why Service Pages Are Great for SEO
Individual service pages are integral to improving SEO. Here’s what we’ve found in our work as a performance marketing agency:
Service pages are more relevant to the user, since people usually search for the type of product or service they need, rather than a company name.
If people find your content more relevant and valuable, they stay longer on your website. That increases your organic visibility, which improves your performance on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Service pages are also an excellent, practical way to beef up links between pages on your website. This tells users and search bots that you have lots of in-depth, high-quality content to help people get their questions answered and make informed decisions.
Building Links Between Service Pages
When it comes to internal links, you want to keep people looking through your site at relevant, related content to increase content marketing conversion rates. Linking different tiers of service pages is one way to facilitate that.
Have a block that features your most significant service categories on your homepage, and links to those service pages.
If you have a page for services, put all your major service categories there, and link to those service pages.
From each service page, link back to your homepage and/or your main services page if you have one.
Next-Level SEO: Subservice Pages
The more links you have between high-quality pages, the better. If you're ready to level up content marketing and SEO, create subservice pages focused on the different components of each service.
For a local house painter, the link structure between service and subservice pages might look something like this:
Mentioning interior painting and exterior painting in a block on the homepage.
Creating top nav links to pages for those services.
On each of those, listing everything you do as part of that service (paint removal, pressure washing, surface repair, wood rot removal, paint color selection, etc.).
Creating linked subservice pages for each of those steps.
Along with improving key performance indicators for SEO, a thorough service page strategy is an investment in lead generation. The more services and subservices users can explore, the more relevant their interaction with your site will be. That makes them a hotter, more qualified lead, and you can see paths people take through your site more clearly when checking your website analytics.
How to Outline a Strong Service Page
Here's how our clients' most engaging service pages are outlined, from top to bottom, and what we recommend addressing in each service page section:
Service "Hero" Content: What does this service empower people to do? What problems can they solve with it? How will it relieve some stressor they're dealing with?
Service Area: Where do you provide this service? You can include a map with pins to give people a visual and prevent a "wall of text".
Company: Who are you, and what major service categories do you provide? [Don't forget to link to those pages.]
How Do You Work?: What's your process for providing this service? How is the way you do it unique and/or especially effective? Break this into blocks that explain the process from left to right (start to finish). Adding small icons can improve the visual impact of this section and draw attention to it.
Reputation: Here's where you brag. Choose a few of your best reviews and highlight them here, along with links to your review pages. If possible, choose reviews for the specific service you're promoting.
If you're bringing together landing page content marketing best practices and SEO strategy, you'll find a formula that works best for your service pages.
Treating them like a network of interconnected landing pages will make it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl your site and for users to know if you can solve their problem.
