It’s fun to slap together a new “service” page and see fast results, because most of the time it doesn’t work out that way. More often, you’ll need to put in a little more gruntwork before that new page can help produce organic rankings, Google Maps rankings, and customers.
As usual, your process counts for all the marbles. I can sum up the basic process: Make your new page hard for Google to miss, make it hard for would-be customers to dismiss, study your results from multiple angles over time, and improve the page over time. If you pull it off, you’ll create another little (or big) source of local visibility that makes you less dependent on the finicky Google Maps results, while (paradoxically) helping you perform better on the map.
Exactly how do you do that? Here is a 30-point checklist of what you should do after writing, building, and roughly optimizing a new “service” page. Not all of these points will apply to every situation, but most will.
Steps to take right after you’ve built the “service” page (if you didn’t do them during your initial build):
1. Link to it on all relevant other “service” or “product” pages.
2. Link to it on all relevant “location” or “city” pages.
3. Link to it in your footer links. Even if you’ve got 117 other links down there.
4. Add it to your main menu, if possible. (If you have tons of “service” pages and other pages and you’re using WordPress, I can’t recommend Max Mega Menu highly enough.)
5. Link to it on all relevant FAQs on your site.
6. Dig through Google Search Console for pages that already rank for the terms you want this new page to rank for, and add links on those pages to the new page.
7. Link to it in relevant blog posts (if you have them), particularly in posts that already get some search visibility or traffic.
8. Link relevant photos (on your other pages) to it. That is, if people click on a given photo of whatever your service or product is, they end up on the page you just created. (If you’re using WordPress, just search your media library for keywords relevant to the service page you just created, and hyperlink relevant photos to the new page.)
9. Scour your site for unlinked mentions of that service, and link those to the new page.
10. Double-check its title tag and make sure you’ve shoehorned in a couple of your HIGH-priority search terms. Don’t worry about going too long, and don’t think too hard about exactly what those terms are. When in doubt, defer to your intuition, your knowledge of your customers and market, and what the “queries” report in Google Search Console tells you. You can revise the title tag later, and probably should. If your wheels are spinning and you don’t know what should go in your title tag, use this free AI tool from Ahrefs to get into 1st gear.
11. Add your service area to it. List all of the cities and towns you consider priorities.
12. Check it out on your phone. Just make sure it’s navigable, all the important main-menu links show up, important links are easy to click, and doesn’t look like the neighborhood cat got to it.
13. Check its load time. Don’t get hung up on all of the recommendations. As I tell my clients all the time (and as I will cover in a post at some point), a fast page doesn’t help you as much as you might think. Remove or shrink giant photos, remove sliders, pare down your plugins to the bare minimum, and call it a day.
14. Submit it for indexation in Google Search Console.
15. Add that service as a “service” on your Google Business Profile page. May help your Google Maps visibility for niche terms.
16. 301-redirect any underperforming older versions of that page (or blog posts) to the page you just created.
17. Look for existing backlinks you can point to that page. Let’s say you donated to a local charity a while back and got a link to your homepage, and let’s say your homepage is doing OK on links. Consider asking the organization to link to the new “service” page. Sometimes it’s that easy.
18. Copy and paste customers’ reviews onto it. If possible, feature reviews from customers who got that service from you. Include a link back to where the customer posted the review, so would-be customers can read the original and know it’s not lab-grown meat.
19. Add relevant photos to it. Take, create, or buy those photos if necessary.
20. Embed relevant videos on it, if applicable. Create them if necessary. Effective types of videos include those of jobs you’ve completed, case-studies, and FAQs you address.
21. Link to it in the descriptions of any relevant videos you’ve got on YouTube.
22. Create spin-off pages of it.
23. Translate it into another language (that you, your staff, or customers speak with customers) and add the translated version to your site. Optimize the resulting page in the same way you did the primary-language version of the page.
24. Set up Mouseflow or a similar video-replay tool and study how visitors behave on the page.
Steps to take 2-6 months later:
25. Study the page again in Google Search Console. Make sure it’s been indexed. Sift through the “queries” report and see what it’s getting blips of impressions (and maybe clicks) for.
26. Check the Google Maps results for competitors who rank for that term. Report any spammers.
27. Look for more opportunities to add internal links to the new page. Never stop doing this.
28. Expand the page if possible. Add service options (e.g. after-hours), add-on services, FAQs, reviews, photos, videos, and links to other relevant pages. Where appropriate, grab that content or other content from related pages or videos on your site that don’t perform well.
29. Get a couple of new backlinks to it, if possible.
30. Check your Google Business Profile page and see whether Google has automatically added it as “service.” Even if you’ve added the service manually yourself, approving Google’s auto-suggestions may help you pop into the 3-pack for those search terms or for similar search terms. Clearly Google’s already leaning in that direction. Anyway, if Google hasn’t, tune up your H1 tag to focus on your big-money term(s). I’ve found that Google tends to scrape the H1s, rather than title tags or submenu items or bullet-points, as a way to auto-populate your “services.”
Sometimes just writing and building the new page was a ton of work, and the last thing you want to do is even more work. It may not feel like progress in the same way, but the follow-through is critical. It may look and feel unfortunate, but you need to grapple.
What kind of follow-through has worked best for you after you’ve added new “service” pages to your site? Anything you found not to help much? Any items I forgot on the 30-point checklist? Any questions as to why I suggest what I suggest? Leave a comment!
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