The layout of your website is crucial for both ranking and conversions. The Google bots are only allotted milliseconds to crawl your site and figure out what it is about, so you ideally want to make that process as simple as possible. Similarly, human visitors have the attention span of a gnat so you want them to find exactly what they came for as quickly as possible too.
The ideal structure will vary based on whether the business is a single location brick and mortar, multi-location brick and mortar, service area business, or hybrid.
Single Location Brick & Mortar Business (Customers come to the business)
This is by far the easiest to lay out. Your core structure will consist of a home page, as well as top-level service pages, contact page, privacy policy, and terms and conditions. Once you’ve established the top level service pages, you can break each of those down into more specific services.
Example:
A dentist would typically have home, contact, T&C and privacy pages. Top level service pages would typically be preventative dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, and restorative dentistry. Under preventative dentistry, you might have additional service pages for routine oral exams, xrays, annual or semi-annual cleanings. Under cosmetic dentistry, you might have service pages for veneers, teeth whitening, invisalign straighteners, etc. Under restorative dentistry, you might have root canals, bridges and crowns, dentures, implants, etc.
In the case of a single location brick & mortar, you don’t need location pages. Each of your service pages will target the city where the office is located, e.g. preventative dentistry Houston, Cosmetic Dentistry Houston, etc.
Multi Location Brick & Mortar Business
Let’s say that our good dentist has 3 separate office locations, each with its own GBP.
The multi-location brick and mortar business is not all that much different in structure, except that you will add a location page for each office. The contact info for each office would typically be on each respective page, so you would not need the stand-alone contact page in addition to the location/office pages.
For the multi-location brick & mortar, each location page will serve as a landing page for each of the offices.
Service Area Businesses (The business goes to the customer’s location)
With a service area business (SAB), our focus will be to geo-target the cities or towns in which the business services its customers. For our example, we’ll use an HVAC contractor. We’re still going to structure the top level services and sub-services the same as we did for the brick and mortar business. The only difference will be that we will be adding a landing page for each of the cities in the service area. For most contractors, there is a central point of contact for customers to call so we will have a single contact page unless they do use different contact info based on location.
Hybrid (Customers go to the business location and the business also goes to the customer’s location)
Some examples of a hybrid business would be a restaurant that offers dine-in and delivery, a flooring contractor that has a retail showroom and offers installation too, a florist that has a storefront and also makes deliveries, etc. For this type of business, we would bifurcate the sales/showroom operations and the installation operations into separate service silos. The showroom pages will focus on the physical location of the storefront, while the service city pages are used to define and target the installation service area.
Conclusion
While this may seem a bit OCD, when it comes time to keyword mapping and creating internal link SILOs, having a well-structured website is going to make your life exponentially easier. Also, and I will repeat this a LOT throughout my posts, the website is the foundation of your SEO campaign and the more solid of a foundation you have, the less work you will have to do later on!
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