A well-planned site structure serves two purposes.
- It makes your local business website easy for search engines to understand.
- Second, it provides an efficient user experience that maximizes lead conversion.
Unfortunately, business owners and designers spend too much time worrying about logos, color schemes, and fonts. Instead, or in addition, they should spend spend adequate time planning an effecient structure for their website.
Building a website isn’t cheap.
And you wouldn’t invest in one if you didn’t expect it to pay for itself tenfold sooner rather than later.
If you don’t build a proper foundation, you will pay later in lost business and/or redesining your website to get it to accomplish what you want it to.
In this article, we’re going to discuss:
- What is site structure?
- Why is it important for my local business?
- And lastly, how do I create it?
What Is Site Structure?
Site structure refers to the URLs of each page on a website, the navigation/menu system, how pages link to each other, and the path the consumer is led through as they go from a website visitor -> lead -> customer.
Why Is Site Structure Important?
Site structure is how SEO and website design can work together to create the best user experience for your website visitors.
Your site structure is like the chassis of a car in that it will facilitate the growth of your site. In this analogy, your engine would be the quality of the content you put within that site structure.
I big mistake I see almost every local business make is skipping out on properly planning their site structure. What eventually happens is their website limits the growth potential of their business.
What happens when your business expands to a different location?
When you add a few more services to your offering?
These are questions you need to ask on day one.
The Ten Pages Every Local Business Website Needs
Now that you understand what site structure is, let’s dive deeper into the optimal site structure for local businesses.
After building dozens of local sites from scratch and doing SEO on countless more, we’ve discovered that there are 10 pages that a local business may utilize on their site.
You can see what they are in tabs below.
1. Homepage
Your Homepage’s main goals are to:
- Rank for your money keyword
- Pass link juice to your location hub & service hub pages
- Display social proof like testimonials, work photos, and case studies
- Move “not” ready-to-go leads through the customer journey
- Convert ready-to-go leads
This is easily the most powerful page on your site, meaning best practice is to pass of “link juice” to as many of your other pages on your site.
This process of internal linking will also provide the best user experience. People come to your homepage to find the page with the solution they need.
For example, we’re going to create a fake company so you can see an example of what the site structure should look like.
I want you to meet, Bob, he runs a painting company located in Miami.
His homepage URL is:
Bobspainting.com
Info Pages
Info pages are designed to move site visitors through the customer journey on your site by passing along vital information about your company and what you can do for them.
Your info pages are NOT designed to drive significant traffic from Google, however they’re still important for SEO and user experience. These pages add depth to your site, which may increase your credibility with search engines.
Examples of info pages include:
- About us page
- FAQ page
- Team/staff page
- Portfolio page
- Testimonial/Reviews page
These pages are designed to do one thing.
Build comfort with the end user.
It will accomplish this by answering questions like:
Can I trust this company?
Do they have what I’m looking for?
Have they helped people like me?
It would be pointless to do the tenious SEO work, wait 6 months for traffic, just for your site to fail at turning visitors into customers.
3. Location Hub
You need location pages if you run a service-based business or have multiple locations.
A location hub page is designed to nest all your location pages and provide customers with a quick snapshot of your service area.
We suggest you use this URL structure for your location hub page:
Site.com/locations/
Bob would use:
Bobspainting.com/locations/
We’ve seen sites use URLs like:
“Site.com/areas-we-serve/” and “site.com/where-we-work/,” but your best to keep this as short as possible (in length & # of words)
4. Location Pages
Location pages are designed to nest your Location pages.
Here’s an example of what we’d recommend Bob do.
Bobspainting.com/locations
- Bobspainting.com/locations/Hialeah
- Bobspainting.com/locations/Doral
- Bobspainting.com/locations/Coral-Gables
- Bobspainting.com/locations/Miami-Gardens
- Bobspainting.com/locations/Homestead
A couple of key points:
Again, we’re following the theme of keeping these URLs as short as possible. There’s no need to include anything other than location/city. Google is smart enough to know that Bob’s a painter, so there’s no need to get cute by adding extra keywords.
There is no need to create a city page for your money keyword. In Bob’s case, the money keyword would be “Painters Miami”. His homepage will be designed to rank for this keyword.
✅ Bobspainting.com/locations/hialeah
❌ Bobspainting.com/locations/hialeah-painting-company
5. Service Hub
Your service hub page is designed to nest all of your service pages.
This is pretty simple.
- Bobspaining.com/services/
Again, keep this short and avoid using URL’s with more than one word like:
❌ Bobspaining.com/our-services/
❌. Bobspaining.com/painting-services/
❌. Bobspaining.com/what-we-do/
6. Service Pages
Service pages are designed to rank your main services in your main or “money-maker” location.
Since Bob’s business is located in Miami and naturally makes the majority of its money from customers in Miami, it would make sense for his homepage and services pages to rank in Miami.
Here’s how Bob would do it:
Bobspainting.com/services
- Bobspainting.com/services/exterior
- Bobspainting.com/services/interior
- Bobspainting.com/services/residential
- Bobspainting.com/services/commercial
A question you may have is, “What happens if my business is located outside of Miami, but I do the majority of my business in Miami?”
Good question.
You have three options:
- Move your business to Miami
- Stay and create a kick*** Miami location page
- Stay and attempt to rank your homepage and service page in Miami
I sincerely wish I could give one good answer to this question, but you’ll have to just use your intuition on this one.
7. Blog Hub
Your Blog Hub page is designed to nest your blog posts and categories so site visitors looking for info can find what they want and stay on your site.
If you check out our blog, you’ll notice that it’s categorized by topic making it super easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
For Bob, this would look like:
Bobspainting.com/blog
8. Blog Posts
Blogging isn’t mission-critical to local business SEO if you’re in an uncompetitive niche. However, you may need to introduce content marketing if you’re in a hypercompetitive niche or you just want to dominate your market.
How do you do that?
Currently, our content marketing strategy for local clients is this:
- Research low-keyword difficulty blog topics we can easily rank for.
- Use the skyscraper technique to write content better than what’s already ranking.
- Drive a few backlinks to these content pieces
The end goal is traffic gains, but not to turn blog readers into customers. In fact, the point is to increase the traffic and domain authority of the site so we can pass equity to your money pages (home page, service, location)
The second reason to blog is to build local relevance for your site. Announce when you partner with a local charity, complete an interesting job, or celebrate your employee of the month.
9. Lead Generation
Lead generation pages are designed to do one thing and one thing only – collect leads.
These pages are not designed to rank on Google. In fact, we’ll no-index these pages to assure searches can’t find them on Google.
Now you may be wondering, “Carlton, if these pages don’t rank on Google, how are people going to find them?”
Simple, from other traffic sources like:
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Social Media Posts
- Email Campaigns
- Other Direct Marketing Channels
Basically, you’ll send traffic to a lead generation page directly after pitching them an offer to buy your services. The only two options they’ll have on this page is to take the next step (call, fill out a form, put in their credit card) or leave the page.
