Creating Service Pages that Rank and Convert: A Step-by-Step Guide

Before your website can convert visitors into customers, it needs to attract those visitors. Creating service pages that rank on Google is a critical step to getting that done.

Creating high-converting service pages is actually a lot simpler than you might think. You just need to do it step-by-step. Think of it like a construction checklist. You wouldn’t build a house by just randomly doing construction tasks out or order and whenever you felt like it.

I’m going to take you through a 4 step process to creating service pages that both rank – and convert

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

First off, you need to know your target audience. For instance, if you’re reading this article – you probably are: A small business owner that has a website but is looking to increase your rank on Google so you can land more jobs. Am I close? Of course I am! That’s the intended audience for this article. Literally everything I’m typing is FOR YOU, Mr. Contractor.

First you need to create a buyer persona. There’s plenty of in-depth articles available all over on creating buyer personas, try this one from HubSpot – so we won’t cover it in detail here. What you need to know is that people buy for different reasons.

Say you’re a landscaper. You can have two people who both spend $20,000 on a new landscape but for two different reasons. Customer A is spending the money because he wants to one-up his neighbor who just installed the koi pond in the front yard. Whereas, Customer B just has disposable retirement income and wants to lower his tax bracket before the end of the year.

You can gather that speaking to these two groups will require a different pitch if you will.

You’ll need to first identify your target audience, and then write your service page copy for that audience.

One caveat: Let’s say you want to appeal to both the younger professional dad and the retirement grandpa - you’re better off writing content blogs for each of them and then directing them to your service page.

Step 2: Conduct Keyword Research

This cannot be stressed enough. You have to research the keywords you’re going after. Here’s the thing - not all keywords are ranked equally.

For instance – ”Landscape design” will be MUCH harder to rank for than “Landscape architect in New Bern”.

While the second keyword is easier to rank for, it probably will have far fewer monthly searches than the first. It’s a balancing act of:

Keyword volume vs. Keyword strength

Well how do you do all this research? How do you know which keywords to rank for?

Here’s a few primers on how we do this in our Search Engine Optimization for our clients:

1. Identify existing keyword searches that you are coming up for, but not being clicked on in Search Console.
2. Find other keywords that are related using a keyword tool such as AHREFS or SEMRUSH
3. Place all those keywords in one of their tools, and it will tell you the monthly search volume and keyword strength
4. Find other service pages that already rank high for the top keywords

If you’re going to target the highest strength keywords, be sure to create service pages that offer a unique perspective than the competing service pages that already rank

Remember, the higher the search volume – the more precise your service page will need to be.

Step 3: Optimize Service Page Structure

Keep all of your service pages with the same 5 part structure I’ll explain below. Bonus, if you’re using a CMS platform such as Webflow, all you need to do is create ONE service page template, and all of your services will follow the same structure! This is exactly how we build all of our custom website designs.

Here are the 5 parts to a great service page structure:

1. Long form, focused on the benefits (not the features)
2. Proof in the form of testimonials or reviews
3. Images and/or Illustrations
4. Hierarchy of typography - don’t make everything a big paragraph. Break it up.
5. CALL TO ACTION - this cannot be overstated. You’ll want to guide them to the next step

• Discuss the importance of writing compelling service descriptions
• Provide tips for writing effective service descriptions
• Provide examples of effective service descriptions

Step 4: Write SEO-Friendly Landing Pages

It should be noted that the term service page, webpage, and landing page are used synonymously. For this purpose though, we’re calling them landing pages - because ideally your individual service page is where they should have landed on from Google.

To make your landing page SEO friendly, you’ll want to make sure it has the following components:

1. Optimized Title
2. Optimized meta description
3. Open graph image
4. Proper H1, H2, H3 heading structure
5. Use of bullet points, numbered lists, and pull quotes if you can

The title and meta description are the blue link and summary that will show up on a Google search result page.

So now what?

Well, by now you should know how to create service pages that rank and convert. If you missed some of it though, here’s the steps laid out in order:

1. Define your target audience
2. Conduct keyword research
3. Optimize service page structure
4. Write SEO friendly landing pages

It’s truly simpler than it seems. Of course, in 2023, there are tons of AI writing assistants to help you out. NOTE that I said ASSISTANT. Google has been clear about not using an AI tool to just spit out a full blog. It’s not original content, and it’s generally not very helpful - it’s too bland.

I’ve found that using AI as an assistant works best. I used two different tools to help me write this article.

Copy.AI to help create the outline.

• It gave me 6 steps, I narrowed it to 4.
• Then I took each step and had it write a bullet point for each step.
• From there, I wrote the entire article
• It’s sort of like a journal prompt but for long form content

Then I used StoryChief.io to write the article.

• There was no AI used from StoryChief (though they do have that now)
• StoryChief is a blog editor, it helps you keep the structure of the article SEO friendly
• Plus it offers several other tools for readability, and other optimization tips.

Another option you can do is just outsource the copywriting to someone else.

Copywriters are dime a dozen though. You can literally find a copywriter for $5 on sites like fiverr.com - but you WILL get what you pay for.

In other cases, I’ve seen articles written for as much as $300-400 per article.

We’ve worked with many different copywriters over the years, and have a good list we use. If you need help managing your SEO, give us a shout.