How to plan a service business website page by page

Why the plan comes before the design

Most service business websites are planned from the top down. Someone sketches a home page, a menu appears, and pages are added to fill the menu. The result looks complete but often misses the searches customers actually make, or splits one service across three thin pages because the menu had three slots.

Planning page by page works the other way round. You start from what the business sells and what people type into Google, decide which pages need to exist to answer those searches, and only then think about menus and layouts. The design then has a clear brief: a known set of pages, each with a job.

This guide walks through that plan in the order we use for our own site architecture work.

Step one, list what the business actually sells

Write down every service the business offers, in the words the owner uses. Then, next to each, write how a customer would describe it. These are often different. An owner might say "reactive maintenance"; a customer types "emergency plumber".

Group the list. Some items are really the same service described two ways. Some are separate services that happen to be done by the same team. A useful test is whether a customer looking for one would be satisfied by a page about the other. If not, they are separate.

At the end of this step you should have a short list of distinct services, each named the way customers name it.

Step two, check how people search for each one

For each service, find the searches that matter. You do not need an expensive tool to start. Type the service into Google and note:

• the suggestions that appear as you type
• the questions in the People also ask box
• the kinds of pages that rank: service pages, directories, articles, maps
• whether the results change when you add a town name

If the results for a search are mostly local businesses with maps, it needs a service page and a strong Business Profile. If the results are mostly articles, the searcher wants information first, and an article may serve them better than a service page.

If the business already has a website, Search Console's queries report shows which of these searches already bring impressions. That is the most reliable list you will get, because it is real.

Step three, decide which pages must exist

Now turn the services and searches into pages. For most service businesses the plan includes:

1. A home page that says what the business does, for whom and where.
2. One page for each distinct service from step one.
3. Location pages, only where the business genuinely serves an area and can say something specific about it.
4. An about page with the people and the history.
5. A contact page with every way to get in touch and the area covered.
6. Proof: reviews, examples of work or case notes.
7. Articles and answers for the informational searches found in step two.

For each page, write one sentence describing its job. If two pages have the same sentence, they are the same page. If a page has no sentence, it does not need to exist yet.

Step four, map the links between pages

Pages help each other through links. Decide in the plan, not after launch, how each page connects to the others.

Service pages should be reachable from the main navigation. Location pages should link to the services offered in that area. Articles should link to the service they support, using words that describe that service. The home page should link to every main service.

A simple way to record this is a table with one row per page and a column listing the pages it links to. It looks dull, but it prevents the common situation where a page exists, ranks for nothing and turns out to have no links pointing to it at all. Our page on internal linking explains why that matters.

Step five, write the record

The finished plan is a document, not a sitemap diagram. For each page it should hold:

• the address, kept short and readable
• the page's one-sentence job
• the search or searches it answers
• the pages it links to and from
• the action a visitor should take next
• who writes it and who approves it

This record becomes the brief for design, writing and development. Months later, it is also how you check whether the site still matches its plan or has drifted.

A worked example

Take a cleaning company that does domestic cleaning, end of tenancy cleaning, carpet cleaning and office cleaning in two neighboring towns.

Step one shows four services. The owner calls the office work "commercial contracts", but customers search "office cleaning", so the page uses that name. Step two shows that end of tenancy searches are almost always local and come with a deadline, so that page needs prices or a quick quote route near the top. Carpet cleaning searches include many "how to" questions, which suggests two or three short articles linking to the carpet page.

Step three produces a home page, four service pages, two location pages, an about page, a reviews page, a contact page and three articles. Each has a one-line job. Step four links each location page to all four services and each carpet article to the carpet page. Step five puts it all in a single table that the designer and writer both work from.

Mistakes that undo a good plan

A sound plan can still be undone during the build. These are the ones we see most often:

• Pages added to fill the design. A template has room for six services, so two are invented or split. Keep the page list from the plan and let the design adapt to it.
• Names changed late. A page planned as "office cleaning" is renamed "commercial solutions" in the final review because it sounds bigger. The customer's word was the reason the page existed.
• Location pages copied from one template. Every town gets the same text with the name swapped. If the plan cannot say something specific about an area, that page should wait.
• Links left to chance. The table from step four is skipped because the menu looks finished. Articles then go live with no link to the service they were written to support.
• No owner for the record. The plan is written once and never updated, so a year later nobody knows why a page exists or what it was meant to do.

Each of these is easy to prevent while the site is a document and expensive to fix once it is live.

What to check first

Before approving any plan, read the one-sentence jobs aloud. If any two sound the same, merge them. If a service the business sells has no page, add one. If a page exists only to fill a menu, remove it. A plan that passes those three checks is ready for design.