Planning Your Website's Pages
This may seem obvious, but determining the structure of your site (i.e., what pages you want to include) is often overlooked by those planning a new website. Proceeding with a build without a plan is like going to Home Depot and buying lumber and nails before you have a blueprint for your house. How DO you know what pages you should have on your site?
STRATEGY 1: List the general categories of services/products that you offer + Home + About Us + Contact Us + Privacy Policy + Terms & Conditions.
(Get the details.)
STRATEGY #2: Learn from your competitors. Visit your online competition (remember to search with your target search phrase).
(Get the details.)
STRATEGY #3: Create one page for each region you serve to optimize your site for local searches.
(Get the details.)
Strategy #1 gets you started and you can stop for a simple site. Implement Strategies 2 or 3 if you want to optimize your site’s search engine position. For a mega search-engine-optimized site, do all three. See an sample super-charged page list below.
Strategy #1: List all the services/products you offer
Create a list of your products/service and add: Home + About Us + Contact
Create one page per item on your list.
- Home
- About Us
- Commercial Roof Installation
- Commercial Roof Repair
- Commercial Roof Inspections
- Contact Us
Add other pages that are common on many websites.
You might consider:
- Our Work/Gallery
- Awards/Affiliations
- Map/Locations/Directions
- Warranty
- Testimonials/Reviews
- Employment
- Privacy Policy
- Terms and Conditions
Strategy #2: Visit your online competition
(Remember to search with your target search phrase.)
To go with the example started above, we will imagine we have a roofing company in Fort Worth that specializes in commercial roofs. Let’s do a search in Google for “Fort Worth commercial roofing”.
Here are the first few results we get:
Strategy #3: Create one page for each region you serve
In this case, we will create two pages:
- Fort Worth Commercial Roofing
- Dallas Commercial Roofing
THE RESULT: A Super Mega-Charged Page List for SEO
Take all of your ideas and divide them into logical categories. You know how you go to a website and you see a top navigation bar that lists the “main parts” of the website? If you hover over one of those tabs, you will see a drop-down navigation. You have just witnessed how pages are grouped into categories. We divide pages into categories to make site navigation easier for the visitor. By using the three strategies outlined above, here is the proposed site structure for our commercial roofing company in Dallas/Fort Worth.
Home
Fort Worth Commercial Roofing
Dallas Commercial Roofing
About Us (Category page)
- Why Choose Us
- Company History & Philosophy
- Awards/Affiliations
- Location/Map
- Warranty
Commercial Roofing Services (Category page)
- Roof Repairs
- Roof Replacement
- Roof Penetration Repair
- New Roof Installation
- Roof Check-up
- Roof Inspections
- Emergency Repairs
Roofing Types/Products (Category page)
- Single Ply Systems
- Roof Coating
- Modified Bitument Systems
- Tar and Gravel Systems
- Energy Saving Roofs
- Gutters & Downspouts
- Coping
- Thermal Roof Coatings
- Metal Roofs
- Flat Roofs
Our Work (Category page)
- References/Testimonials
- Videos
- Project Gallery
News (Category page)
- News category page
- Three news articles
Other Pages
- Free Bid Request
- Employment
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
This site will have a total of 44 pages. For SEO purposes, you should expect to write SEVERAL paragraphs on each page, discussing the topic of that page thoroughly.
