Sally Newman July 1, 2021 With organic search, purchase intent is always higher when users are looking for specific services. So, while it’s important to have your homepage ranking at the top of the SERPs, you will almost certainly generate more business by increasing the visibility of your service pages for relevant queries.
In this article, we look at SEO strategies that will help you capture more organic traffic that’s ready to do business.
Categorise your services
Chances are, every service you provide has a number of sub-services or related services. For example, we offer SEO for different business types (eCommerce, enterprise, local businesses) and provide a range of sub-services, including technical SEO, mobile SEO and website migrations.
So we’ve created pages for all of these services and they’re grouped under the primary category page (subdirectory) of SEO services.
This structure tells search engines that our SEO services page is the key service page while all of the pages under this subdirectory are related.
We can also use this structure to focus our optimisation efforts on the top-level category page instead of diluting our SEO gains across multiple, related pages.
At the sub-service page level, we can target more specific keywords while keeping every page hyper-relevant and the navigational structure creates a more intuitive experience for website users.
Build internal links to service pages
Every service page (top-level and sub-category) should have plenty of links coming in from other pages on your website. With the structure above, you’re already building some healthy links to each page but you should also build internal links from blog posts and other pages on your website.
Internal links help describe the structure of your website to search engines and they also distribute link equity to other pages. So, when one of your blog posts earns inbound links, you can pass along some link equity to the relevant pages you’ve linked to.
This is particularly important for service pages because it’s difficult to earn inbound links (do-follow) for service pages so you want to pass along as much equity from your outreach and blog content as possible.
Create FAQs for each service page
By adding FAQs to service pages, you can optimise for featured snippets and the People also ask section of Google Search.
You can also use FAQ sections on your page to target long-tail keywords alongside the primary keyword of your service page. For example, we’ve identified “how can I rank my business for local SEO?” and “how do I boost local SEO at scale?” as long-tail keywords and we use the FAQ section on our local SEO page to address these questions.
Optimise service pages for local search
If your services are performed on-site or at fixed locations, then optimising service pages for local search can gain crucial visibility. For example, a window repair service has to be performed at business or residential locations so, even if you operate across the entire country, your customers are going to be searching for services that cover their specific area. They’re searching for “window repair service near me” or “window repair service [location]”
If your business only operates in one area, you can optimise all of your service pages for the same location to maximise local visibility.
If you need help with this, watch our tutorial, How to optimise your Google My Business page, below:
If you cover the whole country or multiple locations, optimising for local search involves more work.
Instead of managing one location in Google My Business, you create a location group and create a profile page for each location, which you can optimise for audiences in every area – including local opening times, images and posts.
With your Google My Business profile optimised for multiple locations, you can also create location pages for each service to cover your most important areas.
For example, if we go back to our window repair example, you could create locations as a top-level category page for each service, as shown below:
Alternatively, you could use the service pages as your top-level page and include location pages as your subdirectories, if you want to prioritise the services over locations.
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