How To Plan Out The Pages You Need For Your Website
If you’re looking to have a new website built, or looking to expand on your current website, it’s important to consider what pages you actually need to be on your website. When looking at a website there may be a few different things to consider and each type of page will have a different reason for being on your website.
Marketable Pages
These are the pages which are most likely to be the most important for your business. These are the pages which draw new people to your website with the aim of converting them into your customers. These are normally chosen in order to fulfill a need from a specific or multiple marketing channels. These pages may overlap with other kinds of pages on here and are most likely to be within the following subcategories of pages:
- Product/Service Category Pages
- Product/Service Pages
- Informational Pages
Finding Pages For Search Engine Marketing
One of the most important marketing channels for your website will be search engine marketing, whether organic (SEO) or paid (PPC). If you want to find the required pages for your website it will begin with keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for. Tools such as Keyword Planner in Google Ads and Ahrefs can be used in order to find these keywords.
Once you have a list of keywords these then need to be sorted into topics, which will then become the different page requirements. Remember that topics should be fairly broad and you no longer need to have pages for each keyword variation. (This used to be a common SEO technique about 10 years ago!)
Business Pages
The next thing you need to consider is what pages are required for your business. It’s well enough that you get the person to your website but do they need more information before they take action? You have a list of the different pages needed to market the website, here you will find the gaps which are required for your website to function for your business. This could be pages such as checkouts and contact pages.
Navigational Pages
Another thing to consider is how a website visitor will navigate your website. You may need to consider how people may get from one page to another. These pages can also be helpful to sort out the hierarchy of your website. An example of this may be if you have found a group of sub services that people are searching for, you might want to create a parent page which links to each sub service. This can then be easily linked to from the homepage where it might not be suitable to link through to each page individually.
Legal Pages
If you’re running a website it’s important to consider what is legally required. Most websites will require some sort of privacy and cookie policy. Other things you might want to consider is terms of service, delivery information and returns policies.
Putting These All Together
We find it useful to put all these together in an easy to see document. We find that diagrams.net which links with Google Drive to be a great solution for this. It allows you to create a flowchart which will enable you to see how your website flows and all the different pages required for your website.