Most Important Web Pages To Include

These Are The Pages You Need To Include On Your Website

What are the most important pages you need do have on your website – one of the most common questions we get asked! In this episode we’ll break down the main pages that every local business should be including, and answer this question. These are the critical pages for Google bot and your customers, and you need to design them for both to have success. Here’s what working for us right now and we hope it helps you, too!

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YOU’LL LEARN

  • What are the critical and essential web pages that you need to have on your website
  • Your homepage is the most important page on your website
  • Using your primary Google My Business category on your homepage
  • How to properly display your address and nearby cities you serve on your homepage
  • Creating niche pages for the products and services you provide
  • Including your secondary Google My Business categories in your niche pages
  • Designing your pages for both your customers and Google to navigate and find
  • Using an About Us page to send signals to Google about being a legitimate business
  • Putting a Contact Us page in your main menu
  • What type of information you should be putting on your contact page and how to display it
  • The importance of a reviews or testimonials page, and what it does for Google
  • Creating a “locations served” page if you serve cities outside of where you’re physically located
  • Matching your Google My Business service area with your locations served page

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 23 What Pages Do I Need On My Website? The Most Important Pages You Should Include;

Jesse: Hey everyone, welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, Jesse Dolan with Bob Brennan. And
this week we’re gonna be talking about the essential web pages that you need on your
website. We talked about this in some episodes going back and forth about, what
should I have on my website? What’s a good number of pages? And a lot of you’ve been
asking, what exactly should I have on there. What’s the critical things that I need to have
on my website. As it relates to SEO and the signals that you’re sending to Google. So
we’re gonna break those down today. Go through our list. I’m sure if you do some
Googling you might find some that are, or are not on our list here. But this is what we
employ, this is the strategies that we use and what we’re having great results with.

First thing, of course, is your homepage. Every website has a homepage, almost by
default. And as we talked about before, that’s the most important page on your
website, bar none. Whether you want it to or not, sometimes it shows up in search
results as the primary for your business. And that’s because Google knows that’s the
front door. That’s the entrance to your building as your business online. So it’s very
important to set that up for what is the primary things of your business. We talked in
episode 17 about using Google my business categories as keywords. You definitely
wanna make sure you’re doing that on the homepage of your website. Whatever your
primary category is, and even with my business, that should be the headline, and then
the tags, and the descriptions of your homepage for your website. That’s the primary
thing that you do, so that’s what you want to get found for, and you wanna send that
signal to Google.

The other main thing you wanna do on your homepage is call out your
location. You may serve a lot of suburbs or service area in whatever city you’re in. But
you’re physically located in one city, assuming you’re a single location business. If you’re
a multi-location business, have multiple branches, we’ll talk about that in a second.
This part right here is about you as one physical address for your business. You need to
make sure that’s very clear on the homepage of your website. Have your address listed,
having it on there two times is actually great. Kind of like a little contact area, then
mention it somewhere in the body of the text on your webpage is ideal. And your phone
number, kind of these local signals to Google. Here’s my area code, here’s my zip code,
here’s my address. Even if you can embed a Google map for your actual location, that
just helps that too.

So just to kind of quickly recap that. Homepage, make sure you’re attacking your
primary Google my business keyword category. And your location that you’re in. You
can also put on there some of the locations that you serve, or we serve within 30 miles
of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Or whatever. That’s fine too, you don’t just have to say,
we’re in Minneapolis. You can talk about it and kind of expand on it. But don’t mash in
all of your suburbs on your homepage. Don’t try to attack with that. Just be very, very
clear, almost like your business card, or one page flyer. Here’s what we are, here’s what
we do, and what we’re all about.

