A Site Where Every Page Says the Same Thing

The site

A trades business with forty-one pages. Nine services, each in four areas, plus a home page, contact, and about.

Every service page follows the same structure: a heading naming the service and the town, a paragraph about being trusted and reliable, a list of five reasons to choose them, and a form.

The paragraphs are identical across pages except for the service name and the place name.

It was built by a supplier who described it as covering all the important search terms, and it does contain all of them.

What a reader does

Somebody arriving on the drain cleaning page in one town reads a paragraph about being trusted, a list of reasons, and finds a form.

They learn nothing about drain cleaning: not what it costs, not how long it takes, not what happens when they call, not whether their particular problem is one you handle.

If they are comparing you against two competitors, they open a second page on your site to check something and see the same paragraph again.

At that point the site has actively told them something: that it contains no information, and that the pages exist for a reason other than informing them.

That is a worse position than having one page, because one page cannot be caught repeating itself.

The three things missing

• Anything specific to the service.
• Anything specific to the place.
• Anything a competitor could not also write.

The third is the test that catches templated content fastest. If a competing business could publish the same page with only its name changed, the page is not about your business at all.

Why it happens

Not laziness, in most cases.

The business was told that more pages means more coverage, which was true enough some years ago and is the reason these sites exist.

Writing forty genuinely different pages is a substantial amount of work, and nobody had forty pages of material.

So a template was used, because the alternative was admitting the site should have nine pages rather than forty-one.

The supplier delivered what was asked for, and the count was the thing being measured.

A worked example

The business consolidated. Nine service pages, one per service, no location variants, plus a single coverage page listing the areas served.

Each service page was rewritten to contain what the business actually knew: the common causes of that problem, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, what happens on the visit, and two photographs of that work.

That took about a day per page, spread over two months, written by the owner in his own words and tidied afterwards.

Thirty-two pages were removed and redirected to the relevant service page.

Enquiries improved over the following months, and the change everybody noticed was that people arrived already knowing roughly what the job would cost.

The site went from forty-one pages saying nothing to nine saying something.

What a real service page contains

Since the replacement matters more than the deletion.

What the problem usually turns out to be, which is what somebody searching is trying to find out.

What it costs, as a range, with what moves it.

How long it takes and what happens during the visit.

What you need from the customer beforehand.

When this is not the right service, and what is.

Two photographs of that specific work, not stock images.

None of that can be templated, which is precisely why it works.

How to test your own site

Two minutes, and it is uncomfortable.

Open two service pages side by side in separate windows.

Read them together and count the sentences that differ in anything but a noun.

Where the answer is under three, they are one page presented twice.

Then ask the harder question: could your closest competitor publish this page with only the business name changed. Where they could, the page is not doing what you think it is.

Fewer pages, redirected properly

The mechanics, since deletion done badly costs more than it saves.

Redirect each removed page to the most relevant remaining one rather than to the home page, since a person arriving should land on the thing they were looking for.

Keep the pages that genuinely earn traffic, which you can check before deleting anything, and merge their useful content into the survivor.

Update the internal links and the sitemap, since leaving links to deleted pages is how a consolidation produces a site full of errors.

Do it in one go rather than gradually, so the site is consistent at every point rather than half-converted for six months.

The owner already had the material

Worth noting, because it is the usual finding and it changes how daunting this looks.

Asked what the common causes of each problem were, the owner answered in detail for every service, without hesitation, in the language customers use.

Asked what each job typically cost and how long it took, the same.

None of that was on the site, because nobody had asked him. The supplier had written the pages without a conversation.

Which means the work in fixing a site like this is mostly transcription rather than invention, and an hour of recorded conversation per service produces more usable material than a week of writing.

The counter-case within the site

Not every page here deserved deletion.

Where a service genuinely differs by area, because of local conditions, regulations, or what the housing stock is like, a location page with that specific content is legitimate and useful.

The test is whether the page contains something true only of that place, which two of these forty-one did.

Some businesses also genuinely offer many services, and nine real service pages is not too many.

The problem was never the count. It was that the count had been achieved without any material behind it.

What to change

1. Open two pages side by side and read them.
2. Ask whether a competitor could publish the same page.
3. Decide the real number of pages you have material for.
4. Write each properly: causes, cost, duration, process.
5. Add photographs of that specific work.
6. Redirect removed pages to the relevant survivor.
7. Fix internal links and the sitemap.

Step three is the decision the original build avoided, and it is the one that determines whether the rest is possible.

The location page version of this is covered in a page for every suburb.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.