One Page Per Thing You Sell

Why the combined page fails

A page listing nine services, with two lines each, is trying to be nine pages and succeeding at none.

For any given search it contains a fraction of the relevant content, competing against pages devoted entirely to that subject.

It also cannot carry the things that convert: the process, the price, the duration, the examples, the questions. There is no room.

Which means it fails twice, at being found and at persuading anybody who arrives.

How many pages

Fewer than the number of things you do, and more than one.

The right number is the number of services that actually produce revenue, which for most small businesses is three or four.

Everything else can stay as a list, mentioned on the homepage or an overview page, without its own page.

A business doing nine things well will still get most of its money from three of them, and those three deserve real pages.

Building nine at once produces nine thin pages, which is the original problem redistributed.

What goes on one

• The service and the town in the heading.
• What the job actually involves, step by step.
• What it costs, as a range with what moves it.
• How long it takes, and how disruptive it is.
• Two or three examples with photographs.
• The questions people ask about that job specifically.
• What happens next if they want to proceed.

That is around eight hundred to a thousand words without padding, because each item is something a customer genuinely wants to know.

A worked example

A trade business with a single services page listing eleven items.

It ranked for the business name and nothing else.

They wrote three pages over three weeks, one per evening each, for the three services that produced most of their income.

Each followed the structure above and ran to roughly nine hundred words.

Within three months two of the three were appearing on the first page for their service plus the town, and enquiries had roughly doubled.

The eleven-item list stayed as an overview page, linking to the three, which is where the other eight services still live.

Nothing was deleted and the site went from one competing page to four.

Writing them without repeating yourself

The practical difficulty, since three service pages from one business share a lot.

What differs: the work itself, the price, the duration, the examples, the questions, and what can go wrong.

What is shared: the company, the area, the guarantee, the process for booking.

Keep the shared material short on each page and link to a fuller version elsewhere, rather than repeating three paragraphs verbatim.

Near-identical pages are a genuine problem, and the fix is making each page substantially about its own subject rather than about the business.

The counter-case

Where a single page is right.

A business with one service, which needs one very good page rather than an artificial split.

Services so closely related that a customer would not distinguish them, where splitting produces two pages saying the same thing.

And a business at capacity, where more visibility is unwanted and the site's job is to confirm legitimacy.

Also worth naming: services you do reluctantly, as a favour, or at low margin. Those should not have pages, because a page produces enquiries and you do not want more of that work.

How long each one should be

A question that produces bad advice, so worth answering plainly.

Long enough to cover the seven items above properly, which lands most service pages between eight hundred and twelve hundred words.

Not because a number matters, but because that is what it takes to explain a job, its price, its duration and its common questions without rushing.

Padding a page to reach a target makes it worse, and a genuinely simple service covered fully in five hundred words is a good page.

The useful test is whether somebody reading it could decide whether to enquire. If they still have obvious questions, it is too short, whatever the count says.

Ordering and linking them

Structure that helps both readers and search engines.

An overview page listing everything, linking to the detailed pages for the main services.

Each detailed page linking back to the overview and across to genuinely related services.

The main pages in the navigation, the overview page as the parent.

That arrangement means a visitor can find anything in two clicks and a search engine can see which pages you consider important, which is what the linking structure communicates.

Location pages, carefully

A related idea worth handling correctly because it is easy to do badly.

A page for a service in a specific town can work, and only if it contains something genuinely different: jobs done there, local considerations, photographs from that area.

Twenty pages generated by swapping a town name are recognisable, add nothing for a reader, and can harm the site.

The honest version: name all your towns on the service page, and build separate pages only for the two or three areas where you have enough real material to fill one.

If you cannot write three hundred original words about working in a town, it does not need a page.

What to do with the old page

A practical question once the new pages exist.

Keep it, and convert it into an overview: a short paragraph and a list linking to each detailed page.

Do not delete it. It has whatever visibility it already had, links pointing at it from elsewhere, and possibly a position for the business name.

Deleting a page that ranks for anything, in order to replace it, throws away the accumulated history for no reason.

And if you do remove a page at some point, redirect its address to the closest replacement rather than leaving it to error, so anybody following an old link arrives somewhere useful.

Building them in order

1. List your services by revenue, not by how interesting they are.
2. Take the top three.
3. Write one page a week, not three in a day.
4. Follow the same structure each time.
5. Link them from the overview page.
6. Leave it three months before judging.

The third is what makes this achievable at all. A business that sets out to write nine pages writes none; one that writes a single page this week has a page.

What to call them is covered in the title that shows up in the results.

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.