Bob: What’s a reasonable number of suburbs? I mean, there’s a compromise between
anything right. You don’t wanna list 30 suburbs butJesse: Yeah. If like, we’re talking about your homepage?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: I’d probably pick the top two to three, maybe three to five on the high end. Because you
want to be clear in your signals. There’s another spot that we’re gonna talk about, your
locations served page, where you can go ahead and list all this stuff. But yeah, go ahead
and list a couple on your homepage. But I wouldn’t probably go over that, just because
the more cities you add, the more you dilute that.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Tied into your homepage, you’re gonna have Google my business listing. So Google
already knows, here’s the GMB property, and we have their location and address listed
on that. So your kind of trying to replicate that on your homepage and let them know,
yeah, this is my website, it’s all tied in, I got the same message on both of these
properties. It kind of dominates in the Google map pack, and in the natural results. So if
we list a dozen other cities on your homepage, that starts to look a little confusing and
you kind of dilute that primary city.

Bob: So, they’ll see you’re trying to spam and over optimize it, and it’s just not gonna sit right
with Google.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s actually another great point too. It can definitely look a little spammy. So
that’s your homepage. Obviously, for anyone that’s the most essential page on your
website. Other primary pages are gonna be niche pages. Niche, niche whatever, I go
niche.

Bob: I just go niche, the whole niche thing, I don’t know.

Jesse: You guys can call it whatever you want. You’re not gonna hear me say niche outside of
when I just said it right there. So make your niche pages. And what we mean by that, is
really all of your product and service pages that you offer. If you’re doing auto repair,
we talked about it in other episodes, but the types of auto repair you do, individual
pages like that. And then also, those Google my business categories, you picked one as
your primary. But then you probably have maybe a half a dozen other ones that you’ve
selected. Try to frame those up as your niche pages too. Because they’re gonna describe
what you do, and it’s just important to get those out there as well. Those don’t have to
be linked to your main menu. I wouldn’t say you want 85 pages up in that top there.
Sometimes you can have a dropdown menu under services, or variations of that service.
The exact layout is gonna depend on the style of your website and what you wanna do.
But you do wanna these linked to be navigable somehow by users, and crawlable with
the Google bots and things like that.

Bob: So as a local company, we’re probably talking about 7 to 10 services?

Jesse: I would say so.

Bob: Because anything more than that, I’m not saying you can’t have it. But it’s gonna be the
exception to the rule.

Jesse: Yeah, because you can go on variations within a page too. If you do auto repair, let’s say
transmission repair is a specific category that you wanna go after. You don’t have to list
every variation of transmission repair on a separate page. Have this page about
transmission repair, and here’s the types of transmissions we work on, or the types of
repair offered. From there, you can definitely branch out from there. I’m not saying that
you can’t, but I would start with like you’re saying, somewhere in that 7 to 10 range.
Definitely making sure all or your Google my business categories have a niche page. And
all your primary products and services are identified with a niche page too.

Within those, just like your homepage, we kind of skipped over that. But you’re gonna
want photos on there as well. You’re not just creating a page here. But all the standard
stuff that we’ve talked about, do your proper and tags, identify your keywords, make
sure you’re working them in, not to be too spammy, kind of find that balance of right in
the content. Depending on where you search online, or who you talk to, 500 words on
introduce pages is really what you wanna go after. Some places 1000 or 2000 words as
well. I’d say as a minimum, if your gonna go under 300 you’re probably gonna have hard
time ranking. I would use that 500 as your minimum. But if you have the ability to write
2000 or 1500 words, somewhere in that range …

Bob: That’s better.

Jesse: Yeah, go for it. That’s more opportunity to talk about things. You wanna keep it topical,
you don’t wanna just ramble on about stuff that doesn’t matter to what the topic of that
page was. But for sure, add in some pictures, make sure the pictures are relevant to the
keyword or the category that you’re going after. And, like we talked before as well, the
filing of those pictures should incorporate those keywords, not just the image1234 as
your standard iPhone picture might be. Kind of roll all of those in. They’re gonna get
your homepage, just kind of rolling back, now you’ve got all your niche pages for your
product, services, and your Google my business categories. Those are definitely gonna
be critical.

