Pages you should have: a guide by business type

A website can look fine and still leave a visitor unable to tell what you do, where you do it or how to reach you. That's a question about pages, not colour. So: what pages should a website have? This guide answers it, then points you to a page for your own type of business.

Start with the basics. A small site needs the handful of pages that do real work.

1. A home page. It should say, in plain words, who you are, what you do and where. A stranger should get that in a few seconds. Link out from it to everything else.
2. One page per service. This is the big one. If you offer three distinct services, give each its own page, with its own explanation of what's involved. Don't cram them into one long "Services" page and hope for the best.
3. An about page. People want to know who they're dealing with. Say who runs the business, how it works and what you stand behind. Keep it factual.
4. A contact page. Phone, email, address if customers visit you, and a form if you want one. Make it easy. Nobody enjoys hunting for a phone number.
5. Reviews or testimonials, but only if they're real. If you have genuine customer feedback, show it. If you don't, leave the page out. A made-up review is worse than no review.
6. FAQs built from real customer questions. Think of what people actually ask you. Those questions are your content. Don't invent ones you wish they'd ask.
7. Company details in the footer. If you're a UK limited company, this isn't optional. GOV.UK says you must show your registered number, your registered office address, where the company is registered, and that it is a limited company, on business letters, order forms and websites. Put it in the footer and it's done.

That's the core.

Here's the trap. Once you know pages matter, it's tempting to make lots of them. One for every town. One for every variation of a service. Dozens, quickly, with only the name swapped out.

Don't. Google's spam policy treats scaled content abuse as spam. That means many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings, however they were created. Written by hand, by a template or by software, the policy doesn't care. If the point of the page is to game search rather than to help a person, it's the wrong page.

So the test is simple. Does this page rest on something real? A service you actually provide. An area you actually cover. A question customers actually ask. If yes, build it. If you'd struggle to say what's genuinely useful about it, skip it.

The same thinking applies to web addresses. Google advises URLs with words useful to users. So /services/boiler-repair beats /page-47. It tells a visitor, and a search engine, what's there before anyone clicks.

None of this is glamorous, but each page rests on something real.

You don't need a guide to get started. You need four lists. Make them honestly.

1. What customers ask on the phone. Listen to the calls, or just think back over the last few. Those questions are your FAQs and often your service pages.
2. The services you really offer. Not what you'd like to offer, not what a competitor lists. What you actually do. Each real, distinct service is a candidate for its own page.
3. The areas you really cover. Be accurate. If you work across a handful of places, name those. Don't stretch the map to look bigger.
4. The bodies you really belong to. Trade associations, registers, schemes. Only list the ones you're genuinely part of.

Turn each list into pages where there's something real to say. Then add the basics from earlier: home, about, contact, and the footer details. That's a sound site.

If you want the wider picture, two guides help. SEO for small business explains how search fits into all of this without the jargon. And Content gap analysis for small business shows how to spot the topics your site is missing. Our guide to getting found on Google covers the practical steps.

Not sure which pages you're lacking? Seracu offers a free snapshot: a free look at which topics your site lacks compared with its competitors. It's a quick way to see the gaps before you decide what to build.