Most business owners assume that more content means more visitors and better search visibility. But a website content strategy only works when it starts with the service page content that represents what the business actually does. Put simply, that means connecting the services a business actually offers with the searches it wants to show up in. Get that right, and the rest of your content strategy will fall into place. Here’s Rocks Digital Marketing’s approach to getting there.
Your Service Pages Should Match What the Business Offers
Business websites can have large content libraries filled with blogs, FAQ and other resources, yet still present an incomplete picture of what they offer. The problem is not that the content is irrelevant to the industry itself, but that it doesn’t represent the specific services customers can hire the company to provide.
One of our long-distance moving clients ran into this exact problem. The client had a lot of blog content already on their site, but had only a handful of foundational service pages – specifically long-distance moving, international moving, corporate relocation, storage and packing. On the surface the site looked developed simply because there was so much content.
However, on closer inspection, we found that many of the company’s primary services were not represented anywhere. Specific types of moves like cross-country, interstate, apartment and senior moves had no dedicated pages of their own. As a result, customers and search engines had no easy way to see the full range of moves the company could handle. They did not need more general content, they needed service pages built to match the business the company actually ran.
Related Content Needs a Real Connection to Core Services
The missing pages from that example (cross-country moves, senior moves and the rest) show what related content should actually look like. To be worth creating and publishing, related content needs a direct logical connection to a core service. The mistake many businesses make here is to instead look for general connections to the industry as a whole.
However, every industry topic doesn’t always belong on a business’ website. For example, a topic can be integral to an entire industry without being relevant to a specific business within it. By chasing topics for search potential, a website can drift away from the services it needs to represent. And when it strays too far from its core services, this kind of irrelevant content can also hurt a site’s SEO results.
Also, the moving client we mentioned above had many examples of blog content published to attract high search volume to their website. For this client that meant a high volume of impressions in search results for a phrase like “Home Depot moving boxes,” yet very few clicks to the website. This deficit sends signals to Google that this business is not relevant for this search. While the client did receive many impressions, they did not achieve their goal in publishing such articles. Instead, they impacted their average click-through rate negatively and wasted resources on writing, editing and uploading the blog post.
Focus Your SEO Efforts on the Services That Matter Most
Many businesses have several services that each deserve their own service page. But that doesn’t mean that every page needs the same amount of attention all at the same time. Before creating anything new, it’s important to understand what matters most to the business, what’s currently missing, and where it wants more visibility.
Returning to our long-distance moving company example, we found that their top-level service pages were thin and didn’t properly explain the different types of moves within each category. Fixing those pages became the priority before any new service pages or blog posts could be published. Only once the core pages were solid could supporting content be developed in a logical order. Sometimes a content strategy isn’t about more content – it’s about improving what’s already there.
Service Pages Are the Foundation of Your SEO Strategy
More than any other content on a website, service pages show what a business can actually do. When someone searches for a specific service such as “condo moving services,” a search engine can point them to a relevant service page. And for that to work effectively, your service page content writing needs to cover both the broad categories and the subpages underneath them.
When your service pages are accurate and complete, the rest of your content strategy has something solid to build on. With these pages in place, you can build search visibility around the services that actually drive sales.
Talk to Us About Developing a Content Strategy That Works
When your website could benefit from a custom content strategy, give Rocks Digital a call. We help businesses stand out in search and answer engines with complete digital marketing services, including SEO, service page creation and web design. Call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation.
