I’m sure you’re thinking that this seems completely counter-intuitive, I know. Why on Earth would you want to remove the page that lists everything that your company does? The reason is that this page makes us lazy and makes us think that we’ve provided the visitor to our website with everything they could possibly need, and that’s simply not true.
The Past & Present
Over the last five years, websites have continued to evolve in a number of ways. More importantly though is the changing way in which visitors and potential customers are finding our websites and no longer is a user being directed to your homepage to work their way through from top to bottom. They used to:
- Look through what the company was “about”
- They would visit the profiles of your key staff
- They would go through the information that you provide in your list of services, and
- Then ideally get in touch through a contact page. Not anymore. Who has time for all of that!?
When someone uses Google or another search engine, they are directed to pages deep into your website (blog posts, sub-sub-sub-pages, and potentially indexes you didn’t even realize you owned) which are catered to their search query exactly. The majority of users nowadays simply want to answer one question: Will you provide what I need for a company like mine or a person like me? (Which is what they searched for in the first place). They haven’t searched for “Lawyer”, they’ve searched for “Defence attorney traffic accident”, and they haven’t searched for “Container desiccants”, they’ve searched for “How to prevent mold in storage containers”.
While at first glance it would appear that a page of services would tick this box, it’s simply not customized enough anymore.
You can do all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the world, but if someone arrives to your website and the page they land on doesn’t cater to their personal needs, they’re immediately put off and not engaged with what you’re offering. If for example there’s information that speaks to an alternate segment of your audience, or if there’s information that seems too much for their needs, they are looking at the page you provided through a lens of “prove to me why I’m wrong in my assumption you’re not right for me” as opposed to “this seems to be close to what I’m looking for, I want to know more”.
For this reason, it’s important that we look at building more content out that goes through your major consumer or customer groups.
The Future
If you service a particular range of clients then you should be creating pages like “How we help GROUP A” or “What we do for GROUP B”. This, for many, is going to be a difficult exercise because you may serve a wide range of potential clients and you want to grow that, but knowing specific groups of who you are selling to is absolutely fundamental to your business and you should at least have an idea of where you could start. Your sales team knows because they’re getting calls from different types of potential clients, and if you look through their data, you can generally track the common questions that are asked by different groups. Use this!
These pages will include lists of services, but their messaging will be targeted and most importantly concise. This should actually make creating these pages much easier because you don’t have to try and target multiple groups and consider how others might interpret the information.
In addition to these significantly customized pages, you should have a category of your blogs catering to these audiences. You should be taking the questions that your sales team has been asked over and over and turning them into blog posts. This is the easiest way to generate content because you don’t have to come up with the questions yourself, they’re already there!
Sure, you can leave the “Services” page somewhere on your site, and you can direct people to it when it’s absolutely necessary, but always keep in mind how you would feel arriving to a long list as opposed to a page that really fits your needs. Monitor what you’re doing when you arrive to a website, yourself, and tell me that you don’t wish you could find something that was specifically catering just to you!
If you would like some help with discovering your audiences and changing this content, talk to us!