My Client’s Web Enquiries Tripled When I Set Up These Pages
The non-negotiable pages you need on your site — pronto.
I was recently doing some work for a client — it had been a while since their website had a content refresh. When I took a look and realized that they had over thirty pages, I was in disbelief. They were a small business, for crying out loud!
Their web designer (despite designing a beautiful site) had created an excessive number of web pages, with content that really could have been combined or was non-essential. The user journey wasn’t logical and was lacking a clear site ‘flow.’
When you’re designing or refreshing your website, you always need to keep in mind your target audience and the expectations they could have when looking at your site.
It’s imperative to analyze whether people are consuming your site on mobile, how they’re finding you and what is helping convert. You then need to use this data to inform you of the content to highlight for your prospects.
With all this in mind, let’s take a look at what pages are essential for a website and then we’ll unpack how I practically restructured my client’s website.
The webpages you definitely need:
1. Homepage
They say not to judge a book by its cover — but I’m sorry, everyone is judging your business based on your homepage.
Your homepage needs to be aesthetically pleasing, giving an overview of what you do (make it easy, people shouldn’t be left confused at what you do), as well as including testimonies or business logos of clients you’ve worked with, a primary Call to Action (CTA) and if possible — something highlighting your point of differentiation.
Think about your customer and look at your website from their point of view. Because guess what — they may have never heard of you before, and this could be the first time they’ve stumbled upon your site. You need to dress to impress.
2. Services/products page
Highlighting what you offer is a no brainer! This includes everything from the products you ship to the services you offer.
For basic sites, it’s best practice to create a primary product page where you outline in detail what you offer and then link to individual services or categories (if you actually have enough content to include that warrants it) where users can either learn more or put your product in a shopping cart.
Ensure you include a next step or CTA so that the user knows what they should be doing after this. Please don’t leave them confused.
3. Thank you/ purchase confirmation page
Saying ‘thank you’ on a separate webpage for submitting an enquiry, or purchasing a product, will help make analytics and setting up actionable goals based on user behaviour easy!
It’s also super nice to be thanked as a consumer for taking action — plus, it’s a good place to have a CTA to follow your brand on social or sign up to a mailing list. People who have just interacted with your brand are more likely to do something else now that they’re connected.
When you create a ‘thank you’ page/URL, you can determine the rate of conversion based on those who visit particular pages and start the purchasing cycle versus those who actually convert and make it all the way to your confirmation page.
Setting this up and monitoring the end result through tools like Google Analytics goals will help you identify pain points in the User Experience and create some tests for conversion rate optimization (CRO).
4. About page
This is one of the most underestimated pages on a website but one of the most important pages that people actually do care about. At the end of the day, people want to know where their money is actually going and make sure that you’re legit.
This is the right place to include information about your company and who you are, profile or bio your staff, and include anything else you want to share with your customers.
This could include any contributions your business makes (it doesn’t make you a show-off, it just proves to the community that you care about others with your profit) and what drives your business or culture.
Give this page a personality and use it to give prospective customers a reason to choose your business over competitors.
5. Contact page
This is stock standard. You need to include all of the ways your customers can contact you should they so desire. If your ‘about’ page doesn’t have a lot of content, you could always include contact details on this page, but be sure to think about the User Experience and if this could make it confusing.
Make sure you include:
- Opening hours
- Phone number
- Social pages
- Brick and mortar locations
- Map of said location
Tip: Have your contact details in the footer of your website or menu bar, so web users never have to search too far.
6. Blog (okay, maybe this one is optional)
Having a blog on your site as part of your content marketing strategy will assist in position ranking your site on google and increase your organic search volume , which could result in leads or heightened sales volume.
It also gives you content to push out to your fans via email or on social media.
You can use your blog to provide helpful tips to your community related to using your product, or you could position the brand as an expert on particular topics. These businesses/people have used their blogs to do exactly that:
Warning: if being able to maintain a regular blog is unrealistic, don’t create one for the sake of it.
You’ll need to be able to write with consistency and have a distribution plan to get eyeballs on your content. You’re better off having nothing than a blog that’s not looked after — otherwise, you’ll give the impression that your site is hardly ever updated and cared for.
7. FAQ’s page
This isn’t relevant for everyone, but FAQ’s are beneficial for e-commerceThaHe sites (including shipping details) or subscription-based services. Minimize the number of emails or calls you might get with commonly asked questions and answer them on the page.
Tip: if you have a search function with historical search queries, you should see if there are any questions commonly asked and create FAQ’s based on this.
8. Policy pages
Your eCommerce provider or online payment gateway will require that you put on privacy policies across your site. Google favours sites with a privacy policy, and so you need to have them to cover your *bum*. Generally, you’ll need to outline:
- Privacy Policy
- Refund Policy
- Delivery Policy
- Terms & Conditions
Tip: just do a Google search for privacy policies, and you’ll find a tonne of free templates! Your bank or eCommerce provider might even provide them for you, too.
But before doing anything, read this:
What about retiring existing content?
Before making particular pages redundant and deleting them, use your analytics tool to do a content audit and determine if you have popular pages that are actually attracting traffic.
You could always update the content and keep the same URL to ensure that you’re not creating a convoluted User Experience for your web visitors.
You can also see if any other sites are linking to your site via Google Search Console, which could negatively impact the User Experience if they’re sent to a page that no longer exists.
Make sure you set up redirects (Just 301, 303 messes up all that SEO goodness) and submit specific pages to Google as outdated content, to ensure that old pages aren’t showing up on Search.
Note: Once you’ve done this, make sure to submit your XML sitemap to Google’s Search Console for indexing again.
Let’s see it in action
Let’s go back to the client who had a ridiculous mass number of web pages.
What did I do? Well, I ended up enhancing the best-performing pages based on historical data, combining or deleting unnecessary pages (based on Google Analytics), created a pillar service page and topic clusters, implemented SEO best practice site-wide and made the CTA’s more prominent across the site.
We cut down the website to five primary web pages, plus service pages and blog content.
The results? The most monthly web enquiries they’d had ever — and that was with another week of the month to go. What an easy win! Since then, they’ve hardly been able to keep up with enquiries (well, so I’ve been told).
Key Takeaways:
If you start to make these simple changes and ensure you have the following web pages, you’ll be on the way to winning more customers and creating a better experience for your web users.
It’s important to regularly review and refresh your website to stay current and up-to-date with search engine changes.
When designing or restructuring your website, make sure you include:
- Homepage
- Services/products page
- Thank you/ purchase confirmation page
- About page
- Contact page
- Blog (only if you can upkeep)
- FAQ’s page
- Policy pages
I encourage you to find websites that you love for inspiration and take note of the user journey and what your experience was like from the perspective of a potential customer.
It’s time to make sure customers are wowed by your website the first time.
