How to Build a Website Step 5: Plan Your Website Structure & Content

Our WordPress website is now ready for content. Actually, for all intents and purposes, we now have a live website with really nothing in it. That’s okay, nobody but us knows that, so I won’t tell if you won’t.

Before we start building the pages and posts (blogs), let’s take a second to figure out just what pages we want to use.

How Many Pages Should I Have on My Website?

You’re going to find a lot of website companies who are going to offer you a one-page website. Walk away. Seriously, walk away right now. If you want Google to pick your site up, your need content. You need ample, relevant content on each page, and each page should be optimized for the content on that page.

Even a long-form one-page website with tons of photos and thousands and thousands of words isn’t practical, nor is it good for domain authority, a ranking factor for search engines.

One-page websites are easy to build, fast to create, and usually highly templatized. Web companies offer these at attractive price points, and they are money-makers for agencies. Why? Because they only have to worry about one page. They may make it look like a multi-page website by putting a navigation bar, but you aren’t fooling the search engines. You will hopefully submit a sitemap, and that sitemap will have one page. That doesn’t say authoritative to Google.

What Should Be on My Website?

My approach here will be to start with an eight-page website plus a blog. A good basic format can be:

1. Home Page – this should still be optimized with search terms, but it’s your main branding area. Hint: it’s not a great page to use for your ad campaigns.
2. Services and/or Products – this should give an overview of your service or product offerings.
   1. Landing pages for specific products/services – in my case, I’ll create two different service-focused pages:
      1. Consulting – this will describe the type of consulting services I provide, and it will have a link to a place where you can book an appointment with me.
      2. Digital Business Building – this will describe the various services I can help to perform including web design, email marketing, marketing automation, pad advertising, directories, and design services. I’ll have a contact form on this page.
   2. Product pages – use this if you are using an eCommerce solution such as WooCommerce.
3. About – this will tell about your company and about yourself of your team.
4. Testimonials – This is where you can place stories people tell of your greatness.
5. Contact – Put your basic contact information here plus a contact form.
6. Lead gen landing page – here you will have a sign-up form for your mailing list in exchange for some item of value. In my case, I’ll be giving away some of the tools and templates I’m using here including the Anatomy of a Great Web Page.
7. Blog – this will be the “archive page” of the blog. It’s where you’ll see up to 10 of the latest blogs posted on this site.

Luckily, websites are completely scalable. This is a good start, but eventually I might want to create a separate portfolio page or a page specific to a single service that I am featuring. I might also wish to have a survey or a contest. The possibilities are really only limited by your imagination.

I think any less than five pages might not serve your visitors very well. You definitely want to have clear navigation to each of those pages. But, I want you think about your website this way… if someone wants to only know about this singular product or service you perform, you don’t want them having to go reading through a whole page. If they are looking in, say, Google, that page (not your home page) will likely show if it’s optimized well.

Similarly, when and if you start running Google Ads or Bing Ads, you want highly relevant pages to your ad copy. For instance, if you are a plumber and you do a lot of work with hot water heater installation, it’s a really good idea to have a web page that is specific to hot water heater installation using the keyword “hot water heater installation” on the page… especially in the page title and the Heading 1 (H1) area… but, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Yes, it may be a little more work and planning to create all of those pages, but in the end, you’ll have an easier-to-navigate website that should convert better and have a better Ad Quality Score.

What the hell does all that mean? Tune in again for more.