And I would say, if you’re not gonna do anything else that we’re talking about, make
sure you do that part on your website. Because you’re communicating what it is you sell,
and what your revenue streams are. The rest of the stuff we’re gonna get into kind of
helps define who you are as a business, as an entity in the locations that you serve.
Which are very important, just like in A1 and A2, not like this is less important in a much
less way. But start there, make sure you have those suckers done. Otherwise people
don’t know what it is that you’re selling and serving, and neither does Google then.
Bob: Yeah, so in some ways you gotta think of it as, I gotta communicate to two entities. I
gotta communicate to the person that might land on my site, but somehow I have to
communicate to Google in a back-ended way, what we do, how we do it. And that’s
gotta be legitimate in Google’s eyes.

Jesse: Yup. And with Google, they’re kind of getting smarter with how their AI is starting to
take over the algorithms. And they’re really identifying user intent. So let’s take this
auto repair example for transmission repair. If you’re gonna write your page about it, it’s
not just saying, “I fix transmissions, I service transmissions, I rebuild transmissions.” You
also wanna talk about some of the problems. Like, why is somebody coming to you?
What’s the question they’re asking that’s literally gonna be something that might be
typed into Google. And if it’s not, it’s something that Google knows, with how their AI is
going, they know that somebody typing this symptom, I don’t know, stuttering out the
gate or …

Bob: Shuddering…

Jesse: Shuddering, they know that’s a transmission problem, just from the mass amounts of
searches and data that it collects. So if you talk about that stuff on your page, like having
shuddering when you’re accelerating, or kind of describe the problem. Come on, I mean,
if you’ve been in business for a while people are calling you saying, “I have this problem,
I have this need. What do I do in this situation?” Use that on your content for these
pages, and then talk about your solutions for it as well, kind of framing it up. Not only is
that gonna be like your saying with Google, you’re making the page for Google and for
the user. That’s also kind of a little cheat way to write more words. Not just, “Here’s
what I offer.” But, “Here’s the questions people are asking me.” “Here’s the problems
they’re usually coming to me with.” Framing it up and typing that out in paragraphs, it’s
gonna get you well on your way to 500 words or more.

Bob: Yeah, I mean, if you’ve been in business long enough, you should know your customer.
And you should know what they’re experiencing or have experienced. And now, if you’re
new to this, and you’re just getting started, let’s hope that … okay maybe you’re a
mechanic and you’re thinking about staring your own shop. Well, let’s hope you’ve had
some experience with what your customers are having problems with. And that’s what
you need to write about. And content writing is not fun.

Jesse: No.

Bob: But as soon as you can get in the head of your customer, it becomes a little easier.
Jesse: Right. And images are gonna help that a lot too. Back in episode 20 and 21, we had Matt
Addington in talking about how to take better images. And really how to have those
images help tell a story for your website. This is a great spot to mention that too. You
wanna take some images, or find some stock photography to kind of help give that
narrative for what you’re talking about on that page. Answering these questions, and
framing it up on there.

So move on, I kind of stalled us up a little bit too long there. On those pages, it’s more
me talking than you asking questions. Those are great questions. But again, that kind of
rounds out the most critical things you need on your website. Get that homepage
looking good, and then get all your niche pages rounded out so people know what it is
that you’re offering.

Next very important page is your About Us page. Over that last few years for us, if you
rewind the clock either 10 years ago, we used to make About Us page, contact pages,
and all that. We stopped doing that, we molded those into one combo page, thinking it
as a little bit redundant. Over the last year or so, our opinions have completely changed
on that. Google wants to see an About Us, and a Contact Us page. We’re gonna break
both of those down here, for what those are and why they’re important.

First, the About Us page. A big thing for Google right now, as it relates to local results is,
are you legitimate? They’re trying to filter out crappy businesses, shady businesses,
illegitimate businesses, to just focus on real businesses and connect you with that. Your
About Us page is a great tool to do that. That’s where you’re gonna tell your story, tell
your history. Who you are, who’s on your team. Anything you want to do, you don’t
need to have 18 pages, or a huge amount of content. Again, try to get at least 500
words, up to 2000 words if you can, mixing in these pictures. And just, who are you?
What’s your history?

