When it comes to ranking in Google Search, many articles offer generic advice—like optimizing title tags, headings, and the first paragraph—often focusing on blog content as a use case. There’s a lack of resources specifically discussing SEO for service or solution web pages, which are the money pages for driving conversions.
Service or solution pages highlight your offerings and are usually linked from the top navigation menu. These pages often follow a URL structure like /features/
,/services/
, or /products/
. However, regardless of the URL structure, there are some techniques to consider for ranking these key pages.
Why care about service or solution webpages?
The answer to the above question is easy: Because you care about revenue, not just traffic.
When you aim to rank pages that drive revenue, purely informational content often doesn’t match the “money” intent. Instead, service or solution pages (and possibly your homepage) are where you present your offerings and benefits, making them crucial for conversions.
These pages should be optimized and crafted as your sales pitch to improve conversions. Below, you’ll see how different it is to rank these high-intent pages as compared to blog posts.
When does Google rank service webpages?
While blog content frequently ranks in Google Search, service pages tend to be prioritized when:
- The search query indicates strong intent for immediate action, e.g. “learn python“, “business loan application“, “transfer money“.
- The search query follows a
[brand name + feature type]
pattern, e.g. “Deel EOR”, “Revolut money transfer”, “Semrush keyword research”, or “Hibob onboarding”. - The search query includes terms like “solution” or “service”, e.g. “content translation services”, “web hosting services”, “equity management solutions”.
How to optimize or rank your service pages
Build your brand awareness
To build brand awareness, consistency is key. Coordinating with your wider marketing and communication teams to align with the brand’s value proposition ensures that messaging remains cohesive across all channels, from paid social and search to digital PR, offline events and sales collateral.
As your brand gains recognition, more users will search using the brand or [brand name + feature type]
, the pattern mentioned above. Not only does this search query format return your service pages to SERP for conversion, but it also minimizes competition in search.
Create an association between the brand and product features
Associate the brand and its feature as closely as possible to help users remember them and encourage people to search for [brand name + feature type]
.
For example, place your brand name and feature together in navigation menus, anchor text, titles, headings, etc, such as “Deel EOR”, “Deel global payroll”.
At the start, search volume for these [brand name + feature type]
queries may be low, but over time, this search pattern will increase. When it does, you’ll gain several benefits:
- Improved conversion: Your service pages get returned to the SERPs more frequently, increasing organic visibility, clicks and conversions.
- Increased authority: As more people search for the
[brand+feature]
combination, it signals to search engines that your brand is closely related to that feature, meaning you’re starting to own this entity. - Reduced competition: These search queries have strong branding intent, making it difficult for competitors to rank for them.
- Scaled SEO: Applying this SEO strategy across all your features multiplies its positive impact on your business over time.
The search volume for multiple Deel features has increased in the past two years, resulting in higher frequency for the corresponding service pages to get ranked in the SERPs, ultimately boosting conversions.
Tip: Also apply to your social copy, paid ads, event booths, and sales collateral to create a stronger brand-feature synergy.
Observe the pattern and intent behind competitors’ service pages that rank for specific search terms
As discussed, a search query with stronger purchasing/consideration intent likely returns service pages in the SERPs. Therefore, you should analyze your competitors to identify the search query patterns and intent that get their service pages ranked.
To illustrate, imagine one of your software features is “online quiz creation” and you have a dedicated service page for it. To optimize this page, let’s first look at what keywords your competitors are ranking for:
Competitor 1: https://www.typeform.com/quizzes/
Search query | Search volume | Position |
---|---|---|
quiz builder | 480 | 3 |
create your own quiz | 480 | 4 |
build your own quiz | 390 | 5 |
quiz builder free | 880 | 5 |
Competitor 2: https://www.jotform.com/quiz-maker/
Search query | Search volume | Position |
---|---|---|
multiple choice quiz maker | 720 | 2 |
make a multiple choice quiz | 390 | 2 |
quiz maker | 8.1K | 3 |
free online quiz generator | 590 | 5 |
You can continue your competitive analysis with more players if you wish. From there, you can roughly see that Google tends to rank service pages for [predicate (e.g. make/create/build) + quiz]
and [quiz + noun phrase]
search query patterns. Therefore, target these phrases for on-page SEO to rank for your “online quiz creation” service page.
Include service pages in your content clusters
A content cluster (or content hub) is a group of related content centered around a central topic. It includes three components:
- A pillar (i.e. central topic);
- Multiple clusters (i.e. subtopics) and;
- Links between clusters and the pillar.
The pillar page is at the core of the cluster and serves as the authority page for the central topic for which you aim to rank. So, consider placing your service pages as a pillar within a content cluster with supporting cluster pages.
In the example below, the /hire-contractors/ service page serves as the central topic, and other sub-topics like blog content, template/guide and glossary link to the service page to give ranking power.
Use Schema markup
Schema markup can help communicate the role and purpose of a page to search engines. For example, blog content should be marked with BlogPosting while your service pages (e.g. mortgage, loan, financial planning services) should be marked as Service.
For SaaS businesses, you can designate Webpage as the page type for your feature pages and then use the property of mainEntity to describe the main feature of that page.
Don’t forget SEO best practices
I’m not going to bore you with the SEO basics like internal linking, keywords in the title, headings and body content, etc. But, I would like to emphasize two practices I’ve found very useful:
URL Slug
Use an exact-match keyword and keep it short and sweet. Based on my observations, using an “exact-match” keyword in the URL can have a powerful SEO impact together with other SEO best practices.
Here are some examples that rank highly with the exact match keyword strategy: insightsoftware.com/certent/equity-management-software, wise.com/us/send-money, docusign.com/products/electronic-signature and deel.com/global-payroll
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Anchor Text
Use a wide variety of meaningful anchor text. If you have blog content about “online quiz ideas for school”, link that piece to your service page using various anchor text like “your brand’s quiz maker”, “create your own quiz” and so on.
Optimize for your product, not only keywords
Again, your service/solution pages are the sales pitch to promote your offerings. Focus on the benefits of your services and solutions and how they can solve users’ pain points.
Oftentimes, these pages have a different template from blog posts because you don’t want to sell your product with heavy-text paragraphs. Instead, keep your selling points short and sweet in a visual, easy-to-digest way.
That’s the main reason as to why ranking money pages are different from blog posts. You have to be able to effectively convince potential customers with minimal text.
Take a look at Docusign’s eSignature page which ranks number one for quite a few high-intent keywords such as “electronic signature” and “sign documents online”. This webpage is product-focused, with clear and concise language, free of unnecessary jargon.
They explain their features and benefits by putting their user needs at the forefront with self-explanatory product screenshots, supported with convincing data.
My favorite strategy for ranking a service page is…
Strategy two — creating an association between the brand and its features — is the most effective in the long term.
I admit that it’s challenging at the start, especially for a new brand, and requires constant collaboration across teams. Imagine if the messaging is pushed consistently on the web, but the events team communicates something different, it can be very inefficient. Even within the web team, every copywriter, SEO professional, and UX designer needs to be aligned to create synergy.
If implemented consistently, this approach helps improve SEO and conversion rates and minimizes competition in the SERPs.
Now, it’s time to combine all of these SEO techniques to supercharge your service pages!