Guide · Content
Writing a service page
that does its job.
Most local business sites have one page listing every service in a bulleted column. That page cannot rank for any of them, because it says almost nothing about each. The fix is one page per service, and the structure barely changes between trades.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
One page per service, titled the way people search.
A page trying to rank for “drain cleaning”, “water heater replacement” and “emergency plumbing” at once ranks for none of them. Each needs its own page, and the title of that page should contain the words a customer would type, which are rarely the words the trade uses internally. Nobody searches for “hydronic solutions”.
Across the 34,180 business websites we opened in the GTA, 11,566 have page titles that never name the city the business works in. That single omission is the most common local search fault in our data, and it is a morning of work rather than a project.
Answer in the first screen.
Someone arriving from a search has one question and very little patience. The first thing on the page should confirm that you do this specific thing, in their area, and roughly what it involves. Not a slogan, not a welcome, not a stock photograph of a handshake.
A reliable opening is three lines: what the service is, who it is for, and what it typically costs or what the cost depends on. Everything else on the page exists to support those three.
Then the parts that actually get read.
What is included and what is not — the single biggest source of disputes, and the thing competitors leave vague. How long it takes. What happens on the day. What the customer needs to do before you arrive.
Then proof specific to this service, not to the business generally: photographs of this work, a review that mentions this service, the licence or certification this particular job requires. Generic trust badges convince nobody.
Make the next step obvious and cheap.
Every service page needs a way to act that is not a phone call. Of the 27,080 working sites we opened, 12,024 have no enquiry form at all — every visitor unwilling to phone a stranger is simply lost, and that is a large share of people under forty.
Keep the form short. Every extra field costs enquiries. Name, the service, the postcode and a way to reply is usually enough to have a conversation, and a conversation is all the form is for.
Four habits that sink service pages.
Writing for the industry instead of the customer. Padding to hit a word count, which produces pages that say the same thing four times. Hiding the price question behind “contact us for a quote” with nothing else — the most common way to lose someone who was ready to buy. And duplicating the page across services with a few words swapped, which is the doorway pattern and gets treated as one.
The test for any paragraph: could a competitor paste it onto their own page unchanged? If yes, it is doing nothing for you.
Questions
Straight answers.
How long should a service page be?
Long enough to answer the question properly and no longer. For most local services that is 400 to 800 words. Pages padded to 2,000 words to hit a target read as padded, and the padding is the part nobody reads.
Should every service really get its own page?
Every service you want to be found for, yes. Services you offer but do not want more of can live on a combined page. The page count should follow what you want to sell, not what you are capable of doing.
Can I use AI to write them?
To draft, yes. But if the draft is generic you have automated the problem rather than solved it — the specifics about how you work, what you charge and what goes wrong have to come from you, and those specifics are the entire value of the page.
Before you decide anything
Find out whether
you have a problem.
Most people asking about a rebuild do not need one. The free check opens your site, looks at how it behaves on a phone, whether it is secure and how old the page is, and tells you which of those apply to you.
Start with a
straight answer.
Describe the business and where it works. We come back with what we would change, what it would cost and how long it takes — or with a reason not to bother.