Bob: This is something I have issue with. I know you’re correct on this. But as a consumer, I’m
clicking on … I need something. Let’s just say, if it’s over 5 or 10 thousand dollars, I’m
gonna crawl into the About Us and find out who I’m dealing with, right.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: But if it’s a fix my car, or even my roof, and roofs can be expensive. But you get the idea.
but here again, the mission needs to be clear. Google wants to know about you and
your business, and it kind of has to be done in such a way that it’s tied in with your
business, right.

Jesse: Yup. And if you think about it, exactly like you’re saying, it’s probably irrelevant.
Depending on your business niche, it’s probably irrelevant for a lot of people. That’
really not what this is for, this is sending signals to Google that this is About Us, this is
who we are. You’re mentioning your people, your brands, your history, locations, where
you been at. They’re gonna get all this data, and Google isn’t just something that grabs
words out of websites now. They have machine learning, artificial intelligence, to help
provide these results to people. So they’re taking in this information as a user.
Us humans may glaze over this, like you’re saying, depending on the price point for the
product. But Google is not, they’re scraping all of your data, and coming up with these
decisions to align user intent, legitimate business, all these things. Your About Us page is
that spot for you to communicate to them, “We’re legit, we’ve been around since 1993.”
Or 2004, whatever it is, calling that out. And I always use this example, even if I had
exact same websites, all things being equal. If I’m gonna give Google these signals
saying, I’m a legitimate business established in 1993, they’re gonna give me a little bit
more credit. That’s just one more signal, they know what that means now. They can
literally parse that out, established, in business since, things like that. And they carry
some weight, because they wanna give people legitimate results.

So, yeah, just whatever you can do to that About Us page, and tell that story. And with
all these things too, you can come back to them later. You can add to it. Having the page
out there, you’re literally calling it About Us. So it’s Bobsfishing.com/aboutus. And that
can be aboutus as in one word even better as about-us, in my personal opinion. Get that
out there. Same thing with the Contact Us page. That’s gonna be just like it sounds,
more main to be contact information, how to get a hold of you. You’re gonna want that
basic contact information on every page or your website, just like on your homepage.
Have your address listed, have a driving direction map, that would be great. Put your
phone number. If you’re okay with putting an email address out there, go ahead and put
that out there. Sometimes people don’t wanna do that because that can get screened,
scrapped, and you can start to get spam on email pretty quick. So if you’re gonna list
your email address on a Contact Us page, or just in your Contact Us box, if you will, on
any given page. Definitely like an info at, or contact at type of deal. Don’t list Bob’s
address, something that you’re gonna be comfortable managing spam on, quite frankly,
because that’s gonna happen.

But, put all that on your contact page. Again, most users, maybe aren’t gonna get to
your contact page, they’re gonna find your contact information on whatever page they
landed on. If you’re doing it right, you should have a huge ass phone number on your
website, so they don’t need to go to the contact page.

Bob: Yeah, that’s just it. It’s always amazed me, why companies hide their phone number. If
there’s a reason for it, it’s like, okay, then why have a website if you really don’t want
people to contact you? If you have a website, my rule on this is, the phone number has
gotta be big, bad, and bold at the top. And no offense to grandma, she’s gotta be able to
find it within a couple seconds.

Jesse: We think about sometimes, as a business owner your ego kind of gets in there. You’re
like, I want a beautiful looking website, I want it to really look good or whatever. And
then you lose sight of the purpose of the website. It’s somebody’s got a question or a
problem, you want them to find your website and contact your business. And maybe
you’re adverse to phone calls, but if you’re not, and you actually want phone calls, then
make that sucker as huge as possible. I’m getting a little sidetracked. It’s hopefully they
don’t ever get to your contact page. Again, this is something that’s kind of more for
Google than the average end user, although some people will go there. Some pieces of
information that can be found on there, your standard stuff. Your phone number, email
address, like we said, driving directions, address. But this is also a spot where you can
put your business hours.

Anything else that’s related to contact type questions, the contact form, that’s usually a
common thing to have there. A quote form maybe, depending on what your service is.
And any other kind of information like that. If you have an after-hours hotline number
or things like that. Or start a support ticket, whatever. But again, the main thing on that
is, you’re sending the signal to Google. Like, here’s all of our contact information. Now,
whether they parse some of that out to go into the knowledge panel, or in some other
form for other display on your website. Or just to let them know you’re legitimate. You
have a contact page, because all this information, that matches up with all the other
stuff you’re seeing on our social profiles, and everything else. It’s kind of your main
record for your contact information. Definitely an important page to have on your
website.

