How Many Pages Should Your Website Have to Gain Traffic?

Often times business owners will ask “how many pages should I have on my website” or more specifically, “how many pages do I need to have in order to get tons of traffic?” and the answer is one that everyone hates… it depends. However, this article will explain the ideal number of pages, what content you should be posting, and what numbers to expect.

Different Types of Pages

Let’s explore the different types of pages and what each one does, and how many you should have on your website.

Core Pages. A core page is a page that your business or brand can’t live without. These are often the home page (duh), about, gallery, product(s) / service(s), contact, privacy policy, terms of service, and or value statement. Usually, a site with just these pages won’t rank well in a competitive environment, but they serve the prospect more than the actual search engine.
Service / Product Pages. Service or product pages are pages surrounding the specific solution your company offers to a specific problem. I mentioned them under core pages because they are necessary to include in your website, but they deserve their own page type since they’re incredibly important. Most companies offer more than just one service or product, they offer a variety of sub-services or supporting products. These should each receive their own page in the form of “sub-pages” which simply help rank the primary page. So if you’re a car mechanic and offer “car repair” as a service, you may want to include “tire repair” as a sub-service / sub-page to your overall car repair service.
Landing Pages. These are pages that serve one purpose, getting a user to take action. This can be in the form of signing up for an email list, purchasing something, or downloading a product. Landing pages are usually sent to an email list, blasted on social media, or are directly sent to a user. More often than not, a landing page won’t be super important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. There are a few tricks you can use, but you should probably consult with an SEO agency to get maximum results.
Location Pages. Ah yes, location pages, bring controversy in the SEO community. Why? Because people are too often deceptive with these types of pages. Simply put, a location page is designed to grab the traffic of a specific location, usually miles away from the local business’s primary address. If you’re a cleaning company in Manhattan, and service Brooklyn, Google will penalize you for creating a “cleaningcompany.com/locations/brooklyn” page if you are too deceptive.

Blog Posts. Blog posts will be your offensive strategy when building your online presence. These pages/posts should be keyword-specific and link back to your top pages. Your top pages could be a service page, location page, or home page.

The Magic Number Depends on What Your Site is About

The magic number is… as many pages as you can create before going insane. Seriously, and here’s why.
Google loves content, the more content you can create, the better your site will be in terms of gaining traffic.

How many pages should a local business site have?

For local businesses, you should have, by default, a minimum of 5 pages. Home, about, service(s), blog, and contact. These are non-negotiable pages you MUST have. Forget SEO and online marketing for a second, without these pages you might as well forget generating ANY traction because people are going to think of you as a joke. And you want prospects to take you seriously, right?

What pages should you add on top of your default pages?

Those five pages are the bare minimum to even be taken seriously. If you want to create authority and generate organic traffic you’re going to need a lot more keyword-targeted pages.

What I mean by that is, you need to create pages that are targeting specific keywords, and add value to your prospect/target audience.

Every service you offer should have its own page, with sub-pages supporting it. For instance, if you’re a lawyer and provide services like legal advice for immigration, you want to have an entire page dedicated to that service.

The URL structure for this would look similar to: yoursite.com/servics
and the sub-page would look like: yoursite.com/service/sub-page
That’s step one.

Step two is to go above and beyond and add supporting pages to that service page. Maybe add a topic such as “visa assistance” or “employment-based immigration” something is more specific, and that helps users answer a problem they’re having. Remember, people, go on Google more often than not, because they have a problem. If you can solve that problem, you’re more likely to have gained that person’s trust and land a new sale.

Always out-perform your competitors!

If your competition has a service page and lists 2 services with no sub-pages, you know you need to have subpages. If they list sub-pages, then you need to either add more, or optimize your content even more by adding more images, internal links, and overall content. Always out-work your competition, especially when it comes to SEO.

What if you’re not a local business?

If you’re trying to rank nationally for different keywords, then you’re going to want to have dozens, if not hundreds of pages. This is because national keywords are more competitive than local keywords, there are few exceptions to this.

The phrase “how to learn a language” is searched WAY more than “language classes in New York” so you’re going to need a lot more authority.

How do you build this authority? By building more pages!

If your goal is to rank a site nationally, most likely you have a larger budget and are more committed to Search Engine Optimization, so in that case, you’re going to want to do some keyword research and competitor analysis.

Performing Keyword Research

There are tools you can use like Uber Suggest, Ahrefs, and KW Finder, to help you organize your keyword plan, but even the classic Google Search Engine will do just fine.

Simply type in your topic of interest into Google, see what comes up and then manipulate the search around that. So if you’re trying to rank for “online singing lessons” you might manipulate that to “online singing coach” or “online singing classes” and see what comes up.

You’re going to want to enter this data into a keyword tool of your choice and then see which one looks most profitable. This is based on the keyword’s volume, difficulty, etc. You can learn more about SEO terminology by reading our blog on SEO Terminology Basics.

Each keyword should then get its own page, with 2-3 supporting pages to help it rank higher.

Competitor Analysis

Once you’ve come up with some keywords, you’re going to want to take a look at what’s already ranking and why they’re ranking. I have a video ready for you guys that goes more in-depth on competitor analysis.

Make sure your site is EASY to navigate

The most important rule in marketing is “don’t make your user think” and that goes with your website as well. When determining how many pages your site should have, you want to keep in mind the structure of your website. As we’ve mentioned earlier, the more pages you have the better, with a few exceptions.

But more importantly, you should be asking yourself “how are my users supposed to get to my content?”

Internal links, footer links, and navigation bars should be clear and easy to follow. You should place a clear call to action throughout your site that will encourage a user to actually click on your desired page.

Contact JCSURGE for Online Marketing Help

If you’re having trouble with doing this yourself, feel free to request a video audit of your current site, or schedule a complimentary consultation to see what solutions can help you in your unique situation.

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