A flat list of twenty services presents everything as equally important, which means the visitor has to read all of it to find theirs. Grouping into three or four families, ordering by what you want more of, and splitting the significant ones into their own pages solves it.

Why a flat list fails

Scanning is comparison. A visitor looking for one thing among twenty equal items has to evaluate each one, and a proportion give up before finding theirs.

It also communicates nothing about the business. Twenty services presented identically says you do everything, which is a weaker position than doing four things visibly well.

And it wastes the page. Nothing is emphasised, so the work you most want has the same prominence as the job you took once in 2019 and left on the list.

Grouping

Three or four families, named the way customers think rather than the way the trade organises work.

The grouping should be by the customer's situation rather than by your process. For a plumbing business, emergency, bathrooms and kitchens, heating, and maintenance is more useful than a list sorted by pipe type. For a contractor, by room or by project type rather than by trade discipline.

Under each family, three to six specific services. A family with one item is not a family; a family with twelve needs splitting.

The test is whether a customer can find their group in about a second and then their service within it. That is two quick decisions rather than twenty comparisons.

Ordering

Not alphabetically, and not by how often you do it.

Order by what you want more of. The work with the best margin, the work you enjoy, and the work you want to be known for goes first, because position on the page is one of the few levers that costs nothing.

Within that, the most searched terms should be visible without scrolling, since a visitor who arrived looking for a specific thing should see it immediately rather than after a page of alternatives.

Which services get their own page

The structural question underneath, and the one with the most effect.

Give it a page whenKeep it in a list when
People search for it by nameIt is a component of a larger job
It has its own questions and price factorsIt is a variation of something you already have a page for
You want more of itYou do it rarely and would not chase it
You could write eight hundred useful wordsYou could not fill three paragraphs

For a typical trades business that produces four to eight pages, not twenty. The rest live as entries on a family page or as sections within a related service page.

Creating twenty thin pages to cover twenty services is the common error, and it produces pages that compete with each other and rank for none of it.

The services page itself

Once the families exist, the overview page has a clear job: route people.

Each family as a heading, the services under it, and a link to the full page where one exists. A short line under each family explaining who it is for, since the family name alone may not be enough.

What it should not be is a page that tries to describe every service in detail. That is what the individual pages are for, and duplicating them here creates the internal competition described above.

On a phone

A flat list of twenty becomes a very long scroll, and grouping helps considerably more here than on a desktop.

Collapsible groups work well, provided the family headings are all visible when everything is closed, so the visitor sees the four choices immediately rather than scrolling through opened content.

What does not work is a grid of twenty equal tiles, which on a phone becomes twenty stacked blocks and is worse than a plain list.

The pruning question

A long list usually contains things nobody should be enquiring about.

Work you took once, work you would now decline, work with poor margin, and work that no longer fits. Each of those on the site produces enquiries you then have to turn down, which is more effort than never receiving them.

Removing them is a decision about the business rather than the website, and the website is where the decision becomes visible. Taking something off the list without deciding to stop doing it produces the reverse problem, so the two go together, as covered in dropping a service line you no longer want.

The check

Give someone unfamiliar with your business a specific job and ask them to find it on your services page, on a phone, while you watch.

Time it. Under five seconds means the structure works. Watching them scroll past their own service twice means the list is doing the opposite of its job, and the fix is grouping rather than more description.

Frequently asked questions

What is wrong with a flat list of services?

It presents everything as equally important, so the visitor must evaluate every item to find theirs. It also says you do everything, which is weaker than doing four things visibly well.

How should services be grouped?

Into three or four families named the way customers think about their situation rather than how the trade organises work, with three to six specific services under each.

How should the list be ordered?

By what you want more of. The best-margin work and the work you want to be known for goes first, since position on the page is a lever that costs nothing.

Which services deserve their own page?

Ones people search for by name, that have their own questions and price factors, that you want more of, and where you could write eight hundred useful words.

Should I create a page for every service?

No. Twenty thin pages compete with each other and rank for none of it. Four to eight proper pages is typical, with the rest as entries or sections.

How do long service lists work on a phone?

Collapsible groups work well provided all family headings are visible when closed. A grid of twenty equal tiles becomes twenty stacked blocks and is worse than a plain list.

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.

Services page listing everything and converting nothing?

We group it the way customers think, put the work you want first, and split out the services that deserve a page of their own.

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