Top Header Navigation
As far as navigation goes, your homepage is the most obvious link you want in the header. A lot of businesses nowadays put their logo in the top left of the header area, and link this logo to their home page. This is a common practice.
You should also have an About Us page that tells a bit about your company’s story. If you’re more than a one-person shop, you may even want a Meet Our Team/Staff page. This page should have your team’s pictures or bios, and should have some of those juicy keywords mixed in.
I love the idea of a Why Choose Us page, too. Use this page to explain your key differentiators, mission statement, passions, etc. For instance, we’re veteran owned, and we talk about this on our page.
If you have a workroom, you might even want to have some sort of a workroom related page. This page should have pictures of your staff hard at work, building valances and cornices. Caption each picture with related keywords such as ‘Here’s Jim building another custom valance for a home in Kirkwood’.
Under Services, you’re going to list all your different services obviously. You’ll want your interior design, cleaning, repair, bedding, any of those other things that you do.
We also recommend that you have an Online Specials page. They should change monthly, or quarterly, or however often you typically change your specials.
In addition to any specials you run throughout the year, vendors like Hunter Douglas have two or three different specials per year as well. Those need to be put up on your site, because people will be pulled in just because of their brand popularity and related offers. Some of our clients change their specials every month. Others just change them quarterly. No matter how often you change them, you definitely need to have a Specials page in your main navigation.
A Word About Reviews
Reviews and testimonials are huge, but they are not the same thing. Reviews live on external sites from yours. For instance, Google, Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, etc. Reviews that are left on these sites are much more trusted because they are not and cannot be manipulated by you, the owner.
When it comes to testimonials, they are important, too, but Google understands that you can make those up. You can put them on every page of your site, or in certain key areas of your site. They’re great trust factors for Joe Average that’s visiting your site, but they’re not going to be trusted by the search engines.
You really need both. You really need those external reviews, and you need to be pushing people towards leaving reviews on those external sites.
Lastly, you’re going to want a Contact Us page, along with a map of your service area. You’ll want some sort of a form that visitors can fill out to contact you right away. That form needs to dump to an email, or maybe even a couple people at your business to make sure that somebody gets back with that lead as quickly as possible.
It’s very important that you embed a Google Map on this page as well. To do so, go to https://maps.google.com and then just type in your city. Let’s just say you type in Memphis TN, and it will give you a map with an outline of what they consider Memphis. Then there’s an embed button that you can copy, grab that code, put that onto your website.
That does a couple things for your website. First, because you’re pulling it from Google Maps, when Google comes to index your page, there’s going to be a map embedded on that page with your city. Since Google knows what that map is about, you’ll start to rank a little bit higher for those city-related searches and phrases. This is an easy and quick addition to your site.
