Small Business SEO - Minimum Viable Pages

In this first series covering small business SEO, we will look at one of the most important factors to get started – your website content. We’ve worked with many small businesses over the years, and one of the common things we see is that small business websites typically need more content to qualify for ranking in Google or other search/answer engines.

Something we’ve discussed internally is helping businesses get their website at least up to standards with what we call minimum viable pages or MVP. A minimum viable page is a page that describes your services and the issues that you solve, along with some use cases and evidence of outcomes. This doesn’t have to be in-depth content at this stage, but it does have to give your potential client enough information to feel confident in choosing you as a service provider. A website should have a page devoted to each service or product offering, and the areas that your business serves.

So many times, we encounter business websites that have a “services” page that list out their services, sometimes in bullet form, but do not have any content or pages for those services. If you put yourself in the customer’s seat, would that be enough information to persuade you to reach out for a quote? Probably not. But this is all too common on small business websites.

So let’s get into how a small business can go about updating their website to get to minimum viable pages.

The first thing we’re going to do is get a list together of all of our product and service offerings. What are the things we are selling to our customers? Start a new document and list out all of those things. These are going to be the pages that your website is going to have.

Next, organize these pages by importance. Organizing these pages now will help establish a priority and the navigation we are going to use to help a user find what they need. For now, we will only begin with our top-line products and services. We might eventually expand, but our target for now is going to be getting a page for the products and services I need to sell.

Beginning at the top, start selling each of your services to your target audience. We’re going to boil this down into a couple of tips to help get you started.

• Define the service. What are you providing and who are you providing it for?
• Pitch your differentiation. Why would someone want to hire you versus someone else? Why did you start the business? Lean into the things that you value and that you want to communicate to your customers.
• Provide examples. One of the secrets of conversions is allowing people to see themselves in the solution. Examples of work and challenges solved help others get a sense that you can help them too.
• Get pictures. Content isn’t just words, but it’s the full story including images and video. If you can’t get a video, you can usually get pictures. Real pictures add authenticity, but if you don’t have real pictures in the beginning, finding some royalty-free stock photography will be OK while you are getting this off the ground.
• Share feedback. Get a couple of reviews or testimonials to include on the page about the service. This will give you some social proof to add to your pitch.
• Ask for the lead. A Call to Action (CTA) like “Call Now” or a Call to Outcome (CTO) like “Get the Help You Need” can spur visitors into action if you’ve given them enough info to make a decision. Give your user an easy way to contact you like a form and a phone number (and click to call on mobile devices).

Now that we have our Pages completed, we need to create a funnel for those on our homepage. This process is going to help users quickly find the services they want as well as give us needed relevance on the homepage for these products or services. A popular way to do this is to either create a panel for each service, or a “card” or block in a grid that highlights each service. The idea is to get a heading with the service name, an image, a short description, and a link to that service page.

An important part of this will be talking to your specific audience in their specific cities or markets. For businesses that serve a specific market or city, the homepage should target your primary city, so you probably will include your city name along with the services to give Google a better idea of where you provide your service.

We also want to make sure that we update our navigation to provide links to these new pages. It might be helpful to create a service overview page that would act as a collection of all your services and link to those individual pages. This would give you a main service page, and allow you to put each individual service page as a “child” or subpage of the services page.

The end goal in this phase is to have a website with a homepage that highlights each primary service, a navigation that provides links to each main service, and a page devoted to each service. This would be a good example of a website that has minimum viable pages. This will start giving you enough to get Google’s attention as well as users, but we will need to start optimizing and improving ranking potential from here.

Up next, we will discuss some service area and location-specific landing pages to help us rank for the types of searches in our Market that are likely to produce good lead opportunities.