Essential Website Pages Your Small Business Needs

If your website is giving “I threw this together at 3 AM,” we need to chat about the essential website pages your business actually needs.

Here’s the tea: according to HubSpot, 75% of consumers judge your credibility based on your website. Yet most small businesses are out here missing crucial pages that could turn browsers into buyers.

Whether you’re planning a website refresh or building from scratch, this guide breaks down exactly what pages you need and how to make them work harder than a fitness influencer in January.

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The essential pages your website needs

• Home Page
• About Page
• Services/Product Page
• Contact Page
• Optional but valuable pages
  • Blog/Resources Page
  • Portfolio/Case Studies
  • FAQs
  • Privacy Policy/Terms of Conditions

Home Page

Your home page is the first thing people see when they land on your website — it has to be attention-grabbing, enticing, and inviting enough to get your ideal clients to keep scrolling and clicking to other pages.

This means you need…

A BOMB Hero Section

This is the first part of the home page that you see “above the fold” before you keep scrolling down. It needs a headline, body copy, a CTA button, and some sort of visual element (e.g., brand photos, portfolio reel, video, etc.). You can also have eyebrow copy, a subhead, and a secondary CTA.

And all those elements should:

• Speak directly to your target audience
• Highlight the main benefit of investing with you
• Be crystal clear
• Be consistent with your brand voice
• Align with what your reader wants to do
• Be clear and action-oriented

A Clear Value Proposition

In a nutshell, this is a clear statement of what your reader gets out of investing in you. Your hero section should have a logline of this — but as your site visitor scrolls down the page, you should say it again when you have more room to really drive it home.

Social Proof

You should pepper this throughout your home page anytime you make a claim — because it validates everything you’re saying, makes you look more credible, and sells for you when your words need a wingman.

If you’re not sure which social proof to use, I have a freebie that shows you how and when to use different kinds of social proof.

About Page

This is a doozy of a page to write because… what the hell do you write? About yourself? Your clients? How your entire personality is sipping an espresso martini with your friends on a Friday night?

Trick question: you can write about all of these things (amongst others) on your About Page! It really depends on your target audience and what the strategy is on your other website pages. But no matter what, your About Page should have these elements ⬇️

Brand Story Elements

Share your journey of how you got to where you are today. Every “aha” moment, imposter syndrome spiral, boost of morale, and learning curve. The good, the bad, the ugly, it all leads to how you’ve been able to help your people achieve their dreams.

Introduce Your Team

If you have one, talk about each team member. Their experience, credentials, how they support your mission, and some fun facts about them.

Values, Vision, and Mission

This is a biggie, especially for methodical and humanistic decision makers who care about the impact of their investment. If you show that you’re a company with a cause, people are more likely to buy from you, trust you, promote and recommend you to their friends, and protect you if you make a mistake in the public eye — as evidenced by this study.

So share the future you hope to create, and how you plan to get there with your business’ actions.

Trust Building Factors

This could be anything from your years of experience and credentials, to testimonials and success statistics, to sharing your process, to talking about when you made mistakes and what you’ve being to fix them!

Services/Products Page

Whether you’re a product-based or service-based business, you need a dedicated page that shows all your offers. You can have individual web pages for each one, but people should be able to read about all of them on one page.

Service/Product Presentation

If you have a lot of offers, you can have a brief benefit-focused logline of each service/product so people know what it is, who it’s for, the investment and the benefit of investing.

From there, they can either click to expand more information about the offer on that same page or click a button that takes them to another web page specifically for that offer.

Benefits vs Features

Talk about what’s in the offer, but also what each feature can achieve for people. So they get tutorial videos to help maintain their new 8-page website. So what?

→ So they can add new web pages easily, conquer bugs like the BOSS you are, and deal with less stress when you have a lightbulb moment at 11 o’clock at night.

Pricing Strategy

I’m of the belief that you should always share the price for your offers, even if it’s just a “Starting at” point — because even people with the most loaded of pockets want to know what the damage is.

Beyond that, it’s also a good idea to use pricing strategy. You can position your most expensive offer first, and then the cheaper options so they don’t seem like that big of an investment (that’s some sales psych for ya). Or, you can use social proof to validate the value of each offer’s investment!

Package Comparison

If you have multiple packages that can achieve similar results for your readers, it’d be good to compare them against each other — like you see Saas companies do with their pricing packages.

For example, if I were to compare my Premium Website Copywriting Package against my 50-hour Copy Retainer, I’d say you’d get all the fixings available in the former package in a 50-hour Copy Retainer AND MORE, and for $1,200 less.

See what I did there? Learn more about my 50-hour Copy Retainer here >>>

Contact Page

When it’s time to get in touch with you or start the process of working with you, your contact page should have:

Form Essentials

Whether you embed it or have a link to an external form, it should get your site visitor’s contact information, what they need from you, their goals, their budget, and where they found you.

Additional Contact Methods

Even with a contact form, people want to be able to reach out to you just in case. So include an email address, your mailing address (or where you’re located), and your office hours.

Response Expectations

How long will it take for you to get back to them, and what should they expect when that happens? Let ‘em know.

Blog/Resources Page

To establish yourself as an expert, and give your target audience another way to get value from you, a Blog and Resources page are great ways of doing that. And each should have:

Content Strategy

By planning, creating, and managing the right content, you can attract more of your target audience and help them out while meeting business goals like a higher click-through rate and more aligned leads.

Category Organization

You want to help people find the information they’re looking for — whether that’s by organizing by topic, by the type of media, or by the level of investment!

Like how I categorize topics on my blog:

Or have an easy-to-click freebie section at the bottom of my web pages:

Lead Magnet Placement

Putting your lead magnets in the right freebies will not only increase your chances of getting more clicks, but also getting more leads. For example, I pepper my freebies throughout a lot of my blog posts naturally, whenever I talk about something related to that lead magnet.

Email Signup Integration

Your newsletter should be a VIP spot that everyone tries to get into, and where you can sell your priced offers even more. So, integrate opt-in sections on your Blog or Resources Page naturally whenever you’re giving a taste of the value that you’d give in your newsletter.

Optional But Valuable Pages

Portfolio/Case Studies

This can include success stories, showcase the results from your projects, and explain your process for doing things.

FAQs

If you want to address common objections in one place, a dedicated FAQs page could be a good fit for you! You can clarify things about your services/products, and build more trust.

Privacy Policy/Terms

This should be a given because you want to legally protect your ass(ets).

Success Metrics

So how do you actually see the return on your copywriting investment? You can have key performance indicators like:

• Website traffic
• Decrease in bounce rates
• Increase in leads
• More aligned leads
• Increase in conversions
• Extra engagement
• A decrease in questions and objections

You can track your progress with tools like Hotjar or Google Analytics, and keep optimizing by investing in an audit with your copywriter or designer.

Learn more about my Copy Audit service >>>

Next Steps

Okay! Now that you’ve read all that, it’s time to:

• Audit existing pages
• Identify gaps
• Develop a timeline

I can help you do all that in a Copy Retainer! Let’s connect, and get your project started.