One real page for each service you sell, an about page with actual people on it, a contact page, and somewhere that proves you have done the work. That is the floor. Most local sites we look at have more pages than that and fewer real ones, which is a different problem from being too small.
The pattern is nearly always the same: a home page, a single services page listing eight things in a bulleted list, an about page of adjectives, and a contact form. Then four or five pages nobody has read this year. The site is not too small, it is hollow in the middle.
Why does each service need its own page?
Because that is the unit people search for and the unit they decide on. Nobody searches for services. They search for the one thing they need, and they want a page that talks about that thing in enough depth that they can tell whether you do it properly.
A service page should say what the job involves, what it typically costs or what moves the price, how long it takes, what could go wrong, and what happens next. That is four hundred words at least, and if you cannot write four hundred honest words about a service, that is worth knowing before you put it on the list.
What makes an about page worth having?
Real people, real history, and a reason to trust you that is not adjectives.
Ours says we started in 2013 and have worked with more than 50 local businesses. That is a fact somebody could check rather than a claim about our values. Names, faces, how long the crew has been together, where you are based. The about page is doing trust work and trust comes from specifics.
Want to know which page is missing?
Send us your site and the list of services you actually sell. We will tell you which ones have no page, in order of what they are worth to you.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat counts as proof?
Named work, or reviews, or both, with enough detail to be checkable. Our own client outcomes are qualitative and named: Build and Burn Fitness grew traffic, rankings and sales after we put a strategy in place; Michael A. Hunt DDS saw more appointment requests after launching a new site. No invented percentages, because a number nobody can verify makes everything around it less believable.
Proof does not need its own page for most local businesses. It works better woven through the service pages, next to the thing it proves, than parked in a gallery nobody visits.
| Page | Its job |
|---|---|
| Home | Say what you do, who for, and where, above the fold |
| One per service | Answer whether you can do this specific job, and roughly what it costs |
| About | Real people, real history, facts somebody could check |
| Contact | One short form and a tappable number |
| Proof | Named work and reviews, placed beside what they prove |
What about a blog?
Worth having once the service pages are right, and not before. A blog is where you answer the questions people ask before they hire you, and those answers pull in people who are not yet ready to call.
What it is not is a substitute for a proper service page. We have taken over sites with forty blog posts and no page for the most profitable service in the business.
Does the home page need to do everything?
No, and trying to make it is what produces the endless home page nobody finishes reading. Its job is to say what you do, who for and where, then send people to the right service page quickly.
Think of it as a signpost rather than a summary. The visitor who wants one specific thing should be one click from the page about that thing, and the visitor who is just checking you are real should find that out in the first screen. Everything else on a home page is optional, and the sections most often worth keeping are a short line of proof and a clear route to the phone. Long home pages tend to be a symptom of thin service pages: everything got pushed up because there was nowhere below to put it.
Which pages can I skip?
A separate gallery, a testimonials page, a team page for a two person business, an FAQ page that duplicates answers already on the service pages, and anything called Resources that is empty.
Each of those splits attention and adds something to maintain. Put the photographs on the service pages where they are evidence, put the reviews next to the service they praise, and put the questions on the page they belong to. The site gets shorter and every page gets stronger.
The order I would build them in
Home, then the two services that make the most money, then contact, then about, then the remaining services one at a time. Launch after the first four. A site that is live and earning while you finish the rest beats a complete one still in review, and the pages you write in month two will be better for having seen which questions people actually ask.
What we build and in what order is on the Growth Engine page, what it costs is on the pricing page, and if you want us to look at what is missing from yours, get in touch and we will tell you.