Service pages offer your business an important opportunity to inform potential customers/clients about the services your business offers. How you present your services could be the difference between someone picking up the phone or filling in that enquiry form, and someone clicking away.

Why create service pages?

As we’ve already mentioned, service pages provide an opportunity to inform visitors about your business’s services; however, there are other functions that a service page has for your website.

Service pages can also:

• Bring users with relevant queries to the site, and persuade them to stay on the site by providing them with relevant information to match their search query
• Explain why users who are looking for a particular service should choose yours rather than a competitor
• Provide potential customers/clients with confidence about using your service
• Encourage potential customers/clients to commit to make a purchase or get in touch with your business

Service pages also play a vital role in informing Google about your services to ensure that your business appears in favourable places within its search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Here, we share some tips that tend to be forgotten when writing service pages for your website to ensure you create something that wows your site visitors with what you have to offer.

1. Match your users’ intent

When users search online, they expect results to be in line with their desires - that’s user intent. Users will likely be making one of the following search queries when they come across your site:

• Informational - this type of search query will involve looking for information centred around a problem to try and understand how it can be solved
• Navigational - these queries have users searching for a brand name or using internal site search to find relevant information from a site
• Transactional - users making this type of search query will have likely completed their research and be ready to invest in a service 

Understanding these ‘wants’ is crucial to nailing user intent. Unfortunately, many sites tend to do a bad job of this, producing content that swings too heavily in one direction by either solely answering transactional or informational queries. By taking a balanced approach, you’ll score better rankings, improved conversions and more opportunities to reach your target audience.

To create content that targets your audience and provides a balanced response to search queries, it’s all about keywords. The right keywords can make or break your content.

2. Let users know they’re in the right place

Visitors to your website won’t necessarily come straight into it through a service page; they may have come through your home page, a blog post or via social media. So when they come to your service page, make sure they immediately know they are in the right place. Make this clear by giving them a top-level view of what you do, the unique value you offer and a call to action to persuade them to choose your services over a competitors. 

What’s more, users that are further along the buying journey will have everything they need to make a decision, including how to get in touch with you.

3. Create a clear structure

While there is no single structure that works for every service page, it’s important to provide visitors with a clear format to help them navigate through the page. Most users will likely start by reading the headings, list titles, bullet points and any other formatting to see if the page is going to satisfy their needs. If it does, they’ll either scroll back to the top of the page or skip to the section that most interests them. 

You should also be conscious of not overwhelming your visitors with large blocks of text by breaking them up with white space or visual elements to keep them engaged and interested. If you need to go into a lot of detail about a service, consider what’s the most important content to be displayed (i.e. content that’s likely to make them engage with your services) and include any secondary information on separate pages. Don’t forget to link your supportive content from the service page! 

4. Build trust

Trust plays a large role in the selling of services as, unlike with a faulty product, services cannot be returned. Therefore, potential customers/clients may worry about what recourse they will have if they’re unhappy with a service they’ve engaged with, even if your company offers excellent customer service. So, in addition to selling the benefits of your services to users, you also need to advertise your qualifications and experience to demonstrate that they can trust your work.

Some ways of helping to build trust with potential customers/clients include:

• Providing examples of previous work you’ve done via case studies, testimonials and reviews
• Ensuring any official accreditations or certifications are included
• Adding details of the personnel who are experts in the service by linking to relevant profile pages with career history, experience and specialisms

Another way of building trust is to connect with your customer - understand your target audience’s personas, identify their pain points and consider how your service will help them overcome these concerns. It also won’t hurt to speak directly to your customer by shifting the focus onto them, rather than your company by using sentences that feature ‘you’ and ‘your’ as opposed to ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ - nobody likes it when they talk about themselves too much! 

5. Avoid jargon

Marketing and sales teams can fall into a trap of using jargon because they believe buzzwords will make them sound like experts, which, in turn, will make people trust them. However, the opposite is true - jargon turns people off. 

While it may be necessary to include some industry-specific terms in your service page content, too much jargon will stop people from listening, even if they know what the words mean. That’s because our brains respond better to content that is written in clear, simple language so we can find the information we require quickly and easily.

One of the smartest things you can do when creating service pages is vet all your content, strip out the jargon, and make it as easy as possible for people to understand what you do and how it will help them. While this might sound difficult if you’re covering complex subjects, the companies that make their services easy to understand will stand out from their competitors.

How I-COM can help  

Your service page is your chance to showcase what makes your offering great and for many businesses, it’s not as easy as you might think. However, if you don’t spend the time crafting wonderfully informative, persuasive and trustworthy service pages, you will find it difficult to get new customers.

I-COM’s specialist content marketing team has provided content services to B2B and B2C companies of all sizes in all sectors for well over a decade. Every day we produce web content, including service pages, on behalf of our clients who trust us to explain their services, communicate their unique selling points and persuade visitors to engage with their services. But don’t just take our word for it, take a look at the results we’ve helped clients generate through our copywriting skills here.

If you’re interested in creating engaging and effective service page content, get in touch with I-COM today to find out how we can help you.