Structuring a Service Page: Building Blocks for SEO Success

“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” – T.S. Eliot

When people search for a particular service, they are more likely to land on a dedicated service page than a generic page that has a bunch of services listed. Creating dedicated pages for each service you offer lends you a lot more SEO opportunities, and will help your site rank higher in search engines when users are looking for your specific service.

Service Pages: How to Begin

It can be a bit intimidating to look at a blank site page and know that you need to fill it up with a bunch of content that is relevant to your particular service. So how do you begin? Well, T.S. Eliot’s quote “Good writers borrow, great writers steal” is relevant in this case because a good way to figure out what to include on your service page is to see what successful people in your niche have been including on their pages. It’ll give you an idea of what people are searching for and what’s ranking high in the search engines so you can “steal” their ideas, but do them better. This is especially helpful if you’re creating the site for a person in a particular niche, but you’ve never actually worked in that niche before. You can pretty much Frankenstein other people’s ideas into a new, beautiful service page.

PRO Tip: Use iSearchFrom to remove geo-location and personalization in your search to discover the top ranking service pages (this used to be much simpler until Google removed the search by location feature.)

Simply set location to United States, language to English, and search your service keyword without adding a specific city. This can be great for discovering solid service pages that will give you content and optimization ideas.

Discover top Service pages w/ iSearchFrom

Make your Service page BETTER

Now you’ve got the basics for your service page, and you can go ahead and pull it together, but there’s still more you can do.

Images

You want at least one image on your service page. It’ll make your page more visually appealing, and will help with SEO. You can either take pictures yourself, or more commonly people will use images from copyright-free image sites such as Pixabay or Creative Commons. You simply type in keywords relating to your page, and a handful of potential pictures will pop up.

You can also use videos to improve relevance. Remember that you can (and should) rename the file when uploading media to your site. The Alt tag is another place where you want to give your picture a relevant label/keyword. Make sure that the Alt Text is CamelCase (no spaces and all words are capitalized), and that you use your primary keywords – but don’t overdo it, as keyword stuffing can actually be more harmful than beneficial. Also remember to only use pictures with smaller file sizes and proper dimensions in order to keep your site looking professional and pageload speed at a minimum.

Interlinking

Chances are, you have some pages that relate in some way to each other. For example, on a law firm website, any page that says something along the lines of “this crime is a felony” will have an embedded link in the word felony to the felony page (only the first time “felony” is mentioned – you don’t want to overdo it). Furthermore, the felony page may have a list of felonies this firm defends with links back to all those pages that linked to it. (Keep in mind that if you’re editing a page that was created a while back, check to make sure that none of the links on that page are broken.)

Keyword Repetition

This one is tricky because there are some places where it’s good and some places where it’s bad. If your key term is “children’s eye care”, you’ll want to sprinkle that phrase or some variation of that phrase throughout the page, in headings, in the page title, and in the meta description. You can phrase it slightly differently if it feels like you’re repeating the exact same phrase too many times – as long as it still sounds natural.

Meta Descriptions

Having the proper keywords is a good start. If your service is location-specific, make sure to include that location in the meta description, as well as your brand name. Also remember that calls-to-action are more effective than complete sentences. (“Call today!” “You need tires from a brand you can trust.” “If you find yourself facing unwarranted charges, you need an experienced attorney by your side immediately!” Etc.) Keywords in meta descriptions are not a direct ranking signal; however, click-thru-rates CAN have an impact on where you rank!

Formatting

Who doesn’t love a good chart? Or a well-placed slider. Experiment with media and graphic elements to make your page a bit more eye-catching. Don’t force it if you can’t think of any good way to implement them, but it never hurts to experiment with a new page.

Make your Service page THE BEST

Most of your service page work beyond the basics is trial and error. If your ranking seems stagnated, try changing things around. Why did that person’s page jump from number twelve to number two while mine stayed at seven? What are they doing?

Use a keyword tracking tool, like SEMRush, Moz, or Bright Local to keep track of your rankings. Maybe you’ll find that one of your pages jumped up to the top three, and this can help you figure out what day it was that the jump happened, so you can remember what you did there. Then you can try applying that same technique to your other pages. Remember that if you only do so much for your pages, they can only do so much for you.

Most people only really pay attention to the top few search engine results. You want to make sure that your page climbs higher in search results so that your site can garner more traffic, and your business will be more successful.