One Page, One Job

Sit down with your sitemap and, next to every page, write the single action you want someone to take after reading it.

Any page where you cannot answer in one line is a page that is confusing somebody.

This is the most common structural fault we find, and it is caused by kindness. Nobody wants to delete a page. Every page has a defender: the team it describes, the person who wrote it, the belief that more content is more findable. So sites get larger, they accrete. A business with six things to say ends up with thirty-one pages, twenty of which nobody has read in two years and several that contradict each other on price.

You need to remember that attention is finite and you are spending it on pages that do not sell.

Sort your pages into four groups, we like to label these as Value, Awareness, Credibility, and Conversion:

(Value) Pages that make the case. Your service pages, your pricing, your work.

These earn you money directly. They should be your longest, most specific, most carefully maintained pages, and there should be few of them.

(Awareness) Pages that draw people in. Articles, guides, tools, resources.

These earn attention, which you then spend by pointing it at the pages in group one. Their job is not to sell. It is to be genuinely useful and to hand over cleanly.

(Credibility) Pages that reassure. About, team, process, terms.

These are read after someone is already interested, and they exist to remove doubt rather than create desire. Keep them, keep them honest, stop expecting them to convert.

(Conversion) Pages that do a job. Your booking flow, your calculator, your quote request, your checkout, your client portal.

These are covered in Part Five, and for many websites, this is the thinnest, yet the biggest opportunity!

A page that does not fit in these four is a candidate for deletion.

Two rules.

• First: a page should have one primary call to action, and any secondary one should be visibly smaller or a different style. Adding three or more equally weighted buttons on a page shows that you have made no decision on the reader's behalf. Guess what, the readers also respond by making no decision either.
• The second: every page in the Awareness group (articles, tools, resources) should point to a specific Value page (services, pricing, work), not straight to a Conversion page (contact form, checkout, and so on). An article about common problems should link to your services page. When your content earns its keep, people then want to know what credibility and offers you have to address the same issues before they enquire.

Now we're going to feel your pain, you will meet resistance when you cut content and pages. The most common objection is that the page "might be helping with search". It is easy to check: look at how many visits each page received in the last twelve months and how many of those visits went on to do anything. Bring the data to the table. It ends the argument fast.

Remember pageviews alone don't pay the bills. You want website visitors to convert into leads or online purchases.