There’s no need to overthink your website.
In fact, simple websites have higher conversion rates because they focus on what visitors want rather than getting bogged down in overly complex design and features.
As a micro business owner or sole trader, you probably offer a service or range of services – this is what your visitors want to find when they come to your site.
There are three main ways people will find you:
- Searching for a problem your service fixes
- Searching for your service by name (e.g., Dogwalking)
- Searching for your brand name, as they have already heard about your business
Depending on what they search for, they may land on your homepage, an about page or a specific service page of your website.
Wherever they land, it’s crucial that your site’s structure is designed to prompt them to make an inquiry before they return to the search results.
You’d be surprised how quickly website visitors leave your site if they can’t find the answer they are looking for, so structure and on-page content are crucial to conversions.
A typical small business sitemap
No two sites are the same, so this is an example
Homepage
This is the main page of your website and often the one that ranks #1 for your brand or company name.
This will generally include broad information about your business and services, news and a call to action.
- Header section
- Introduction text
- Services list
- Accrediations
- Tesitimonals
- Call-to-action
What these sections actually look like depends very much on your own business; you may have more images and less text or vice versa, or may use graphics or icons to depict services, for example.
About page
This page is generally about your business, the team, history, and so on; it’s one that visitors often visit before they make an inquiry.
So this is an important page – a visitor may have made the decision to contact you regarding their requirements, but they check your about page before they do so to ensure you’re a good fit.
- Header section
- Introduction to the business
- History of the business
- Notable accreditations, awards, or insurance cover
- Team members with full or short bios
- News and/or events
- Call-to-action
This page will let visitors know that you are established, experienced, credible, and trustworthy.
Services page(s)
Whether you have one main service page or a service landing page with sub-pages depends very much on your own business.
In general, these pages should contain:
- Header section
- Introduction to the service(s)
- Services list – either as a grid with links to single pages or on this main page
- Accrediations (again)
- Testimonials (one for each service if you have more than one
- The people delivering the service (if there’s more than one person)
- Call-to-action
If you offer one service, then one service page will suffice. But if you have a range of services and can write sufficient content for each, we’d break them out into sub-pages with their own unique URLs for better ranking.
Case studies or solutions
Most visitors will check whether you have done something similar to what they want.
This content can be covered as case studies (for project-based work), solutions (for service-based work), or use cases (for product-type work).
What you want here is for the visitor to resonate with your content and relate themselves to one of your pages – when visitors feel the page has connected with their unique requirements, conversion rates improve.
- Header section
- Summary section
- Problem and solution
- Benefits (not features to the client)
- Results (if possible)
- Testimonial
- Related services
- Related blogs
- Call-to-action
Your visitor knows you provide the service or product they are looking for; now they get to see how you have delivered to others like them.
Blogs
Articles, insights, blogs or whatever you want to call them, a blog is essential to your site if you want it to rank.
Your blog helps boost the total number of URLs on your website and helps search engines and artificial intelligence understand your site, your knowledge, and your experience. Blogs can also be organised into categories to better help the search engines as they serve to curate your content.
Blog posts (or whatever you want to call them should contain:
- Header section
- Summary section
- Contents section
- Main text content
- Images, charts, bullet-point lists, videos
- Pull-quotes
- Testimiontials
- Internal links
- External links
- Related blogs
- Call-to-action
Blogs do not have to be long, but they do need to demonstrate your expertise and should always internally link to a relevant service page. Never use AI to write blog content, it will do more harm than good.
Contact page
So people can contact you: your website is legally required to display contact details, including an address.
Your contact page should be simple and easy to use, it should never be overdesigned and should display:
- Header section
- Phone number(s)
- One email address to contact
- Company address
- Company information (registered number, VAT number, etc)
- Contact form
- Opening hours (if applicable)
- Supporting text below all this (to improve local ranking)
A well-written contact page can rank very well locally for niche searches – it’s not just another page, it’s very important for all your SEO efforts.
Other important pages that your site must have to rank effectively.
There are extra pages that people often forget to include on their websites that are really important for ranking and credibility.
In addition to what you might consider the main content of your site, the pages below give your site a more professional appearance and are all noticed by the search engines:
- Privacy page – a legal requirement
- Cookies – again, a legal requirement, you should declare what cookies your site uses at a bare minimum
- Terms page – terms and conditions for using the website
- Thank you page – used to redirect form submissions as a solid confirmation that you have received their enquiry
- Sitemap – a page that lists all your content – handy for both people and bots
If you leave these pages off your site, you are both breaking the law and missing out on important ways to further enhance your SEO and how visitors perceive your business.
David Foreman
Dave has been developing WordPress sites for over 20 years and heads Toast, a full service digital marketing agency based in Oxfordshire. He's worked on every type of website project you can think of and has a passion for businesses to have better websites.
