When was the last time you thought about your service pages? When you’re zeroed in on keeping your blog up to date, other parts of your website might fall by the wayside. Refreshing your service pages both gives them a new lease on life and offers the opportunity to refine how you reel in leads. What steps should you take?
Before you can make any changes, you’ll need to be certain of your brand voice. To which audiences will you address your service pages? What kind of impression do you want to convey—warm and friendly, professional and focused, or something in between? Figure out how you want to communicate and create impressions that will motivate consumers. Stick to simple language and avoid jargon. Use your brand voice to communicate concisely and effectively about what you can do to solve a consumer’s problems.
Break out your services into separate pages and ensure they each have a unique URL that Google can index easily. For example, try to avoid pages saved with “copy” appended on to the end. Copying pages and modifying their content is a simple way to save time in amateur web design, but those URLs don’t tell visitors much—and visitors do look at links to see where they lead. Match your URLs to your content for better search and user-friendliness.
You’ll want your web content to rank, but you also don’t want to cram them so full of keywords you earn a Google penalty. Zero in on one or two target keywords related to your service by doing competitor research and keyword analysis. Remember, your choice matters. Over 92% of all keywords average fewer than 10 queries every month—leaving about 8% that can actually help. After you pick keywords, use “semantically-related” keywords (also called LSI) to add variety without keyword stuffing.
Metadata is important, but it’s a complex beast. The meta title and text that you write will probably only appear in Google search results about 37% of the time—the rest of the time, Google rewrites this content itself to display what it thinks is the most relevant snippet. Therefore, it’s up to you to control the narrative wherever and whenever you can. A snappy, informative meta description with a single keyword inclusion is a must-have. Give readers an idea about what they’re about to see and motivate their clicks.
Google penalizes “thin” content that doesn’t offer value to readers. Most often, Google penalizes content for being thin because of a low word count or a lack of relevant, valuable content. How long are your pages? If they’re under 300 words or so, they might too short—even if you wanted to be as “to the point” as possible. Pages between 500 and 1000 words represent a good average to shoot for today. Although the best-ranking pages on Google today can exceed 1000 or even 2000 words, this is too much content for a service page, which typically won’t hold a reader’s attention for such an in-depth discussion.
By investing the time and effort to overhaul your service pages, you can unlock better SEO performance, reach a broader audience, and ultimately tilt more leads into the sales funnel. Don’t forget that the rest of your website deserves the same level of TLC your blog receives—and a little tweak here and there can go a long way. It’s always a good idea to periodically review your web pages and consider where you might find room to improve.