Why one page per service
A client searching "commercial lease dispute solicitor", "first time buyer mortgage adviser" or "limited company accountant" wants a page about that one thing. A single Services page listing fourteen items cannot rank for any of the fourteen, and it cannot answer the question the person arrived with. A page per service can do both.
Services described in jargon is the first pain we hear from practices, and it is a content problem before it is a design problem. The fix is a page per service written in the client's words, each one a search result in its own right.
Which services get a page
Every service you want new clients for, named the way clients name it. The list looks different by profession:
- Law firms: practice area pages, split down to the matter type. Not "Litigation" but "Commercial lease disputes" and "Boundary disputes".
- Accountants: limited company accounts, self assessment, VAT, payroll, bookkeeping, plus monthly packages and a switching page.
- Mortgage brokers: situation pages. First time buyer, remortgage, self employed, buy to let, adverse credit.
- Financial advisers: what planning involves, then client situation pages. Retirement, inheritance, business sale, divorce.
- Consultants: problem pages. The problem the client has, not the methodology you use.
- Immigration advisers: a page per pathway or visa route.
- Insurance brokers: a page per product line.
- Translators: language pairs, specialisms, certified translation.
- Notaries: a page per document type with the fee and what to bring.
- Estate agents: selling, letting, landlord services, valuations.
Eight to twenty pages for most practices. Start with the six that carry the most value and add the rest over a quarter.
The structure of each page
Written for someone who has never bought this before, in this order:
- What it is and who it is for, in two sentences with no jargon. "A deed of variation changes who inherits under a will after someone has died. It suits families who want to redirect a share, usually within two years of the death."
- When people come to us for this, in their situation, not your taxonomy.
- What happens, step by step. First meeting, what you need from them, what you do, how long it typically takes, who they will deal with.
- What it costs, or how you quote. A fixed fee, a range, or an honest description of the quoting process, from the fee field so it stays current.
- Who does it here, with a photo, credentials and a booking button for that person.
- What clients ask, the six to ten questions this service generates on the phone.
- Book, with the consultation type pre-selected, and the phone number beside it.
- Related services, two or three links.
Six hundred to twelve hundred words. Headings a skimmer can follow. Every term of art explained in the sentence that uses it.
Writing it
The best source is the fee earner talking. Record ten minutes of the adviser explaining this service to a new client the way they would across the desk, transcribe it, and edit it into the structure above. It will sound like your practice, because it is your practice. The questions come from whoever answers the phone; they already know the list.
Then read it back against three tests. Would a client with no background understand every sentence? Is the money question answered, even if the answer is "here is how we quote"? Is there a way to start, visible without scrolling back up?
Avoid copying a professional body's template text, superlatives your regulator would query, and anything that reads as a promise about an outcome. Where you are unsure whether a claim is allowed, describe what you do rather than what the client will get, and check the current guidance with your compliance lead.
Build it as records, not as pages
Services should be a content type with fields, not fourteen hand built pages:
| Field | Purpose | |---|---| | Name | The client's word for it | | Category | Practice area, situation, product line | | Summary | One line for lists and menus | | Body | What it is, when, what happens | | Fee approach | Fixed, range, hourly, or quote after a call | | Typical timescale | Weeks, months, seasonal | | People | Relationship to team records | | FAQs | Repeating question and answer pairs | | Booking type | The consultation type this page books | | Related | Two or three other services |
The template renders all of them the same way, so adding the fifteenth is filling in a form. The fees page, the team profiles and the home page grid all read from the same records, which is why they never disagree.
The technical layer
- URL:
/services/commercial-lease-disputes, stable forever. - Title: the service plus your town, under sixty characters.
- Description: the service, the town and the fee approach, under 160.
- One H1, the service name.
- Structured data: each service marked up with its provider, and FAQ markup where the questions are genuinely on the page.
- Internal links: from the services grid, from related services, from team profiles listing what each person does, from any article on the topic.
What to expect
Well built service pages are indexed within days and start showing for "[service] [town]" within weeks to a few months depending on how contested the term is. The practical signal comes sooner: enquiries that arrive already knowing what they want, because the page told them, and consultations booked from the page rather than from the contact form.
Where this sits
Services as structured, plainly written records are the centre of every professional services website we build, and they carry through to each profession's own page, from small law firms to accountants and mortgage brokers. The content model goes in first, the fee earners are recorded talking, and the pages are written from the transcripts.