The Nine Pages Every Small Business Website Needs

A small business website is not a brochure. It is the part of the sales conversation that happens before you pick up the phone.

These nine pages do that job. Not every site needs all nine on day one, but every site needs the first four.

1. Home

One sentence saying what you do and where you do it, one clear way to get in touch, and proof that you are real: photos of finished work, a review, your town. Most owners try to fit everything here. The home page's job is to answer "am I in the right place" and hand the visitor to the page that answers their question.

2. Services

What you sell, in the words a customer uses. If you install three kinds of fence, that is three short sections, or three pages if each one is searched on its own. Prices or "from" prices if you can. A quote form at the bottom of each.

3. Where you work

A page per town if you serve several. This is one of the few kinds of page that reliably brings in local searches, because "fence company Dublin Ohio" is what somebody types, and a page about that is the page that can answer it.

4. Contact

Phone number and hours at the top, a form with four fields not fourteen, the address if customers visit you, and what happens after they press send. Tap-to-call on a phone.

5. About

Who they are dealing with, how long you have done it, licences and insurance, and one photo of a real person. Owners skip this page. Customers read it.

6. Reviews

Five to ten real reviews, with names, and a link to the profile they came from. This is usually the last page somebody reads before they call.

7. Pricing or how pricing works

If you cannot publish numbers, publish the shape of it: what a typical job costs, what changes the price, what the deposit is. Vague pricing sends people to whoever will say a number.

8. Questions

The eight questions you answer on the phone every week, written down once. This is also the page that can show up as an answer in a search result.

9. Advice, or a blog

One page per question your customers ask. Every one of them is a page that can be found for a search nobody else in your town has written for.

The four pages that usually cost you

• A news page nobody updates. A page last touched in 2022 tells a customer something you would rather they did not know.
• A separate team page for one person. Put it in About and keep the site shorter.
• A services page for work you do not want. You will get the calls.
• A gallery with forty unlabelled photos. Curate eight, label them, and say what the job was. That is what wins.

Nine pages is a site you can keep good. Forty is a site you will stop updating.