Another very important page, is to have your reviews and your testimonials. Now, if
you’re using a product like ReviewLead, Intrycks.com/review150 if you haven’t checked
that out yet, shameless plug, special deal for you. Something like that will integrate
reviews right onto a page like this automatically for you. If you don’t have something
like that up and running, this is where you’d wanna type those out, and have those be
just snippets that you’re putting on your website for reviews and testimonials. You don’t
even have to pull them in from Google or Facebook, you can just go copy and paste that.
If somebody leaves you a review on Google, you can copy that, put that in there and
say, “This is a review from Google from Bob, and here’s what he said, he gave us five
stars.” But just having a page on your website that just has this information from users,
whether it’s embedded, automated, or just hand typed by you. Call it reviews, or call it
testimonials.

Again, in our opinion, Bobsfishing.com/reviews or /testimonials, you’re
sending a signal to Google saying, “I have a page that displays customer testimonials.”
Now that you can use the markup schema and do some other stuff to … I’ll put a link to
Schema.org in the show notes so people can … if you don’t know what we’re talking
about, there might help you out a little bit our reach out to us if you need help with
that. But that’s where you’re gonna tell Google, this is a page about reviews and
testimonials. Number one, they wanna see good information. If actually bumps your
SEO, make you legitimate. And number two, for all the people that do, maybe it’s your
$10,000.00 threshold, whatever it is, let me see a little bit more about these people.
Checking out their reviews, checking out their About Us page, the kind of secondary
type pages before you make that decision of just instantly calling them, if it’s like a brake
fix situation if they wanna learn more.

The reviews and testimonials can be a great page. Usually that’s curated by you, you’re
not gonna have your one star reviews on there, or anything that’s negative. People
understand that, don’t be bashful about it only being glowing reviews. Again, if you’re
using something like ReviewLead or an automated deal, you can usually set a filter or
gateway saying, only 4.0 and higher reviews are gonna be shown on this page, things
like that. I can’t think of any reason why you’d want something negative on there. If they
wanna get that stuff, down at the bottom, I should mention to you, a good practice is to
have links to reviews on the bottom of these pages.

So display your reviews, and at the bottom, leave you us a review, or read more reviews
on Facebook, Google. Wherever you’re getting these reviews from, put links outbound
to those places. People can then go and read more, find those one star reviews if they
really wanna fact check you, and find out what the ugly part is. Because we all got it.
And to an extent, we’ve talked to customers before too. You’ve got some businesses
online, some are 5.0 rating with 17 reviews, and somebody has 112 and they’re 4.2, we
kind of feel like that’s more legit. 4.2, you trust that a little bit more, it’s not friends and
family leaving reviews.

Bob: I personally look at 4.5 and above. It’s not like a discard the 4.2, but if it’s 4.5 and above
I’m gonna call them first, and then whatever. Because I know out of 100 and some,
you’re not gonna keep everybody happy. And that’s the law of nature in terms of, if
there’re 100 people in the room, somebody’s gonna be … two or three people are
gonna be pretty hacked.

Jesse: And inversely, if all they have is 5.0 and there’s 12 of them, I’m usually reading those
like, okay, are these legit or not? Because it just seems to good to be true. So put links to
the bottom of your review and testimonial page, for people to bounce out and read
more about those. And then also, that’s the spot where you can solicit it. So again, going
back. Let’s say you have a review system automated like ReviewLead, hey great, people
are gonna get pinged to give you feedback and reviews. If you don’t, this is where
maybe you wanna send them an email, “Hey, can you leave us a review? Go to our
blank/review and at the bottom you’ll find links to leave us reviews.” That’s a great
resource for that too. But again, all these pages, really the main reason is to send these
signals to Google. You wanna write the stuff for the end user, make it functional for all
of us human beings. But these are the pages you’re gonna want to put out there for
Google to see that you’re putting these pages out there, so they can see that you’re
legitimate and real business.

