How many times have you gone to a website and haven’t been able to find what you are looking for?

Well, when that happens, it’s likely a case of poor planning and a poor sitemap.

The sitemap (flow chart of pages on a website) is one of the most important steps in building a website. It is the structure, the keywords and the flow for prospective buyers to find what they are looking for on your website.

A good sitemap helps funnel a user through the process of determine if you can help them. 

It needs to cover the products / services you offer, in a way that a potential client will relate.

How Many Pages Do You Need?

There are many factors that go into how many pages you should have for your website.  If you want to be effectively found in Google, you need to be comparable to the websites of your “successful” competition.  A plumbing site may ideally require 40 pages, whereas a company selling a niche product may only need 5 or 10 pages.

Budget also plays a factor, especially if they are not providing their own content and need it written.

Maybe it’s a smaller site, with the ability to expand later, especially if they are SEO clients.

But we generally say that bigger is generally better….  More pages means Google thinks you know more.  It also allows you to dial in on particular services.

Determining What Pages You Need

The way I approach creating an ideal sitemap is to consider what you as a business owner offer and to whom.  I ask what you want to be found for in Google.  

Using this information, we then research what the competitors are doing to get an idea of how to break up the pages. To do this, we use direct competitors as mentioned by you, the business owner and we also do Google searches in different markets.

In the case where there is only 1 service, it’s good to break things into client type (eg residential, commercial, industrial).

Where there are more than 1 service, then the dropdown should be by service. At Cityline, we say to our clients that we want a page on every service you offer. That way, when someone is searching for a particular service, you have a whole page on it.  For example, as a landscaper, you may have a page on “retaining walls.”  Who is Google going to show higher in the listings – a landscaper with a bullet point on retaining walls, or a landscaper who has a whole page on it?  Sure, it’s a bit more work to create this page, but it’s a one time investment.

A second industry column could be used if appropriate, as long as you don’t get too complicated.  Often, we do “residential services” and “commercial services” as separate dropdowns of the services - as the service varies slightly between home and business.

If you have more than one “main” type of service (eg Plumbing & Heating), we will often split these into 2 dropdowns.  We’ve have a set of pages under “plumbing” and a set of pages under “heating.”

What to Name your Pages?

You probably are best off if your menus and titles have the exact phrasing that someone is looking for in Google.  What are people going to type into Google?  Look into Google trends to see the phrasing of the page titles.  For example, we are building a site for a business that is transporting vehicles in the Houston Texas area.  We looked up several phrases and found that people are searching for “cars” and not using “vehicles”.  People search “shipping” as opposed to “transport” or “transportation”.   See the Google Trends for some of the phrases we looked up:

Important note: Make sure to use synonyms and lots of associated phrases throughout your content. Don’t just repeat the same phrase exactly over and over again.

Final Sitemap for Our Example Website

Based on these results, we ended up using “car shipping” for most of our service pages. Being essentially a single-service business, we only needed the 1 menu.

Later on, if we do online marketing, we will likely expand the pages to include blog articles, creating full pages based on what people want to know, and maybe include other services that are not part of this company’s core competency.

NOTE: There can be duplication, but only if it’s in a different vertical (eg from an industry menu instead of a residential).  We don’t call it duplication, we call it “re-iteration”!

Conclusion

Do a good sitemap.  Determine what you want to be found for in Google.  Figure out what other companies are doing.  What phrases do people search in Google? It doesn’t really take much time, especially for smaller sites. Your customers will thank you for it.