In creating pages for your website, there’s a balancing act you’ll likely become involved with: writing for your visitors (potential clients) or writing for the search engines (Google, etc.). If you focus solely on the former, you’ll have great content, but not many people who will actually see it. Focus on the latter and you may have many people finding your site, but few who stick around long enough to do anything (i.e., take action toward making a purchase or contacting you).

In selling your services or products on the web, you are certainly wise to elaborate on their benefits, in detail, in a compelling manner, with plenty of testimonials. If done properly, this often requires a fair bit of copy (text).

If you offer several products or services, theoretically each of those can have its own detailed page, which the search engines can find and index separately. This means there are many more ways that potential customers can find your site. It also might mean that Google will consider your site more “important” thus bumping up the site’s rankings.

Here’s a practical example:

Say you are a massage therapist, who offers several type of massage: acupressure, reflexology, shiatsu, Swedish massage, etc. Your site could have one page (“Services”), which talks about all of these types of massage that you offer. If someone were to do a Google search for “massage” and your geographical location, that page should appear in the results pages. But, it might not rank very high, especially if there is a lot of competition in your geographic location.

But…

If you split each of your individual services into separate, detailed pages – linked either from the menu or from a main Services page – then you would have one page talking specifically about acupressure, one talking about reflexology, one talking about shiatsu, one about Swedish massage, and so on. By “detailed” I don’t necessarily mean that they have to be very long. Even a couple descriptive paragraphs, the cost, perhaps a photo, and a “call to action” for people who want to book an appointment for that type of massage would suffice.

What you’ve got now are several “ins” to your site. So, if someone does a search for “Swedish massage” plus your geographical region, that page of your site should appear (hopefully, fairly highly) on the search engine results pages. Same for each of the types of massage you offer.

See what’s happening?

Instead of one way for potential clients to find you, you have several. Google will see each of these specific types of massage pages as a specialized page, so they’ll have high weight for their specific keywords. If you dilute your page by talking about all your services, that page won’t get much weight, if any, for the specific types of massage you offer. Individual, detailed massage pages should.

There’s no reason why you can’t also include on your site a main Services page, speaking in general terms about the types of massage you offer, with links to each of the detailed massage pages. It’s always better to have too much (even repeated) information than not enough. Just make sure to have as many of those well-written, individual detailed pages as you can.

Try this with each type of product or service you offer and I’m willing to bet you’ll get a lot more quality traffic to your site.