The last real essential page that we’d say to put on your website is, your locations
served. Now, that doesn’t have to mean you have to actually go out and mobily visit or
mobily service these, but where is your customer base pulling from? What suburbs do
you wanna target customers in? You were asking me earlier, how many should I put on
my homepage? This where you would put everybody. Yeah, it’s a little spammy, but as
long as you’re calling it out as a locations served, or cities we do business in type of a
page. Nothing negative is going to come of it. You don’t wanna do this on every page,
this is the one page to kind of be able to do that. Not saying this is some secret sauce
that’s gonna suddenly get you popping in some suburb that you haven’t been popping
in, that you used to before.

Google has changed things, but this is a page where you can send that signal and at least
have the chance to mention these other suburbs. There’s other tactics we’re gonna talk
in some future episodes, we’re still proofing out some things on how to help you expand
your zone. But this is a page you’re gonna want to put on your website. Locations
served, areas served. I’ve used that exact kind of verbiage. Again, locations-served
would be my URL of choice. And if you want to put pictures up of any landmarks in
these cities. If you just wanna put a bulleted list of the cities served. Whatever you
wanna do, again this is mainly put out there for the signal to Google saying, these are
the areas I do business in, on the off chance they’re actually going to include you in
those results, and kind of build some authority there. But also for customers, somebody
searching, if you live in maybe a smaller suburb of a certain town and you just know
there’s nobody that provides that service for you. So you kind of broaden your search,
instead of near me, you’re just doing in the greater … like, we’re in the Twin Cities,
right? So Minneapolis is the biggest city.

Maybe in your smaller suburb, maybe you just know there’s nobody that does
transmission repair here. So you’re gonna search, transmission repair in Minneapolis.
Actually that’s problem bad because I’d be going there. If there’s a service where they
come to me, like auto glass repair, let’s say. Do they come out to my suburb or not, let
me check their locations served page. So it is functional for users. But again, that’s not
the primary reason for having it.

Bob: so does that tie back to GMB at any point, the locations served?

Jesse: Yeah, great question actually. Thanks for bringing that up. In your GMB you can call out
the locations that you do serve. You can by radius, or listing them out, throw them in
with that here too. I would make sure those match up. If one of them is not aligned, it’s
not gonna be the worst thing in the world, but everything you’re doing here with your
GMB and your website, try to sync them up to be identical. The more identical you can
be, you’re sending the same signals to Google. And it’s gonna do nothing but give you
good results.

Bob: So and that’s really what Google wants to see is that you’re local, and that everything is
legitimate, you’re tied together. Because the thinking is, a local company is gonna make
all that happen. A company that’s really not located in that area, telemarketer, probably
isn’t gonna make that happen, so they need to get pushed on further down the list.

Jesse: Yup. And we’re talking about listing actual cities, zip codes, you can give zip codes too.
But again, back to your point, your GMB page is probably your most restricted area in
that. We you’re actually saying to Google is here is where I serve, and they’ll penalize or
suspend your listing if you try to be too egregious with that, and kind of lie about it. So
you really have to have your best foot forward and be truthful in where you really do
serve, where you’re primarily pulling customers. And you may travel three states away,
but if that’s not really where you do business, don’t make your zone that big. On your
page here too, follow that same guideline. When I put my GMB service area including
these cities, if you try to use it for spamming purposes. That’s gonna have a bad
consequence or it’s not gonna show up at all or give any positive benefit. So yeah, I
would kind of tie that in with my GMB, absolutely.

So that’s pretty much it for this week’s episode. Hopefully that helps you guys out, lets
you know, this is kind of the basic framework of the types of pages that you’re gonna
want on there. Back in episode six and seven, we talk about some basic approach on
how to develop these pages. So if you want a little bit more tidbits on how to actually
construct these pages and best practices for building the pages, check back to those
episodes six and seven. But hopefully this gives you a good framework on, if I don’t have
these pages, I better go create them right now, and give you some improvement.

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